Orlando Mass-Casualty Drill: Emergency Nurses Association Used Central Florida as Training Ground in Late 2015

Rico, I agree with your answer. All that is required is to open enough of the public’s eyes to see what is being done and by whom. A revolution is fought 90% in the minds of the people, through persuasion, education and yes, even belief. Most of the action necessary would then be only to ignore or avoid the systems set up by these psychopaths. The last bit would be to kill or jail those who persist in their criminal ways.

That first 90% is a doozy, though. People are so thoroughly propagandized that they cannot see things right before their eyes, and will actually fight against attempts to change or eliminate the circumstances of their slavery. I suppose the best analogy is called the Stockholm syndrome.

In the meantime, the only changes we can make are in ourselves. No one can make the criminals reform and no one can make the people see.

Truly, though the last (or first) bit would be to imagine or design a culture which is not criminal. Not a utopia, but real ways for people to live together peacefully, maintain that peace, and avoid all of this criminality in the future. Planting these dreams of that future in our youth’s minds would be a major step in bringing these ideas to fruition. Again, this would be accomplished through education, fiction and lore.

There really is a tribe of people in the jungles of Brazil who already live in this way. They are called the Pirahã.

The Pirahã: People Who Define Happiness Without God: Daniel Everett – Freedom From Religion Foundation

“They don’t actually call themselves the Pirahã; that’s a Brazilian term, and nobody knows really what it means. They call themselves “Hiatíihi” (the Straight Ones). And we are all “Xaói” (bent). They’re ethnocentric; I didn’t tell you they were completely virtuous. A lot of people say that I’m claiming they’re this absolutely perfect group. They would not say that about themselves, and I certainly wouldn’t say that about them. They have their own issues, but one of them is not God.”

https://ffrf.org/publications/freethought-today/item/13492-the-pirahae-people-who-define-happiness-without-god

When you go there, their culture doesn’t seem that impressive. My first impression was they seemed like a bunch of people on a campout. They just were lying around most of the day, and I didn’t see much ritual, no body painting, no feather decorations or anything like that. I hadn’t yet been with them to the jungle, which was the big revelation about their culture to me. But superficially, they just seemed to be just a commune of hippies living in the Amazon, except they worked a lot less hard than people in other communes I had seen.

Pirahã are so good at fishing. I told people when I first saw an Indiana Jones movie that that’s silly, because one Indian running behind Jones would have riddled him with arrows, much less a whole group of Indians. I’ve never seen a Pirahã man miss with a bow and arrow at anything he’s shot at, and I’ve been with them hunting and fishing, and seeing them get in their canoe and just go out into the river and fire three times in succession and pull up three fish with a bow and arrow. They are really amazing at what they do.

Because they’re so good at it, and because they have such a great area to live in — the Maici River with 300,000 hectares for their own reservation, which I helped demarcate — they are able to provide for themselves. I would say the average person works about 15 hours a week to make a living, and they eat just fine. Hunters and gatherers, as you all know, have better diets than we do. They eat better and have more variety and healthier foods than agriculturalists, by and large. In fact, my friend Jared Diamond has written a book called Guns, Germs, and Steel in which he talks about the downside of agriculture for the development of a lot of human societies.

The way the Pirahã live is not idyllic but it’s pretty close. You just have to have really tough skin so you don’t mind bug bites and stuff like that, and they all have tough skin, so it’s different.

they don’t have a word for worry, they don’t have any concept of depression, they don’t have any schizophrenia or a lot of the mental health problems, and they treat people very well. If someone does have any sort of handicap, and the only ones I’m aware of are physical, they take very good care of them. When people get old, they feed them.

I remember one man who was too old to get around. He couldn’t hunt, he couldn’t even gather firewood anymore. They would bring him food every night and help him chew it, even helping him with his jaw. I said, “Does it bother you to give him food? I mean, he’s not doing anything.” They said, “When I was a little boy, he put food in my mouth and took care of me, and now he’s an old man and I take care of him.”

I noticed they didn’t store food. They know how to smoke and salt meat, but they almost never do that. When they bring in meat, they give it away to everyone. I asked one of them, “Don’t you want to keep meat for tomorrow?” He said, “I keep my meat in my brother’s belly. That’s where I keep what I have. I store it with my friends.”

There were a lot of values there I wasn’t prepared for, and actually those sound pretty much like values that a lot of religious people ascribe to, or aspire to, and yet they had them.

Then I had to start working on their belief system. I was starting to get interested in anthropology and linguistics and wanted to find out about the creation myths. Many of you might know that the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss died on October 30 [2009, at age 100]. I’ve written an obituary of him. He worked in Brazil, and he worked in places very close to the Pirahã. In fact, he worked one tribal group over from people that the Pirahã know. One of the proposals of Lévi-Strauss and many other anthropologists is that creation myths are universal. They actually have ways of interpreting this, and theories of creation myths and myths in general, about series of oppositions.

I couldn’t wait to hear what the Pirahã creation myth was, so I asked them: “What was the world like long ago, before there were Pirahã? Who made the trees and who made the water?” The guy just looked at me and said, “What?” I repeated, “Who made the trees and who made the water?” He answered, “Nobody made the trees and nobody made the water; they’re just trees and they’re water.”

I said, “But you know, a long time ago, when there weren’t any trees.” He said, “You saw a time when there were no trees?” I said, “No, no, but didn’t your fathers . . .” He said, “No. “We don’t talk about that. No, the trees were always here and the water was always here, unless you know that they weren’t.”

For the Pirahã, the universe is layered, and we happen to live in this biosphere that’s bounded by the sky and the ground, which are just both barriers, so they’re both called “bigí.” There could be entities above that, but they wouldn’t be supernatural entities; they would be entities like us but maybe with different characteristics of some sort. And there could be entities below that. But the Pirahã don’t worry much about that, because they live where they’re at now.

In fact, I began to realize that not only do they not have creation myths, they have the simplest kinship system known. They just have a word for “generation above,” no gender distinction, “my generation,” no gender distinction (which is brother, sister, cousin, uncle, anything like that), and “generation below,” without any gender distinction, and then two words for biological son and biological daughter. And that’s it. That’s the Pirahã kinship system.

They don’t have any words for colors. They can describe colors — they see colors — but they’ll say, “That looks like blood,” or “That looks like the urucum plant,” or “That looks like water” or “That’s not quite yet ripe” or “That’s transparent” or “That looks like it has an opaque eye.” Those are the ways they describe different colors. They don’t have any words for numbers.

In fact, the article I and three co-authors published in the journal Cognition was chosen by Discover magazine last year as one of the top 100 science stories, simply because it was the first time a group has been documented that doesn’t have any numbers, not even the number 1. I’m sure there are others, but this is the first time it’s been documented. They don’t have quantifiers, so they don’t have a word that means “all.” They have a word that means “a lot of.”

One of the most important values in Pirahã culture is what I call immediacy of experience. If you look at their stories, they don’t talk about things to come. They might talk about what they’re going to do tomorrow based on the things they’re doing today. They don’t talk about the distant future. They don’t talk about the distant past. All of their stories and all of their songs have to do with what they did today, what they saw today. They don’t make a big distinction between dreaming and regular experience. They don’t think that dreaming is just regular experience, but it’s another experience, and they don’t talk about them as being that different.

Why wouldn’t they have color words or number words? Because those generalize and range across things that go beyond immediacy of experience. They don’t have creation myths because that’s certainly something you haven’t experienced. Why would you talk about something if you can’t experience? And so they have suffixes that go on the end of their verbs that tell you whether they saw it or they overheard it or they inferred it. Evidence is very important to them; they’re sort of like the original Show Me State [Missouri]. Or as one philosopher said, the ultimate empiricists.