I have been trying to see how #Paleo is more than a diet. Taking control of our health will in the end be about changing how we live. For our system today not only restricts our diet to shit but treats us like slaves. Tinkering with the system will not alter this. Taking on the system in protest will not either.
So how do most of us take control of our health? It is by overthrowing the system in the same way that it overthrew the Hunter Gatherer system. By establishing a new system that has more power.
This post is all about how they will happen.
"Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they" J J Rousseau - the opening of the Social Contract
Today we think we are free but we are not. None of us are free.
Even Princes have no real control. For we ALL depend on institutions for all the essentials for life.
We all have no control over our food, over our energy, over our shelter, over access to credit and so to work itself. Our children are expensively taught by strangers. Our health itself is controlled by a vast medical empire.
We are not free. We depend on a system as a slave depends on her master or a cow on the farmer.
So how did this come about? It all comes about as a result of the Food System - how we get our food drives the very essence of our culture.
Our current modern food system is based on the idea of domination. Domination over nature. Domination over people. Domination is our culture.
How we get our food will be the most powerful process we can use to change all of this.
The revolution will not be as a result of protest but of people coming together to grow food in a new way that does not depend on oil, on credit or the industrial food distribution system. That does not depend on Domination but on Cooperation.
It will be based not on small peasant systems that all still depend on agriculture. But on small networked farms that work instead WITH nature. Where we use our new understanding of how nature works to mimic her and to use her forces to help us.
There will be NO PLOUGH. And FEW grains. There will be no CONFINEMENT. Scale will come from aggregation not concentration.
The protein will rotate on grass. The vegetables will be part of that system and also use the principles of Permaculture. The system will have a positive reinforcement. Each part will help the others and over time, most of the work will be done by nature herself.
We will get here not as a result of any Utopian dream but in the same way that the Assyrians pushed out the local Hunter Gatherers. This was not adoption but evolution - the system that could field the armies won.
The shift to a new food system will be finally achieved when enough of us live in in to kill off the old.
At first some of us will adapt to this because we will have no choice. With no jobs, no money, expensive oil, no credit - we die or evolve. We evolve by growing a new system that does not need the old system.
As more and more of us find a place here, the old system loses it power. More and more people will be attracted to it because it gives them what they cannot find in the old system.
The old system demands vast amounts of capital and energy. To pay for this, it has to rely on us slaves to pay. Well soon we will not be able to pay. So the old will be defeated by its own inability to fund itself and to find the energy that it needs.
What would it take? It is so vulnerable now that it 15% of us left it forever, I think it would fall. For that is the Tipping Point moment.
So how would this shift start? I think like all new systems. It will take a few pioneers who can see the choices. So in closing - here are some pictures of the old followed by the new. Do you see what I see?
Here is what the 2 systems look like side by side.
This cannot survive a system failure
This can
This cannot survive a system failure
This can
This cannot survive a system failure
This can
So here is the choice. Which system do you want to bet on? Do you have kids or grand children? Now ask again which system do you want to bet on?
Here is your next choice. Will you wait and see how this develops? Or will you work to help this change come?
Will you fight this or embrace it? If fight, how will your kids benefit?
Getting home may be a hard struggle. What immigrant ever had it easy. But the New World we make, could be a much better one that the one we have. And surely our kids will thank us.
This is also not about "Them" versus "Us" - for as JJR said We are all in Chains, even the overseers. For we are prisoners of an idea.
