People's with strong ancestor worship and traditions are considered primitive in the West, but actually is it us who are missing something. For these people if they want to know something they do not do experiments to find new knowledge they consult the ancestors and the old people of the tribe who remember the tribal wisdom. If they want an answer to anything they consult the ancestors. This seems hopelessly constrained to a modern sensibility.
However if we take a closer look is it that odd. Why for instance do we use knife and fork in the West. Did we do an experiment to find the best way to eat food? Did we rationalise it and provide argument? Did we chose it in an act of freedom? No we don't need to think how to eat a meal each time we sit to eat, we just use the knife and fork without thinking. And where did the knife and fork come from? Obviously it is the Past and the people who decide for us are our ancestors. So every time we use a knife and fork in fact we are ancestor worshiping.
Another example is something like cabbage. Did I decide that cabbage was good to eat? Did I cultivate it to make it the large fleshy plant it is today? No all these decisions are inherited from our ancestors. They decided it was good, and we inherit that sense of good.
If we look at our lives from clothes, to wheels, to money, to houses, to marriage, to food, to even our language, or arithmetic, music, holidays, attitudes to birth and death in fact in every part of our life we do not make a choice or invent how to live instead we respect the Past and our ancestors and adopt their choices and wisdom.
In the West it is called coldly culture but this erases the people, our ancestors, who decided on these ways of life.
So in fact cutting ourselves off from our ancestors and not worshiping and respecting the Past is really blinding us to how the world actually works, and cutting us off from the people and the communities who gave us what we have today, and for which we duly respect by adopting these cultures and ways of living.
Those people who we consider primitive and backward are actually the ones in tune with reality. In Bruce Parry's Tribe (2025) episode 3 with the Marapu one of the elders says that he feels sorry for Bruce because he has been abandoned by his ancestors. In the context of the post that is actually the truth of the West. But not recognising who we are and where we come from, and by not respecting our ancestors and venerating them we are cutting our self off from the tree of humanity and living as isolated individual.
A cynical critic might say this is essential. To neutralise people and make them homogenous play things of capitalists, a faceless importable workforce vulnerable to advertising that uproots them and gives them desires for things they never desired before. Such faceless isolated historyless people have no power or identity and represent easily governable malleable pliable citizens. This is the model of America because having eradicated the native people and obliterated American history in a continent wide genocide, America could start again with a blank sheet. But this has made a nation of lost people perfect for empire.
When lost Americans who have no idea about ancestor worship promote their world view it is hard to see whether this is naïve ignorance because they genuinely don't understand history and ancestors, or perhaps it is bitterness at the Old World deeply positioned in meaningful history and identity, or perhaps it is darker and an attempt to obliterate the Past and make all people lost.
Which ever way things go, you can only ignore the ancestors, because they are there regardless whether we acknowledge them or not.
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