Transcript excerpt from Daniel Schmachtenberger's GITA talk https://youtu.be/nvAbKE8-jYA?t=454 follows:
I had a teacher of anthropology that would have been like 110 now when I was young. He was very old and he had the fortune of getting to be the first Western person to contact many indigenous tribes, or one of the first, that were still separate from Western civilization and modern civilization writ large. He was doing cultural analysis on seeing how much the current modern society model had become ubiquitous conditioning (in all of our studies of human nature were inside of ubiquitous conditioning, so you can't really call it nature), and so he wanted to see the things that hadn't been conditioned in that way and if human nature actually expressed differently.
So he was looking at the most violent and least violent cultures and looking at what it's a function of, and one of the key things was looking at how it was a function of language. I actually had a couple teachers that had looked at this deeply. One of the most profound insights was they said that in some of the island Polynesian cultures and some of the Amazonian cultures that were still extremely non-violent, both inter and intra-tribe, they didn't have the word mine in their language. First person possessive just wasn't even a word. And in other ones they had the word, but it was extremely de-emphasized. It was like a strange word to refer to a bad idea. And they had "ours", but even "ours" (possession) didn't mean the same thing, it had the concept of stewardship built into the semantic itself.
And mine is actually one of the first words that most kids in our culture learn. And one of the things that they found was that the cultures that didn't have the word mine also didn't have the word or the prevalence of the words greed, selfish or jealousy. Because those were not just innate human emotions that are always there, they were actually memetic constructs.
If you have a shared ownership situation in a tribe, but it's not ownership because you don't have massive surplus, so you don't have radical wealth inequality, everybody shares stuff, whoever goes fishing, that's for everybody, whoever is picking berries... is you just don't build those same constructs in terms of I want what they have, it just doesn't occur in the same way.
So there are so many constructs that we have that we take for granted as just human nature that we have to work with that are actually at the foundation of our problems.
So I mentioned that because the word resource is an inherently violent word. The way we think of it. The way we've defined it. Human Resources is: how do we see sentient human beings, who are somebody's baby, who are going to be on their deathbed reflecting upon their purpose in life, and if they use their time, how do we see them as a resource for a company that has a fiduciary responsibility to profit maximize.
They're, not f#$king human resources, they're human beings. And talking about natural resources - is a whale a natural resource? Because it is if you're running a whaling boat. A whale's a natural resource. Is it any sentient animal?
Is an ecosystem that we devastate a natural resource? Black people used to be natural resources - meaning part of the chattel the same way we treat cows. So the word and concept resource has to go. Like it just fundamentally the idea man's dominion over everything is here for us. If we can control it and extract it, it's about its utility value, rather than intrinsic value for us. At the heart of the ideas that has to go is that. So I want to throw out the concept of resource to begin with. And I want to say that words like mine and resource and like they're colonized colonizer-mind concepts.