Yanomami III
is no different from jaguar life or monkey life, is not superior nor here to dominate other life, and is certainly not to needlessly exploit other life.
Yanomami following a lifestyle similar to that followed by hominids for several million years, certainly several hundred thousand years of homosapian existence. In just 12,000 or 14,000 years since the beginning of civilization, of which our culture is a continuum of, we have brought not only our existence to peril, but the existence of all human life on the planet.
Exchange and bartering among the Yanomami is a social contract within an egalitarian society based on reciprocal altruism. Trade is between equals in a win/win situation. Trade in a consumerist culture is rarely between equals. Profits are made by exploiting others, the dishwashers, maids, minorities, sweatshop workers, third world countries and has created a world society with unprecedented socio-economic stratification.
Somebody has to pay for prosperity.
The people of industrial nations are insulated against the damage the wreak and the harm their lifestyles do to others, to the world, and deny personal culpability. Industrial society is every bit as selfish as the Yanomami appear, with governments propelled by special interest groups (selfish interest groups?), building roads and freeways that destroys the environment and threatens all wildlife. Western nations, particularly the US, bomb and invade foreign countries under the auspices of national security or humanitarian aid but in reality so that we can retain a supply of oil and maintain an industrial sybaritic lifestyle, and the ostensible freedom of a automobile culture. The west promulgates wanton wastefulness, markets dangerous chemical overseas, dump our pollution on economically vulnerable countries, impoverish the third world, destroy the environment through the manufacture, use, and disposal of increasingly disposable consumer goods.
How sacred does that hold life?
Western culture has spawned rampant alcoholism and drug addiction, sex abuse, child abuse, depression, suicide, outrageous crime and violence surpassing anything the Yanomami do. Children murdering each other on the streets and in schools is not the result of bad luck but of social priorities.
We might be able to tell a culture how to build a television, rocket, or smart bomb, but telling another society how a culture should lead a moral life is simply beyond our capacity, no matter how morally repugnant a behavior may appear to be to our western sensibilities. Our moral repugnance has brought us to the brink of global ecological disaster.
This was not meant
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