This is the last entry in the Chicago Roadtrip blog. I feel like this one, puts a perfect ending to this journey. You may not understand it all right now, but that’s okay. If this knowledge does not hold true with your beliefs, then don’t believe it.
This is taken from The Circle of Life book by James David Audlin. Chapter IV: Human Relationships.
Some parts I skipped as they weren’t relevant. There is more to this chapter, but I think that’s plenty of knowledge right there and you need to digest it first.
In the dominant culture, the primacy of the individual goes hand in hand with the concept that all things in the environment are also individual and separate and can therefore be owned. In Europe, ownership developed through the exploitation of nature: as forests were turned into farmland, large-scale agriculture created concentrations of wealth to be defended and traded. Competition for these prizes led to conquests that gradually brought the land and everything in it under the “ownership” of emperors, kings, princes of the Church, the nobility —- with the majority of human beings functioning as commodities in the process of creating wealth and power for others, valuable only for what they produced. Ownership had come to seem natural and normal, and the newcomers brought it to Turtle Island (=North America) with them. Since the people arriving had to count entirely on themselves and their families for survival, they usually sought to possess as much as they could.
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