B (22:36)
There you go. Okay. So everybody out there can drink. Drink water because I said Harvard. Ooh. Drink again. All right, so here's the thing. There are two different value systems that feed into our culture. One comes from traditional societies, pre modern, pre industrial revolution, where if you look at pre modern societies anywhere, one of the highest values is giving up individuals self interest for the good of the group and to care for others. The web of care. Yep. And then you get this sort of individualized culture that started with Enlightenment Europe. I mean, it didn't start with it, but it was taken to a huge extreme by the Enlightenment philosophers of, like, the 18th century. And they imported it all over the globe, they exported it all over the globe. And in that culture, one of the highest values is competing against the group to achieve individual superiority. So all the structures of, like, work and school and everything are set up to make you act as an individual at the expense of your connections with others. But everything about mothering, everything about the way humans are actually designed requires the web of care. And this is the culture nature split here because in nature, we are social primates. We hang out together, we clump, we clot, we clump about, we get in little, little balls. I mean, it's so adorable when we're in South Africa, if it rains, to watch the vervet monkeys gather into a ball. Like the whole troop, like 20 monkeys will just gather into one ball to keep each other warm. Monkey ball, monkey ball. We call them monkey balls. And it's fun to be a monkey ball at home, cuddle. And we're meant to live in troops, in bands, and to take care of each other's needs in a kind of spontaneous, free flowing, natural ecosystem kind of way. And then you get modern culture, which is like, march up the steps of achievement and beat as many people as you can, get more than other people can get at many stages and train your child to act in these ways. Left hemisphere dominated, regimented, obedient, sitting still and then moving fast when they're told to move. So we have this whole premise in the podcast. What's culture doing to us and how does it contrast with our nature and how do we get back to our true nature? And what you're dealing with right now is this horrible, like, death grip of a parent who is trying to get a child not only to be a happy, thriving little person who needs to be with family and parents and constantly attended to and cared for in all these physical and mental ways. You're trying to raise a happy child while conforming and forcing. It's a wonderful school, but it's still the same system, getting the child to conform to the individualist system. And you're also trying to earn a living based in the individualistic system. So you, you have. And the thing about these two. Okay, I'm just going to say one more thing and then I'll, I'll, I promise we'll start talking about you. In the 1960s, somebody took, they did a study where they took a whole bunch of psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, right? And they had them make a list, three lists. One was a list of the characteristics of a healthy individual. And they put in like strong, assertive, confident, all these things. Then they had them make a list of the characteristics of a healthy male adult and a healthy female adult. They didn't acknowledge anything else, just male, female. Now the list of things that identify a healthy man in this were the same as the list of things that identify a healthy person. But the healthy woman, the list of those characteristics was the opposite of what characterizes a healthy person. So instead of strong, independent, capable, self sufficient, it was observing others, always willing to, you know, sacrifice, self sacrificing, sympathetic, empathetic, soft, all these things. So what became apparent is that it was impossible to be a healthy woman by that culture's definition, and a healthy person, which means you were always wrong if you were trying to act like if you were a woman. But it also pertains to anything men do that is empathetic and sensitive and supportive to others. They would move over into that list of things that were not characteristic of a healthy person. But yes, a healthy woman.
