Alex Stark, Architect, Teacher, Consultant and Healer, on writing new narratives and the willingness to 'abdicate' the kind of conflict-based power we have wielded over the past 10,000 years.
"A world without crimes against humanity is a peaceful world.
It is a world that is peaceful not because it does not engage in action, it is peaceful not because it doesn’t engage in creativity or even expansion of its own capacity and creative power, but it is peaceful because it acknowledges the fundamental reciprocal relationship between nature and humans, between humans and humans.
It is a society and a group that fundamentally recognizes the power of the feminine and of the female; where the males are capable of subjugating themselves to the wisdom of the women; where the males are willing to abdicate the type of power that we have been building for the last five, seven, ten thousand years.
When we write history books we talk about the succession of leaders, we talk about the succession of wars, we talk about the succession of dead, white men who took their people to victory. But that’s a myth. We’ve accepted it as the norm.
In fact, history could have been just as easily written about what the mothers were doing, and how they nourished their children, and how they reacted when the child was sick or when the grandmother died. We could have just as easily been writing history about how we connected to nature, and how we loved it, and how we cherished it, and what we did in order to promote its own success.
If we look at the thousands of years of history in which there has been warfare and conflict in the western world, and you add it all up, you find that we’re living with the trauma of generations, and generations, and generations of violence; and the grief and the sadness that goes with it.
So to my mind, the question of whether or not genocide can be stopped is, in a way, irrelevant because it’s the logical outpouring of a tendency in human society in its current stage of development that was inevitable. It started thousands of years ago when the feminine principle was pushed down; when the masculine principle, in its ugliest form, was pushed up; when wars, and dominion, and power, and political systems subjugated people for their own purposes.
The logical outcome of that has to be war. It has to be confrontation and conflict because there always has to be one group of people that is under and one group of people that is above.
The thing that I find even more tormenting, personally, is that as an architect and a person of learning, that all of the learning that I went through; all of the technological sophistication of society is really, fundamentally, at the surface of this particular paradigm. You know technology created global warming, and it’s not going to solve it. Technology created ever-increasing levels of warfare, and it’s not going to solve it.
So ultimately, it really depends on human consciousness, and how humans are going to manage their particular approach to how they live that will change the tide. There’s no fix to the problem except within the human consciousness and within the human spirit."
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