Role Reversal
It’s all gone horribly wrong!
Somehow as a species, humanity, we’ve managed to completely screw things up and lock ourselves into ways of thinking and behaving that are entirely counter productive.
I’m speaking of course in general, as not everyone, and probably not you or I, is ‘bought in’ to the way things are done round here on this planet.
But even then, many people’s ideas of how things should change are still based on the ineffective paradigms that society holds as truths, as ‘givens’, and the changes proposed only scratch the surface or apply a ‘sticking plaster’ solution to whatever is seen as the problem.
Three key things stand out
- The role of women.
- The role of the ‘elders’.
- How we raise our young.
Many thousands of years ago in so-called ‘primitive’ societies things were rather different. Indeed, there may still be one or two tribes hidden away in the ‘depths of the jungle’ who have not yet been found and suppressed by ‘modern’ society.
The role of men was two-fold, procreation and heavy lifting or hunting. Women ran society, women made the plans, women were the leaders, the ‘managers’, the decision makers – not the men.
Why, because women are much better than men at all those things. They were then, and they are now.
It’s just that, for reasons beyond the scope of this insight, men decided that they were fed up with being treated as sexual objects and providers of the ‘hard labour’.
They replaced the Earth Mother Goddess and redefined the Source of universal creation as male, and in addition created the idea of an ‘Evil One’ (also male) and even assigned some ‘dark’ attributes to the supreme (male) being.
And so, along with the idea of heaven and hell, a ‘Devil’, and a vengeful, wrathful, punishing, supreme being came into the consciousness of society.
The fear that men created by doing this led to a reversal of roles.
Women were displaced from their position in society, they became the sexual objects and they became the performers of all the mundane and boring tasks that were needed to keep things going.
I admit, this is a simplistic summary and there’s more to it – and of course there are exceptions. There is though a huge body of evidence that this is what happened, trouble is that men (in general) have suppressed or destroyed most of it.
Then there are the ‘elders’.
Elders are people of both genders – women who have naturally lost the capacity to bear children and men who are no longer attractive to the younger women who can.
In primitive society the elders had a vital role, probably best described as coaching, mentoring, and acting as advisors to the community. In addition, and as part of their role in society they became thought leaders, innovators, philosophers and so on.
Elders, unlike today (and again I speak in general), were treated with respect as the most valuable members of society and relied upon to influence and guide the decisions and activities of the younger people.
After all the elders had done all the things the younger people were doing, had discovered new and better ways of doing things and were allowed to pass them on.
Today it seems that anything that anyone over 50 has done or experienced was simply a waste of time, younger generations seem insistent on rediscovering everything that is already known for themselves.
We have ended up in a society where people who ‘know nothing’ about how the world works are directing those who know differently- who do know the secrets of life – how they should behave and what they should or should not be doing.
The elders are now seen as a drain on society rather than the most valuable contributors it could possibly have.
Roles have been reversed.
Which brings me to my third point.
Back in the ‘bad old days’ of primitive societies it was the elders who raised the children, not the child-bearers.
This is logical, as the child bearers were still children themselves – and they had too many other things to do to keep society running to take time out to raise children when there were other people around them, the elders, perfectly capable, more capable than them, of doing it.
But then, with the diminishing role of women and the loss of respect for the elders’ wisdom, and as women were no longer permitted their role in running society, they were expected to raise their own children.
More recently an ‘education’ system was invented where people would be ‘trained’ to educate the youth of society.
It would take too long to go into the fundamental flaws in most education systems, but common practice is that the ‘teachers’ are barely more than children themselves and have rarely been outside an educational establishment in their lives.
They just don’t have the experience and importantly – wisdom of the elders.
When I first walked into a classroom I was only about 6 years older than the pupils and I’d never had a job or had to fend for myself in society. One year was enough for me to realise it was s system that just doesn’t work – or at least operates at a far far lower level than would be possible if we went back to the ‘old’ ways.
Society today is so riddled with all these false paradigms that have been ingrained for millennia that it will take some time – not long because other things are happening – to rectify, but (in this context):
If you’re a woman – you’re right
If you’re an elder, you’re right
If you’re a man – get used to new ideas – well old ones actually.
If you’re a child – ask your grandparents
