Two Cultures

There are two cultures. They are the Technos and the Indians. Technos live in a world of cities: steel, brick, wires and cement; tall buildings, condos and walls; air-conditioning; high-finance; computers and robots; TV, radio and the newspapers; airplanes and automobiles, buses and taxis. They usually dress in uniforms that bespeak their place in the city. Indians live in the country: temporary homes; people all around; grass growing wild and birds singing and the air carrying a million perfumes; some wild animals on the fringe; no horizons; blue skies during the day and heaven at night. Indians dress to keep comfortable and probably make their own dress. They have no bank accounts, no one is truly poor and no one truly richer than the rest.

Indians are in charge of the past; Technos create the future. Without a future, there is no reason to live. Without a past, there is no reason to be.

From the dawn of history, Technos and Indians have made war on each other. The Technos have always won, theirs are the better weapons. The next generation finds the new Indians fighting with the outmoded weapons of the previous generation’s Technos, becoming more Techno themselves. But there are always more Indians, they procreate more readily, and they have a fiercer connection to life itself.

What is different about today is that the Technos are on the verge of total victory, not through conquest but accretion; the Indians are becoming indistinguishable from the Technos. Mostly because they need more and more of the land for their purposes, the land, an essentially Indian need. What they do with the land is put more steel and brick on it. Imagine a world of Intergalactic caravans and city-size space wayfaring ships, and then imagine a ravaged world, a world of no return, the Earth of everyone’s past, not fit to return to. That is what we are creating.

There is a somewhat of a map of Technos and Indians to the Male and Female principles. Oddly, the near total victory of the recent Women’s Movement was really a victory for the Male principle, as women won the right to be equal in the Male world. Little was said about men recapturing their feminine sides.

created on 05/11/2000