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archaeological sites and from historical sources suggest the opposite. (Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization, 1989) With agriculture usually comes division of labor, increased sexual inequality, and the begin- nings of social hierarchy. Priests, kings, and organized impersonal warfare all seem to come together in one package. (Against Civilization, p. 102). Say what you will about such tribal societies, the record shows that they were (and in some places still are) units of cohesion and sodality, of harmony and regularity, devoid for the most part of crime or addiction or anomie or suicide, with comparatively few needs and those satisfied with a minimum of drudgery, putting in on average maybe four hours a day per person on tasks of hunting and gathering and cultivating, the rest of the time devoted to song and dance and ritual and sex and eating and stories and games... No they did not have the power of five hundred servants at the flick of a switch or the turn of a key, but then they did not have atomic bombs and death camps, toxic wastes, traffic jams, strip mining, orga- nized crime, psychosurgery, advertising, unemployment or genocide. (Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels Against the Future) Why did a lifestyle that had been so successful for tens of thousands of years give way to one so different. Modern hunting peoples, though living for the most part in marginal areas, are frequently better nourished and always more leisured than their agrarian neigh- bors...Agrarian peoples not only must work a good deal harder for their sustenance, but are much more precariously balanced in relation to their environment, since they have substan- tially altered the natural ecology of their surroundings. (Dexter Perkins and Patricia Daley) The civilized people believe they have an obligation to bring primitive and underdeveloped people up to their level. Civilization, which is about to self-destruct, thinks of itself as the superior culture that has answers for all the world’s people.... The addict, truly, is a person who is emotionally dependent on things: television, substances, personality routines, other people, mental ideologies, total immersion in some cause or work. If the object of depen- dency is moved, addicts will experience insecurity, discomfort, distress, the symptoms of withdrawal. (William H. Koettke, The Final Empire) We reproduce catastrophe because we ourselves are traumatized — both as a species and individually, beginning at birth. Because we are wounded, we have put up psychic defenses against reality and have become so cut off from direct participation in the multidimensional wilderness in which we are embedded that all we can do is to navigate our way cautiously through a humanly designed day-to-day substitute world of symbol— a world of dollars, minutes, numbers, images and words that are constantly being manipulated to wring the most possible profit from every conceivable circumstance. The body and spirit both rebel. (David Watson, The Pathology of Civilization) 146 Epilogue: Time to Change the Road You’re On Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation