I Believe We Have Lost Our Way As A Human Race

Wiradjuri/Wolgalu First Nations Aboriginal man from Australia, Joe Williams, shares how reconnection with the Earth and collectivism is the antidote to so many problems in our modern world.

Joe in 2022 at the ‘Yarri & Jacky Jacky corroboree’, commemorating when Wiradjuri men, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, saved 68 people — one third of the town's population — from drowning in the Great Flood of Gundagai 

By Joe Williams

If we take a look around it is easy to see a disharmony across many topics dividing the different parts of our world.

We turn on the TV screens, and we are flooded with heartbreaking images and stories from politics in the countries we live — to the impacts of climate change and the erasure of human and animal species with natural disasters — to multiple genocides playing out in real-time across the world.

What is the answer? 
How have we got to this point? 
What can we do to make change?

One thing that is clear is that we cannot continue to live the way we are.

For thousands of years the original peoples of the lands, Indigenous peoples, have lived as collectivist societies, looking after each other, the responsibility and obligation to care for all things in your world; humans, animals, waterways, and the land — because we too are all connected; we come from the land, and when we die, we return back to the land. 

In Australia, we are a people who make up a continent that spans more than 500 separate nation groups with more than 2,500 different dialects of language — all with varying traditions and practices.

Yet we still are one collective people. 

As someone who has worked for the past decade in Australia and across the world in the wellbeing sector, the challenging space of suicide prevention and helping to educate what trauma is, how it plays out, and how it is repeated through our behaviors every day — in our homes, in our communities — I see the impacts and effects that are wreaking havoc on our wellbeing as humans. The trajectory in what I see and how we live as a human race is concerning to say the least. 

All in all and collectively: I believe we have lost our way as a human race.

We are more physically disconnected than we have ever been.
We have fewer social interactions than we ever have.
We exercise and move less than we ever have.
We are the unhealthiest we have ever been.
We get less sleep than we ever have.

And the concerning thing for me is that now, in many cases, we are the most inauthentic version of human beings that have ever existed.

We pretend so much that we don’t know who we truly are.

Many of us are people who are lost — and for the most part, this inauthenticity is driving us further and further away from who we are as humans and making us physically, mentally, and spiritually unwell. 

For thousands of years it wasn’t done this way. Sure, technology and the industrial revolution have played a huge part, but it is introduction of capitalism and the need for the building of wealth and ownership, that has been a huge destructor at its core. 

The collective loss of communities and families living in a village environment has turned us into a world where we become more separated and segregated due to race, social class, and economic disparities. Since the existence of human beings and throughout our history, it has never been like that. We were, and always have been, a collectivist people, where we did things for each other, and everyone was warm, clothed, fed, and looked after — that was the communal responsibility.

If it had never been like what we see in communities today, how have we gotten to this point?

To first understand how we are here, we have to understand the process that has got us here. In Australia for example . . .

When Europeans first arrived on the shores of Kamay (Botany Bay, in Australia), the initial thought process was that the people who were there, were less than them — their life meaningless, with no purpose — in fact, they dismissed the original inhabitants so much, that they declared it was Terra Nullias, a Latin expression meaning ‘Nobody’s Land’.

Terra Nullias formed the view that Aboriginal peoples were not at the same standards as British colonial society. It was believed that the land was ‘unsettled’ and ‘uncultivated’ and that Aboriginal people were ‘uncivilized’. This resulted in all English laws being immediately in force.

The interruption to the collectivist way of life for the First Nations Indigenous peoples to the Australian land meant we faced major disruption with the forced introduction of the colonial process in the late 1700s.

It has taken less than 250 years for this disruption and disconnection from the original ways of living to be in full force flowing right across the country.

What is well documented throughout the colonization process and throughout the early invaders journals, is the purposeful destruction — the wiping out and massacres of families, men women and children.

With complete disregard of Aboriginal peoples, in 1816 Governor Lachlan Macquarie gave the order to his soldiers:

“All Aborigines from Sydney onwards are to be made prisoners of war and if they resist they are to be shot and their bodies hung from trees in the most conspicuous places near where they fall, so as to strike terror into the hearts of surviving natives.”

With that process, comes the notion of white supremacy; the ideology that the white man knows more, has more, deserves more — anything the colored man said or did, wasn’t valued.

The people of that day modeled those behaviors through actions and words to their kids and were racist and outright evil to first peoples — and, naturally, there was a flow on effect and impact that followed. Those people then did the same to their kids, and these racist behaviors have been passed down through generations for some 250 years.

Now, if you look at how we are living today, we still see those same imperialistic views over First Peoples when it comes to decision-making — what is best for Indigenous peoples, when and how — and dismissiveness toward our views on the very lands we have survived for thousands of years. 

In a nutshell, the introduction and consequent behaviors of colonialism mean how we currently live goes directly against how we have evolved since the beginning of human existence. 

The original peoples — the first human beings — lived on the land, they respected the land and everything that encompassed that. We lived in unison with the land, working with the rhythmic patterns and seasons in which we lived and adapted to. We ate from and filled our families with food from the land. We respected, and didn’t take more than we needed.

Today — we have lost that. We over eat, we don’t share, and many people in the communities we live, are homeless and struggle for food and water.

We can’t keep living like this; we simply can’t.

We need to rebuild the collectivist village, where everyone is looked after, and people are fed, clothed and nurtured in comfort.

We need desperately to find our way as humans; connect back to the original ways of respecting the land, each other, and everything that encompasses that.

To rebuild our village and not leave anyone behind. 

If we don’t, it is evident that the climate crisis will continue to increase, people will continue to die at a young age, people will become more and more disconnected, and we will all become sicker mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

I will finish with a quote by leading neuroscientist and child psychologist, Dr. Bruce Perry, from the international bestseller What Happened to You, co-authored by Oprah Winfrey:

“How ironic that the cultures our modern world has marginalized, are the very cultures with the wisdom to heal our modern woes.”

I believe what Dr. Perry is saying there is: to return hope to humanity — in a world where hopelessness is everywhere, and people have no idea who they are or the purpose for which they are living — we need to lean into and learn from the cultures of people, who have been here the longest; who loved and looked after each other, but more importantly, loved and looked after the land.

From the book Songlines: The Power and Promise, Inuit man Bob Dempsey cites, “The trouble with white fellas is that they keep all their brains in books.”

The knowledge we all need, and the stories that carry this knowledge, are written in the landscape of the land. All we have to do is sit in country, be still, be quiet — and country will talk to us. The answers to saving humanity, sits in the stories, that belong to country.

When you/we look after our Mother (Earth), Mother in turn will look after you/us.

We all need to reconnect. Reconnect physically, spiritually, emotionally. It doesn’t matter who you are, your background, race or religion, we all need to lean into and learn from each other a little more. For the sake of humanity, for the health and wellbeing of our generations to come. 

For what we did, worked; what we’re doing now, doesn’t.