THE LOST CONSCIENCE. chapter 3 of the america actually kinda sucks sometimes series.

It was common thought, just a few hundred years ago, that Native Americans were intellectually and morally inferior to people of Western European descent aka white folk. It has been a trend of behavior by said white folk since the beginning of white folk history. It is noted in the historical white folk attitude towards any culture that is not predominantly white. But I digress--this post is not actually about racism.
This post is about conscience, or lack thereof in the white folk culture. This is not just an American problem. It is evidenced in Russia, Europe, The Middle East, Asia, and--wait--oh yes, everywhere on the face of the Earth now. It exists now in countries that are not predominantly white folked---and in the idea of fairness to white folk, the concept actually pre-dates the white folk world franchise. It goes way back to a cautionary tale from the best-selling book ever. A little tale called The Story of Adam and Eve. Besides being a story that kicked-off the trend of blaming women for our downfall(which is a story for an upcoming post) It is a tale of lost innocence. Or, as I see it--Lost Conscience.
It is not surprising that the Abrahamic traditions are peppered with this same theme. The garden of eden, sinning, forgiveness, accepting that we are not perfect, etc. These are all ways to justify the harm that we have done due to our lack of conscience--to justify continuing to do said harm. The religious would argue that we do this because we are imperfect and seek forgiveness. The non-religious have modified this and seek to reduce our impact--not eliminate it, mind you, but reduce it. By accept this model we must believe that we cannot change things for the better--only make them not as bad as quickly. This is a convenient excuse for NOT WANTING TO CHANGE. Because we have no conscience. If we had a conscience, we would not be able to continue. Need some examples?
Our ancestors destroyed an entire race of people so that we could have a place to live. Our ancestors then enslaved another race of people so that we could have cheap labor. Our ancestors then invented horrible weapons so that we could scare the rest of the world into letting us run things. We then began ruining the environment with toxic chemicals because we needed the energy for our cars, homes, and businesses. We then began systematically destroying our food supply and that of the world with chemicals and preservatives and genetic modification. We abused animals so that we could test new medicines and skin-care products. We abused more animals for low-cost meat, milk, and eggs. It is actually hard to think of a bad thing that our culture has NOT done in the last four hundred years or so.
There is a class of criminal that psychologists will label as having no conscience. Psychologists even think that this may be a physical disorder--that a part of the brain is damaged--the part that contains our conscience. These people feel no guilt for their actions and therefor repeat them. Serial killers often fall into this category--And before you get mad at me for comparing our entire culture to serial killers, just try to think about it for a minute.
While we don’t all have a family in our freezer--many of us do have the remains of abused animals--we just call them dinner.(Sorry, I don’t get to be an angry vegetarian in the real world much!) Most of us drive cars--which continually spit out poison--regardless of their efficiency rating. Most of us use electricity--made in part by nuclear reactors that create tons of toxic waste. Most of use use paper, and cardboard, and wood for our houses, even though we know that the world needs more trees. Many people litter--there’s too much trash for it to be an isolated incident. Most of us waste water every day by flushing the toilet, brushing teeth, showering, laundering, etc. We tell ourselves that we need to do all these things--but we actually just WANT to do all these things. That’s the actions of a people with no conscience.
It's what held back the Native Americans from becoming are major world power during the 50,000 years they were here. They had a conscience. They actually felt bad about killing animals for food. They asked the animal’s spirit to forgive them. They never took more from the world than they needed. They actually CARED about how they lived. If it were not for the Native American’s conscience, our ancestors would have landed on the heavily defended shores of a land that was already barren and polluted. We would have been turned away from a land that we would not have wanted anyway.
Aren’t we lucky that was not the case?