4 Amazing ideas White People Ruined

We break down how white people keeps stealing effective systems from other cultures, stripping out the context, then acting surprised when the watered-down version barely works. We trace that pattern through Maslow, mindfulness, Indigenous fire management, and African medicine, then ask what we lose when community, ethics, land, and spirit get removed. 

• cultural appropriation as conceptual degradation, not just theft 
• Maslow’s hierarchy framed as a flipped Blackfoot model with community erased 
• belonging as a core ingredient of safety in a social species 
• mindfulness as Sati within an ethical path toward liberation from suffering 
• “McMindfulness” as a corporate tool for tolerating toxic systems 
• Aboriginal cultural burning replaced by fire suppression and high-intensity burns 
• colonization of African medicine in Zimbabwe and the loss of holistic care 
• the repeating pattern: take what fits, discard the rest, then blame the source culture 
If you feel like buying me a coffee, there is a link in the thing of in the description that says you can buy me a coffee, which is like you just donate five bucks or whatever, which is about the pro about the price of a latte.

Transcript

Why Stolen Ideas Get Ruined

The Blackfoot Model Behind Maslow

Mindfulness Without Ethics Or Liberation

Aboriginal Fire Practices And Bushfires

African Medicine And Colonial Suppression

The Common Pattern And The Cost

Coffee Support And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, Owl Medicine, and thank you for hanging out with me. This is kind of crazy how long this podcast has been going on. I'm really excited about it. I finally got smart and started doing some batch recordings. Um, I'm a little bit behind today, so I won't be able to get as many recorded today as I had hoped, but I hope that you are doing the same thing with the things that matter to you in your life. I know time is short for all of us and time management is difficult and scheduling all the things that we want to get done is tough. So one of the ways that I've gotten like around that or gotten better at it is I started stacking my podcast recording, and I try to record anywhere from three or f to four of them in a single setting. That way I don't, or single sitting, that way I don't have to worry about it for the next month or six weeks. I can put them out every week or every two weeks and be good to go. And I can spend the time that I would normally spend preparing and getting all my thoughts together. I can actually spend that time just writing in between and slapping them all into Google documents and having a chunk of pieces to go through. And that's been really fun. So today, the first episode we're gonna be recording is really fun to me. We all know that white people are thieves. In general, white people have been stealing black people and native people and Asian people and other poor white people and using them as slaves or body shields for hundreds of years. So, we're not gonna talk about white people being thieves. We know that's a thing, which is hilarious that it wound up being called like an Indian giver because it's literally like white people giver. It was how white people treated Indians, Native Americans, like uh American Indians. It was how we treated them that came up with the term Indian giver. And this is kind of a perfect example as like what we're gonna be getting into today. I decided that like we all know that we're thieves, so I wanted to talk about um one of my personal pet peeves, which is my which is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Um, because there was no hierarchy. Maslow spent six weeks with a Native American group and left thinking that he knew everything that they could possibly teach him, and basically took the a concept that they had to be able to grow the most healthy and well-adapted human beings and turn it absolutely inside out, upside down, make it essentially functionally useless, and then say that natives are dumb, savage people. Which wow, because their system worked beautifully, and we're gonna talk about how that's happened not just with Maslow and our hierarchy of needs, but we're gonna talk about four different places and things that white people stole and just absolutely screwed up, just totally screwed up completely. So here is our episode on like, we all know that we're thieves, but white people are also stupid too. So let's get one thing straight. The fact that white people have spent centuries stealing from other cultures is not news, it's not even interesting anymore. But what we have done that's slightly more interesting, is that we steal things, we call it our own, make it a bastardized version of itself, and then it's barely functional. And then we either use that barely functionality to say, ooh, this is us, and we're doing amazing things with it, or we use it's like, oh, this isn't functioning to say that, oh well, all of you are all of you people that we stole this from are idiots to begin with. What we do is we take a living, breathing, highly effective system, something that has worked beautifully for generations, and we cram it into PowerPoint slides. We strip out all of the nuance, we strip out 100% of the community, the relationships to land and spirit, and then we slap a Western label on it, call it discovered, and then act shocked when it stops working. The result is not just cultural appropriation, we know that we do that. We the the result is actually a conceptual degradation, on top of obviously the cultural degradation. But we know that white people steal these things and do the cultural appropriation and then destroy the cultures. But what's important here to for me to try to point out is it's not even just the cultural the cultural appropriation or the cultural degradation that comes from the appropriation, but it is the conceptual degradation of the genius of the cultures that we lose. And this is what pisses me off. So, here are four examples where the original practice was profoundly effective, and where white people, in our infinite imperial stupidity, broke it so badly that the modern version is barely a shadow of what it once was. Best of all, we use our failure with other people's systems to prove that they're dumber than us when the opposite is actually the truth. So, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This was stolen from the Blackfoot Nation. The original efficacy? In 1938, this dude, Abraham Maslow, spent six weeks living with the Blackfoot Nation, which is the Sixica. The Sixica Nation in Alberta, where he found a sophisticated centuries-old model of human needs. And it was often drawn as a teepee that placed sex that that placed self-actualization at the base, not at the peak. In the Blackfoot view, every person is born as a spark of divinity. The community's primary job is to help that spark stay lit. Self-actualization is the foundation above which the community sits. Above it sits community actualization and cultural perpetuity. Generosity, not individual achievement, holds the whole thing together. Inter-white ruination. Maslow took this beautiful communal spiritually grounded model and literally turned it upside down. So we've all seen Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I and you know that we have this little pyramid here, but they he turned it upside down. What he's saying is, well, what the Blackfoot were saying is that if we want to have a community, that each person within that community has their own spark of divinity in them. Something in them that is good and wonderful and useful for their community. The Japanese call it ikigai, the thing that you are good at, that your community needs, that you can make a living at. And in these communal uh sustenance or um subsistence lifestyles that the Native Americans had before white people showed up, it was just like what your community needs. There was no money exchanged, at least not much, right? Not within our not within our communities. But what the entire process was basically that like if if every person is born whole and complete, what we need to do as a community is to foster them in the in the best way possible to make them the healthiest, most full version of themselves. And when we do that as a community, they feed the community. It is the community's job to feed the individual, and then the individual naturally feeds the community. If you're familiar with the Skywoman story, this is very similar to the origin stories of some groups of North Americans, where they have the origin story or the origin myth of Skywoman, where there was a woman who fell out of the sky and fell to the earth, and well, there was no earth yet, the turtles built earth on the on the on his back so she could have a s a safe place to land, and the butt like and the animals gave of themselves for food and for clothing and bugs and all the things all worked together to give the um fallen woman, the sky woman, a place to be so she could be safe. And because of that, it instills this sense of our environment takes care of us, therefore it is our job to take care of our environment. And when uh you take this beautiful, really nuanced philosophical concept and you introduce that to basically idiotic imperial white people, it got shat on. And that's what's happened. So Maslow took this communal, this communal spiritually grounded model, turned it upside down. He buried self-actualization way up at the top of the pyramid, making it a prize that you can only earn after food, love, self-esteem, safety, and he erased community entirely. Entirely. Like the the entire like the reason these needs to create self-actualization the reason any of this worked in the six uh is like nation is because of the sense of community. And he removed community completely from it because white people are so effing stupid. We're so effing stupid, we're so egotistical that we can't possibly imagine that someone else knows more than we do, that someone else's way of thinking could be broader and more inclusive than ours. We we just cannot wrap our heads around it to such a degree that we can take this beautiful centuries-old concept, turn it literally on its head, remove 100% of the context of community, and then be like, I guess it kind of works. Best of all, he never ever sighted the Blackfoot people. He never ever sighted the Sixica. Six Sixica. Never once. And the result, now, today, we've all heard of Maslow's hierarchy. I was introduced to Maslow's hierarchy of needs in medicine, and we all hear about it in our like psych 101 courses. So now millions of psychology students have been taught that human beings are selfish, ladder climbing individuals. We've built management theories, education systems, and even parenting advice around a pyramid that was never ever meant to stand on its point. The original Blackfoot model worked because it understood that no one self-actualizes alone. It is impossible to do. Our version works only if you pretend that other people don't exist. It's awful. By the way, you can look this up. Um, Blackstock is the author from 2021, The Emergence of the Breath of Life Reality. Um, I have a few here, actually, citations that talk about this. And did Maslow get his hierarchy from the Blackfoot, The Globe and Mail, which was an article that I found where they did some studies, and this guy Ryan Kay did some studies back in the day. So there's there's there's piece number one, the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We see it all the time in psychology, we see it all the time in medicine, and where it's like we have to take care of this, this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and then the person can become self-actualized. Wrong. Fundamentally wrong. You don't need you don't need safety and food and those things first. I talk about this at the end of Rethinking Broken. I have an entire section called a bone to pick with Maslow. If you separate belonging from safety, you're an idiot. Because safety in a social species comes from belonging. Our our our like us being safe comes from our sense of belonging and our actual belonging with other people who can help us create safety through resistance or through shelter building or through hunting or through gathering or through farming. We find safety in belonging. So separating those two alone, it just like throws a giant wrench in the whole Maslow's hierarchy because again, it's not Maslow's, it's the tsikka. They have a beautiful integrative system that was too complicated for white people to understand. So white people took it, bastardized it, took it out of its, took it out of context, flipped it on its head, and created a hierarchy where there was none. Sound familiar? Yeah, we're really good at that. We're really good at bastard bastardizing a thing, taking it out of context, and then creating a hierarchy out of it. Oh, speaking of, let's talk about mindfulness. I talk a lot about mindfulness and meditation. I I talk about it all the time with the people I work with, with my clients, and it's a real problem that people have no idea what mindfulness actually is, and no idea what meditation actually is because they hate them. They hate these things because we've never been taught what they actually are. Because again, we don't have the beautiful Blackfoot version of mindfulness. We have the Maslow's version. We have a bastardized, contextless, community-free version that is meant to make our miserable lives slightly more productive under the hell of capitalism. But let me go into the details first. The original efficacy of mindfulness, I mean, is in traditional Buddhist practice, mindfulness, which is called Sati, is not a stress reduction app. It has nothing to do with stress reduction. It is one part of an eight-fold path that includes ethical conduct and wisdom. That's sila and panna. You cannot separate mindfulness from the commitment to not harming others. The goal is not to feel calmer at work. I know we all have the calm app. Everybody's got the calm app so we can be mindful and be more calm at work, so you can get more work done. That is not the goal. The goal is liberation from suffering, which actually requires you to change how you live, not just how often you breathe or how you breathe, or when, or if an app is telling you to do it. The white ruination enters with, I love this term, mick mindfulness, because we have stripped away 100% of the ethics. We've stripped away the community again, and we have stripped away its spiritual context. We turned a radical practice of self-transformation and therefore cultural transformation into a corporate wellness tool. Google offers search inside yourself, and Goldman Sachs has mindfulness rooms. The pitch is very, very simple for these people. Become more resilient to toxic systems instead of changing them. That's what mindfulness has been reduced to. Become more resilient to toxic systems rather than changing them. This is why white people take beautiful concepts and we bastardize them and make them contextless. Because if people got a hold of them as is, they would have to fundamentally change how the system works. The version that we have now of mindfulness doesn't liberate anyone, which is why I have to work so hard to get any of my clientele to do a meditation practice. It's really hard to get them to do it. It's so hard because it's all just been bastardized. Nobody has any idea what it's actually for. And so it takes weeks to usually months of talking to people and pointing out over and over and over and over again, oh yeah, that moment where you didn't have a choice, guess you should have started that meditation practice, shouldn't you? Guess you should have started that meditation practice, shouldn't you? Guess you should have started that meditation practice, shouldn't you? Wouldn't it have been nice? Wouldn't that have been real nice in that moment to be able to like pause and breathe and make a different decision? Yeah, guess you should have had that mindfulness practice, shouldn't you? I wind up spending so much time doing that because the the the version that we have been sold of mindfulness is a crock of horse shit. It is garbage. It is nothing but a way, it's it's our managers coming down and saying, You have terrible time management skills. And it's like, no, no, I don't. You have terrible scheduling skills. Like we're understaffed. It's not my time management, it's your failure at staffing appropriately. That's what is basically happening when I'm having to talk with people about mindfulness because they're so turned off by it because the version that we have been sold doesn't liberate anybody. It just pacifies people. And the people I work with, we don't want to be pacified, and I don't want to pacify them. It turns a practice designed to end suffering into a practice that is just a band-aid for burnout. By isolating a technique from its ethical framework, we made mindfulness safe for capitalism. Nothing good should be safe for capitalism. Capitalism is cancer. Capitalism is the largest cult in the history of the world, and that is an episode I will be recording today. It is the oldest, it's the biggest cult in the history of the world. Anything that's safe for capitalism is not good for human beings. And almost entirely it's inert for genuine human flourishing. The way we teach mindfulness now is basically inert for human flourishing. It's it's awful. And there's a ton of science on this, but I'll digress because I could I could rant about the terrible approach that we have for mindfulness all day. The next one. It worked really, really well until white ruination. The British colonizers called it back burning, and they simply banned it. They were like, oh, that's dangerous, can't do that. And then they replaced it with their own bastardized European model of fire suppression and reactive, calling it hazard reduction, which were large high-intensity burns often set from helicopters with little to no regard at all for the local ecology, no concern for microclimates, no concern for the local ecology, fauna or flora. The result? Go figure. Massive effing bushfires. We have deadly fire seasons in Australia now. There is total ecological collapse. Scientists now admit that Aboriginal fire management was vastly superior to what replaced it. But the knowledge has been lost, not completely, but a good chunk of it of how and when and why and where to set the fires is gone. It's lost because white people spent two centuries calling the world's oldest fire scientists primitive. This is what pisses me off. We know that we're thieves, but here's what's worse. We're shitty thieves. We're shitty little fucking thieves. We stole the Mona Lisa off of the wall and then used it as a napkin. That's what the fuck we've done. That's the that is the history and the story of white people as they encounter beautiful intercultural expressions of our relationships with each other and with nature. As soon as white people got a hold of it, it was destroyed. The last one we'll talk about is African medicine. There was traditional African medicine stolen by colonial powers in Zimbabwe specifically. There's actually a bunch of this, um, a bunch of science about Zimbabwe specifically. And like I know this is a Chinese medicine kind of person, but I love this example. Before colonization, the Nanga, the traditional healers of Zimbabwe and other Africa other African nations, were the primary health care providers for millions of people. Their system was holistic, community-based, and integrated physical, spiritual, and social factors. In Kori Kori culture, mental illness was understood as a social issue requiring communal healing, a view that modern psychiatry is only now catching up to. This is what we call the biopsychosocial approach, which came out in the United States in 1977 and has been, hands down, the single most effective lens to with which to observe human behavior, pathology, disease, all sorts of things, mental health struggles or just mental health. The biopsychosocial approach has been hands down the most effective. And what do we find? Oh, we find that the people in Zimbabwe and the healers of Zimbabwe, they'd done been saying that. They'd done been saying it for a long time. Their systems worked. They were not primitive magic, they were sophisticated medical traditions that developed over centuries until you guessed it, white ruination. British colonizers and Christian missionaries passed laws like the Witchcraft Suppression Act of eighteen ninety nine. They used schools and churches to label traditional healers as superstitious and their practices as evil, their practices of seeing people who were struggling mentally and not having good relational health and turning to the community, the people they have relationships with, to try to solve their relational problems. Yeah, that was crazy. Totally crazy. Ugh just absolutely insane. I was like, there's no way that could work. Oh, wait, that's exactly what we're finding out works now. Go figure. What happened with these people is they were forced into Western biomedical systems that, of course, were horribly underfunded, basically completely inaccessible for the overwhelming majority of the population, and culturally completely inappropriate. Like, completely inappropriate and not effective. If people if if your Western medicine by like if your allopathic interventions are not funded enough and inaccessible, how the fuck you gonna make every other way to find health illegal? Oh yeah, because we're white. That's why. Cause we're white. This is the history of white people. We're not just thieves, we're bad at it. It's really pathetic. What they did is to completely dismantle a very, very complex and philosophically complex system of medicine and understanding of the world and how things interact, and said, nope, that's evil. That's a biopsychosocial approach. We're not gonna come up with that for another hundred and twenty years, right? Because yeah, that uh that witchcraft suppression act was 1899, and in 1977, they were like, oh wait, biopsychosocial, which we're still just now like barely even paying any attention to, thanks to people like Gabor Mate and Robert Sapolski, people who pay attention and are good scientists and good researchers and good behavioral biologists and psychiatrists. It's wild, but this is what we've done. This is what we've done over and over and over again. We did it with the Blackfoot, and we called it a hierarchy when it was a circle. We did it to mindfulness, to this beautiful system that was meant to end suffering personally and communally. We're like, nope, now we're just gonna sell that to capitalism. We did it in African health. And we did it in Aboriginal Burning. We're like, oh hey, here's a good idea. Let's make it trash and then call it ours. Even though it's barely functional. And we'll we'll we'll totally tout that it's ours, even though it's barely functional. But we'll teach it in all of our classes, like the Maslow's hierarchy. We'll teach it to everybody and we'll say that it's ours. He never, he never I mean, of course he didn't. This is white people in the early 1900s. It was like, no, we're just not gonna, we're not gonna give any credit to the natives who came up with these ideas. It's awful. And ironic. Here's the point. What ties all four of them together, in every case, white people looked at a system that they did not understand. They didn't understand it because each of these systems were systems that were rooted in deep time. They were close to nature. These peoples were close to nature, so they were able to observe nature, and they had communal wisdom, a deep communal wisdom, and we called it primitive. Then we took apart, we took it all apart, kept the pieces that fit our worldview, and threw away the rest. But the proof is in the outcome. The Blackfoot model, the Sixica model, produced actualized human beings deeply embedded within the community, who naturally, instinctually fed their communities. Our pyramid produces anxious individualists who are climbing ladders to nowhere. Traditional mindfulness practices produced liberation. Ours produced productive employees. Aboriginal fire management produced incredibly lush and healthy landscapes complete with microclimates and unique species. Our version produces infernos that sweep countrysides, killing hundreds to thousands. African medicine produced holistic healing for individuals and communities. In ours killed off thousands and left a massive colonial gap, and we are only now catching up to their philosophy. Two hundred years later. We are not smarter than the people that we stole from. We are stupider. Not because of anything inherent. I don't think white people are biologically stupider than other groups of people. But I do think there is something really important about understanding how white people have survived. White people have survived in cold. We are white because we survived in cold. And when you survive in cold, it is all about limiting your resource consumption. It is about individualizing everything, not needing anybody but yourself. That's the way that we have survived the cold. It formed the way that we think. And I believe this is why we've screwed everything up. We are so far removed, white people have historically been more removed from the natural environments that have kept us fed and alive for so long, we don't have any intuitive concept of how our environment feeds us. We have no concept of it whatsoever. And because of that, when white people look at mindfulness, when white people look at the this about uh at self-actualization in Native Americans or African health, we can't conceptualize the deep integrated relationship with the self, the community, and the environment. Because basically our environment was trying to kill us for a long time. And so were the other white people. So this is my message for the day. Is yeah, we know white people are thieves, but we're also shitty ones. It's unfortunate, but it's true. Alright, if you have made it this far, thank you. You made it to the end. Well done. Congratulations. If you feel like buying me a coffee, there is a link in the thing of in the description that says you can buy me a coffee, which is like you just donate five bucks or whatever, which is about the pro about the price of a latte. I drink a piccolo now. That's my new favorite drink. It's like it's a double shot with four ounces of steamed milk. So it's like halfway between a quartado and an eight-ounce latte, and it's my new favorite like combo of milk and espresso. So if you haven't had a piccolo, go out and get a piccolo. Or buy me one. Actually, do both. Buy me a piccolo and you go get a piccolo. They're really, really lovely. Thank you very much for spending your time with me. I hope you learned something interesting today. Thanks for hanging out and have a marvelous day. And remember, stay curious and stay on the top.