How the Aché Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Or earning the right to live

Amazon rainforest. Conscious Design. Unsplash.

Let’s dive in to todays thinking piece.

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Hardship is nothing – and this is core to the human story – but an opportunity for growth.

Let us take a walk with the Aché, a hunter-gatherer band of Paraguay, to unearth a truth of the human condition that is wreaking havoc on the modern day.

An old Aché woman filling her basket with berries and wriggling grubs – a delicacy – looks up and sees a necklace of white teeth beneath the black-dyed face of a cannibal. A seventy-year-old man climbing a tree for honey gets caught in a rain storm and clutches the slippery bark twenty feet above the earth beneath forks of lightning. A mother nursing a baby beside a fire hears a growl and sees orange flames mirrored in jaguar eyes beneath the eaves.

To the Aché, we are “being put to death” at all times. We must therefore impose our “own existence on the world” and reaffirm our “right to live on the earth.”¹ Each of us has a choice “to die like an animal or kill like a hunter” which led to a dual mode of living the Aché called bayja, which means “to be both hunter and hunted.” They had bright eyes and strong steps. They were fully alive.

What happens now? My hunch is that certainty of death leads to a vibrant inner life while certainly of life leads to an inner living death, for if we do not govern our minds in the absence of a deadly world, our minds will govern us. It is possible for us to, in part, drift through life because we neither need to be hunters nor the hunted, and while this drift can take many forms, I want to focus on three of the most passive: laziness, timidity, and apathy.

Let us treat these three as “voices” of the inner discourse. Why are these three voices dictating the lives of so many at present? My feeling is that laziness, timidity, and apathy slither into the void left open by a world that no longer tries to kill us.

Let us hold these self-destructive voices of the inner discourse up to the light and see what they are made of.  

The lazy voice expects a long and satisfying life without having to earn it. It neither wants to die like an animal nor hunt like a hunter – it wants to drift. What would happen if an Aché were lazy? He might say, “I am not in the mood to stalk heel-to-toe through dense rainforest to hunt armadillo. It is cold and I want to lay in my hammock.” What follows? He would not hunt, and if he does not hunt, his family does not eat, and if his family does not eat, they starve to death. Laziness existed but it was easily vanquished by growling stomachs that could be heard across camp. Laziness in the modern world is both a luxury and a paradox: it is worthy of gratitude in that life can be so easy and disgust at how easily life can be wasted.  

The timid voice thinks life is infinite and at some point, somehow, courage will be found to take that first step at becoming somebody. What would happen if an Aché were timid? He might say, “I am not sure I have what it takes to carry a bow and a knife and protect myself and my family. I just need more time. Someday maybe I will figure it out.” Standing on his toes to pick an orange, he might see the whites of the eyes of a cannibal staring at him through the leaves a few feet away. If he wants to live, he grabs his knife and bends his knees and screams his rage. If he does not, he will die. The timid voice says, “It is happening to me,” when it should say, “I am happening to it.”

The apathetic voice sucks the joy out of life and sucks to be around. What would happen if an Aché cared about nothing, his back on the red clay and his lidded eyes on the meteors painting the black sky in graceful streams of white, grumbling at the worthlessness of existence? He might say, “The universe is merely a mass of dark matter and elements. I am merely a bundle of cells and neurons. What is the point of it all?” A jaguar might saunter into camp and eat him in a slow and savage death by fang and claw. The Aché would quickly find a reason to care: pain avoidance, sudden awe at the rush of taking a deep inhalation through the nostrils, a pang of love for his children, a primal thrill for a fight – it does not matter which, as any will do. A little reminder of death-by-jaguar goes a long way.

What then? The significant fact is that a violent death at the hands of nature always stood before them like an “if”, and the only thing that kept them alive was the attunement of their inner discourse with the world around them.

Every act of the ancient world was an act of mindfulness. Of the scent of animals crouched in shadow. Of the clouds in the sky that can flood the earth. Of the twigs beneath bare feet whose snap can spook a passing pack of cannibals. Of croaking toucans on tree tops whose sudden silence means a threat is somewhere near in the bush. This awareness is still taught in modern militaries with the SLLS method, which means stop, look, listen, and smell. It is a strange twist of fate that we in the modern world must be taught how to use the same senses our survival once depended on.

We are far removed from the deadly world of the Aché and yet we come from the same stock. We too are mortal. We are no longer eaten by animals or cannibals – we are now eaten by time. But time does not stimulate and prod us the way fangs and arrows once did. We still require a stimulus. A spark. An enemy.

It seems then that we must eclipse our ancestors by treating the voices of laziness, timidity, and apathy with the same seriousness the Aché treated the jaguar and snake and cannibal. We must therefore become even more self-disciplined, even more masterful of our inner discourse, and even more imposing on existence than they were. This is a good fight.

I believe this truth in my bones: the problem we faced in pre-state societies was earning the right to live; the problem we face in state societies is earning the right to die. Said another way, death should not merely drift towards us: death needs to earn us. We must not “go gentle into that good night,” but we must “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”²

I believe we are left with a crucial question: looking backwards from my future death, how do I want to meet it? Either I pick up this heavy pack and muscle it up and down some hills, flow into upward-facing dog pose, or sit mindfully in silent prayer and gratitude, or I choose to drift until my heart stops pumping blood. Either I choose to put my heart, mind, and soul into these green, brown, and blue eyes before me, or I choose not to give a damn in the dying of the light.

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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. Pierre Clastres observed the Aché in the early 1960’s when they were still very much hunter-gatherers. I cannot recommend his book enough. He writes likes a poet, thinks like a philosopher, and observes like an ethnographer. Clastres, Pierre. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. Zone Books, 1998.

2. Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from The Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright 1939, 1946 by New Directions Publishing Corporation.