When did the Mayan society collapse?
Betrayed by Spanish priests, in a town called Maní, 10,000 of their spiritual leaders, their coordinators, were slaughtered and burnt on one single day.
Their economy lost its backbone. It’s wealth went into the hands of the church and financed Europe’s major commercial empires. History was then written by the conquerors.
The Maya fought back. Their last war against the colonising culture lasted into the 1920ies, but … they still had to encounter the strongest colonial weapon. During the past 100 years or so our interest based money lending economy destroyed their last social and political structures.
In Western schools we are taught that the world is a closed controllable system, perfectly designed by those who lead and govern. Our economists are trained to run extractive and destructive production processes. They have no tools for an integration or cascading of different levels of production. This makes them afraid of looking back because then they would have to acknowledge that destruction can never be sustainable. It leads to death.
The Mayan society was wide open and transformative. So the Western economy is incompatible with the Mayan food and forest production systems.
It is hard to realise how this is all happening when you are part of the culture responsible for it. The cultural agreements made about our way of life and production are our default way of thinking and our structural guideline. That guideline is instrumented by our monetary system and subsequent technology.
Now everybody is made believe that the monetary system has the status of a natural law. But it has not. It was intentionally designed to implement our cultural beliefs. It creates dependence and concentration of power. People get trapped in the system. Its lack of resilience is fully intentional. It’s objective is not sustainability but inescapability.
For that very reason our economy repeatedly invokes major financial crises. 500 years ago these crises were solved importing Gold and Silver from México. After the 2008 collapse 4 trillion dollars of tax money needed to be spent to rescue the banks.
The collapse of the European sustainable economy was similar to the old Mayan world’s ending. The reason for the Mayan collapse does not lie in their own but in their colonisers culture.
Do not believe the unproven tales of the Maya depleting their natural resources – they are a projection of what our globalised economy is presently doing to the world.
The Maya acted in agreement with nature.
Nature favours efficiency. Efficiency means to do things well, improving and growing with practice.
But as we gain efficiency the world changes and we lose our capacity to adjust to these changes through resilience or adaptivity. Here is our weak point.
The secret lies in synergising the two. The Maya therefore think of themselves as spacemakers for people to develop their creativity and for nature to thrive.
Mayan family farmers always remained part of the natural productive cycle. They know that to take from the earth you must give.
Little is known about the Mayan civilisation, its books and knowledge were destroyed. Only 3% of their major cities have been partially identified.
Some settlements are several thousand years old and left no trace except a few big stones, ideas and … trees … enough to show that their vital economy of diversity and multi-functionality tried to reach close to nature’s perfection, its energy and information flows.
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Bernardo del Monte
Chan Ká Vergel
Oxkutzcab, Yucatán
México
Skype: Bernardo_delMonte
cel 997 101 5794
+52 1 997 101 5794
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