Quote Originally Posted by catherine View Post
If you have a well-adjusted, fully functioning family, and a bunch of thugs force their way in to your home and kill/decimate your family, is that because there was something wrong with your family? In the case of the Native Americans, I don't think they assimilated into Western culture very willingly. They were overcome, sickened with disease, exploited and run off their homelands. Same is true of other aboriginal cultures. It's hard for small local clans or tribes to stand up to highly organized and competitive, self-interested forces of violence and war.

In any case, the way of life we take for granted has only been around for a couple of centuries. On the other hand, humans have lived the "alternative lifestyle" for millions of years, so that speaks to the staying power of that way of life--it's only been in the last couple of hundred years (since the West glommed onto capitalism) that our planet has become increasingly in peril as we wring the earth dry of its abundance.

I'm not saying that we should all go back to primitive lifestyles, although that would be a better alternative than the trajectory we are on. Now it's time to take the best of both worlds, with a focus on innovation and creativity, community and cooperation, regeneration and respect for all life. If capitalism can be redesigned a la Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism or some other models, great. But right now you can't have capitalism without sacrificing natural resource and human life to the gods of profit.
But if a way of life is incapable of defending itself against cultural corruption or brute force from competing systems (European colonizer, Aztec or Turk), can it really be a superior alternative?