Who is a Belagidds?

What comes to mind when you see these people?

Do you see a people frozen in time with no sense of direction? Do you see a people drifting in history with no purpose of existence? Do you see a people who are only trying to survive and have no idea that there’s such a thing as future or past?

These are our generations who were alive during colonial interruption. We’ve been told that these generations lived in total darkness and didn’t have any sense of direction or future. On the other hand, these generations had cultural systems that ensured that knowledge, identity, legacy and other valuable resources were passed down from generation to generation. Why? It is clear they understood that there were generations who would come after them. And they passed down legacy to make sure that those descendants would continue to grow and achieve more than they did.

That was not darkness. That was a civilization, one that understood the power of intergenerational collaboration.

In this civilization, a generation did not have to start from zero. It stood on a foundation that had been built by thousands of generations before them. And it is this intergenerational collaboration that enabled our ancestors to migrate from one end of the globe to the other even before planes were a thing. It is this intergenerational collaboration that made it possible for our ancestors to build pyramids all along river Nile, long before modern machines were a thing.

Sadly, this civilization was recently interrupted. The formula was very simple but effective, teach the children to discard their own inheritance, make them not to see any value in the legacy that has been passed down to them. And just like that, generations were displaced from their own civilization.

That’s why today we struggle to answer a basic question like; who are you? That’s why we struggle to compete with the rest of the world. We are trying to create things from nothing while other civilizations are building on a foundation that is thousands of years old.

Our civilization was interrupted, not erased. Interruption caused the children of our civilization to turn away from their inheritance and desire the inheritance of other civilizations. But that did not mark the end of our civilization.

Our civilization did not end. We were just recovering from an interruption. The next chapter has just began.

A Belagidds is a displaced child of our civilization who has been refound. This is a child who has made a conscious decision to abandon other civilizations and re-enter his own. Not to come and preserve it, but to build on it.

But building our civilization does not mean searching for records where our ancestors talked about building a civilization. Our ancestors did not look at what they were doing through the modern lens of ‘civilization’. Our ancestors belonged to a different time. They lived in communities, each individual understood themselves through their community, and all their effort was focused into building and growing that community.

But when we stand outside and observe all these communities, we recognize something that none of them could have articulated at the time. Look at how they understood the world, look at how they created things, how they acquired and transmitted knowledge, how they organized society, how they solved problems, how they understood future and how one generation built on where the previous generations left. You realize that what looked like the individual behavior of a single community, was actually part of something bigger.

This observation is what enables the Belagidds to see a civilization where our earlier generations saw communities. But seeing communities did not stop our ancestors from building a civilization. They built the civilization through the many communities they organized, the cultures they invented, the knowledge they acquired and passed down, and the many physical things they created.

We Belagidds are going to be the first generations to build with an awareness of the civilization. That means instead of building individual communities, we can now build the civilizational directly. We can create systems for the whole civilization, we can solve civilizational problems, we can create institutions that serve the civilization, we can carry a civilizational identity and we can inherit from all our ancestral communities. Not because we are better than our ancestors, but because we carry an intergenerational obligation: the obligation to continue to grow and achieve more, the obligation to take our civilization to heights no one had ever imagined.

Are you aware that by the year 2096, 9 in every 10 people you meet today will be gone? That is just 70yrs from now. Are you aware that our earliest ancestors walked this earth over 200,000 years ago? And are you aware that 200,000yrs from now, chances are, our descendants will still be walking this earth? Read that again.

What does this tell you?

It tells you that your life as an individual is like a grain of sand in a beach. It’s like a drop of water in an ocean. Interruption has made us to think that you are here to live your life and go. That life is very short and therefore everything you do should revolve around me, myself and I. But our ancestors would tell you something different. They would tell you that living your life is the lowest form of living. Why live the life of a droplet when you can live that of an ocean?

Living the life of an ocean means living 200,000yrs + 200,000yrs. It means your ancestors, your parents, you and your future generations are not 4 separate people, you are one continuity. It means you can live with a 200,000yrs experience and dream of 200,000yrs to come, because you will still be here. We call that life ILUI life—the life that doesn’t end when one dies. This is the life we’ll need to live to be able to build our civilization.

ILUI life is guided by 4 principles.

Belagidds, you are not here to live your life and go. You were here, you are here and you will still be here. Live like it.

To make these principles of ILUI the center of everything we do, we are going to make it our greeting. So that every time you see another refound child, you are reminded to live the life that doesn’t end. The life that continues across generations.

The handshake forms a spiral to represent the never-ending nature of ILUI life, because a spiral can continue to expand outward infinitely and also stays connected to where it began.

Now that you understand how to live the ILUI life. Let’s now talk about the future of our civilization.

I know we’ve talked about creating civilizational institutions. We’ve talked about solving civilizational problems and even baring a civilizational identity, but what does that look like in the modern world? Where will our civilization sit in a world that is organized into nations?

Well, it will sit right where it sat when the world was organized into communities —it will sit inside them. The only difference is that this time round, we are aware of it’s existence and therefore we can consciously build it.

Our civilization can have thousands of leaders because it is determined more by direction than by the number of leaders.

Now let’s explore that future as though it is already here with us.

Inside your country, somewhere far away from any ‘modern’ city stands a city unlike any other.