To love Polynesian dance, to observe it and to dance it, is to already be standing in humanity's Transformed State.

To love Polynesian dance, to observe it and to dance it, is to already be standing in humanity's Transformed State.

In a previous post on this blog we said the shaka gesture only rings true when it's anchored in how you live the moment before and after the hand sign. Aunty Pilahi Paki gave us the inner code for that — kindness, unity, agreeableness, humility, patience — and the shaka is the smallest possible gesture that can carry it outward. ALOHA is a living practice, not a slogan.

Recently I've been sitting with a question that started bothering me. If aloha is so simple and so accessible, why is the world so visibly hurting? Why do our institutions seem built around fear, our governments around control, our economies around endless wanting? Why does the shaka, gentle as it is, still feel like a small light in a loud, anxious room?

An Australian biologist named Jeremy Griffith spent fifty years on that exact question. His book FREEDOM, free at humancondition.com, argues that two million years ago our species developed a thinking, choosing mind on top of an older, cooperative, nursery-loved instinct. The two stopped agreeing. The instinct said love is the way. The intellect said I have to figure things out, and figuring things out means making mistakes. The collision produced what Griffith calls the human condition: a deep, mostly unconscious shame, and the long detour we've been on ever since — what he names the upset state of anger, alienation, egocentricity, and the endless chase for power, fame, fortune, and glory.

Griffith's hopeful claim is that once you understand the clash, you can stop fighting yourself. Understanding ends the shame. Shame ending ends the need to compensate. The need to compensate ending is what dissolves the institutions, governments, and economies that have monetized our compensating for so long.

I read Griffith and I kept thinking: we already have the medicine here. Aunty Pilahi handed it to us in 1970 at the Governor's Conference. Five values. Daily practice. No attachments. ALOHA.

What the upset state looks like in plain sight.

If you sit with Griffith's framing for a while, the world stops looking like ninety different problems and starts looking like one wound expressing itself ninety different ways. I made a list: 26 elite institutions, 35 forms of government, 29 economic systems, and in every single row I could find the same four symptoms: Power. Profit. Control. Fear.

That's the upset state, scaled up. It's what you get when an entire species spends two million years trying to outrun a clash it can't name. The lobbyist, the algorithm, the trading desk, the surveillance contract, the campaign ad, they're not separate diseases. They're the same compensating reflex wearing different uniforms.

The reason this matters for a shaka blog is that the medicine looks like nothing. Aloha is so small, so unflashy, so apparently unequipped to face down trillion-dollar systems, that people dismiss it. But the systems are downstream of the wound, not upstream. You don't have to defeat them in a fight. You have to make the wound they feed on smaller. That is what aloha actually does, person by person, day by day.

The five values, paired with the symptom each one heals

Aunty Pilahi's acrostic isn't decoration. Read alongside Griffith's diagnosis, it reads like a clinical protocol:

  • Akahai — kindness with tenderness. The antidote to the anger the upset state carries. You can't be tender and clenched at the same time.
  • Lōkahi — unity with harmony. The antidote to the alienation the upset state produces. Lōkahi is the lived experience of not being on a separate team from the people around you.
  • ʻOluʻolu — agreeableness with pleasantness. The antidote to competitive aggression. ʻOluʻolu is what it looks like when you stop treating every conversation like a contest.
  • Haʻahaʻa — humility with modesty. The antidote to egocentricity — to the desperate need to be seen as important. Haʻahaʻa is the quiet release of that grip.
  • Ahonui — patience with perseverance. The antidote to the power-fame-fortune-and-glory sprint. Ahonui is the long breath that says I don't need to grab this; the right thing arrives in time.

Five values. Five symptoms. One protocol. Codified in Hawaiʻi Revised Statutes § 5-7.5 — the only U.S. state law that asks public officials to consider a spirit before they act.

The shaka as the smallest unit of practice

Here is where the shaka comes back in. If aloha is the medicine and the five values are the protocol, the shaka is the dose. It's how the protocol moves into ordinary time — a wave at a stranger, a thank-you to the driver who let you in, a no worry to the visitor who looks lost.

You can't shaka and clench. You can't shaka and dehumanize. The hand shape itself is a tiny refusal of the upset state — thumb and pinky stretched outward, the middle three fingers folded in, the gesture wider than the fist it could have been. It's the body saying I am not going to grab.

That's why misuse cheapens it so fast. A performed shaka, hollow of the values, is the upset state wearing a costume. A real shaka — even from someone who's never heard the word lōkahi — carries the protocol forward by an inch. Inches add up. Inches are how generations shift.

100 Tahitian dancers, and what Griffith was actually pointing at

If you have ever stood in front of a group of 100 Tahitian dancers — at a Tahitian Heiva or in a Hawaiian hālau or in a Polynesian dance performance — you have already seen Griffith's goal for humanity. You may not have known you were seeing it. But it was right there in front of you, in human bodies, moving together.

Think about what Griffith says we are trying to get back to. Not a utopia. Not a religion. A prior state — the original cooperative human, nursery-loved, instinct-led, not yet at war with itself. He calls the destination the Transformed State: a person who has set down the upset state because they finally understand it, and who lives from cooperation again instead of compensation. Two million years of detour, ended quietly, from the inside.

Now picture the dancers.

100 hundred bodies on a stage. Different ages — kūpuna in the back row, keiki in the front. Different sizes, different families, different islands of origin. And yet when the drums start, every hip moves on the same beat. Every arm tells the same story. Every breath catches at the same moment. Two hundred individuals doing one thing — not because anyone is forcing them, not because they have to, but because they have practiced together long enough that cooperation is easier than competition. The ego is not absent on that stage. It is just no longer in charge.

That is the Transformed State, expressed as choreography.

Watch the four upset-state symptoms try to survive in that room. Anger can't hold its grip when your body is breathing in time with someone else's — akahai is happening at the level of the heart rate. Alienation is impossible when the drummer's pulse is also your pulse — that is lōkahi made audible. Competitive aggression has nowhere to land when the whole point is to match, not to win — ʻoluʻolu in the muscles. Egocentricity dissolves because no individual dancer is the show; the line is the show — haʻahaʻa in motion. And the power-fame-fortune-and-glory sprint is replaced by something slower and older: the patient years of training, the kupuna's correction, the next generation watching from the wings, learning. Ahonui at full scale.

Five ALOHA values. Four Griffith symptoms. One stage. The medicine is not theoretical when a hundred dancers do this. It is visible, audible, embodied, and replicable.

This is also why expressive movement matters in a way that lectures never quite do. Griffith's insight is intellectual — you have to understand the instinct–intellect clash before the shame can dissolve. But understanding alone leaves the body behind, and the body is where two million years of upset actually live. ʻOri Tahiti, hula, haka, siva, fa'ataupati — the Polynesian movement traditions are humanity's oldest technologies for putting the body back into the cooperative state the mind has only just remembered. The dancers are not performing the Transformed State. They are practicing it, in public, in front of you, three minutes at a time.

Then they walk off stage and the practice has to follow them, into the parking lot, into the car ride home, into how they speak to the cousin who annoyed them at the lūʻau. That is where the shaka comes back in. The shaka is what the dance becomes when the drums stop. A small wave, a loosened grip, a no worry, the same cooperative posture, scaled down to fit in the present moment.

This is also why Polynesian dance matters more than it looks. From the outside it's a festival. From the angle we've been working in this post, it is an annual, public, intergenerational mass enactment of Griffith's destination for our species and it has been happening in Polynesia and other parts of the world, year after year, while the rest of the world has been arguing. Aunty Pilahi Paki was right. The key is already here. Sometimes it just has flowers, a pareu and a drum behind it.

Aunty Pilahi's prophecy, in Griffith's vocabulary

Aunty Pilahi famously said the world would be in trouble in the third millennium and would turn to Hawaiʻi for the key. People sometimes hear that as Hawaiian exceptionalism. Read with Griffith open on the desk, it sounds different. It sounds like a kupuna who saw, sixty years ago, that the upset state was reaching a fever and that the antidote our islands had been quietly carrying — five small words, one small hand sign — was going to be needed at scale.

The prophecy is not "Hawaiʻi will save the world." The prophecy is the world will get tired enough of fighting itself to finally try the simple medicine. Our job, in that moment, is to have kept the medicine real. To have not let aloha just become a t-shirt slogan. To have practiced the values, taught the values, resourced the people who carry the values, and let the shaka stay honest.

A small logic model, if you want one

I sketched this out as a planning grid for myself, and I'll share the bones of it here for anyone organizing a school, a hālau, a non-profit, or a community project around these ideas:

  • Inputs: Aunty Pilahi's teaching, HRS § 5-7.5, the lineage of kumu and kupuna, Griffith's diagnosis, your own willingness.
  • Activities: Teach the five values. Practice the five values. Wave the shaka and mean it.
  • Outputs: Households, classrooms, workplaces where the protocol is the default.
  • Outcomes: Each of the four symptoms — anger, alienation, egocentricity, impatience — meets its antidote in lived behavior.
  • Impacts: A behavioral substrate for what Griffith calls the Transformed State and what Aunty Pilahi simply called aloha lived.
  • KPIs: Not numbers. People. How many keep practicing when it's hard.

If you want the full detailed version, the one with Theory of Change, Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, Cost, Complexity. Here is a link to the spreadsheet. 

Two million years of human upset, 26 elite institutions, 35 governments, 29 economies — and the medicine still arrives the same way it always has. A small wave. A loosened grip. A breath. Akahai. Lōkahi. ʻOluʻolu. Haʻahaʻa. Ahonui.

Wear the aloha spirit every day. The world is starting to need it.

To love Polynesian dance, to watch it and to dance it, is to already be standing in humanity's Transformed State.

Sources and further reading:

 

Footnote:

Polynesian dance isn't just an activity or art form, but a doorway into a higher way of being human. When you love, watch, or perform Polynesian dance, you're already experiencing what humanity could be at its best—not working toward it, but living it in that moment.

The "Transformed State" likely refers to:

  • A holistic integration of body, spirit, community, and story
  • Connection to ancestors, land, and cultural identity simultaneously
  • Expression that goes beyond individual performance to collective meaning
  • A state where physical movement carries deep spiritual and social significance

Why Polynesian Dance Might Represent This

In Polynesian cultures, dance (hula, 'ori Tahiti, siva, etc.) is never merely entertainment. Each movement tells stories of creation, genealogy, natural phenomena, and cultural values. Dancers embody their ancestors, their islands, and their people's history through precise gestures that carry layers of meaning.

The physical act of dancing connects the dancer to:

  • Past (ancestral stories and traditions)
  • Present (community watching and participating)
  • Future (passing knowledge to next generations)
  • Place (movements often represent natural elements specific to islands)

This is what makes it "transformative"—it dissolves the separation between performer and meaning, between individual and collective, between past and present. You're not representing something; you are the living continuation of it.

Photo credit: Mikaele Foley

 

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