My latest read, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, resonated with me so deeply with all the crazy things that have been happening in the world today. Thank you Emma for recommending to me, and I will be passing the torch. Here's only a few of my favorite points in the book, with without the entirety of the text, maybe be a bit dense. But if it speaks to you, please read the book! Thank you Daniel Quinn for bringing to life!
My latest read, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, resonated with me so deeply with all the crazy things that have been happening in the world today. Thank you Emma for recommending to me, and I will be passing the torch. Here's only a few of my favorite points in the book, with without the entirety of the text, maybe be a bit dense. But if it speaks to you, please read the book! Thank you Daniel Quinn for bringing to life!
You’re captives in a civilization system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.
A few years ago…many young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity, but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the walls to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual
Like people of Nazi Germany, they are captives to a story…There’s no need to name it or discuss it. And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it incessantly. And hearing it incessantly you don’t listen to it…it’s humming in the background.
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story…to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, “ How can you listen to this stuff and recognize it for what it is?” And if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you.
That’s what’s been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You’ve been doing what you damn well mean with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.
This was a very big moment—the biggest in human history to this point. Man was at last free of all those restraints…The limitations of the hunter-gathering life had kept man in check for three million year. With agriculture, those limitations vanished, and his rise was meteoric. Settlement gave rise to division of labor. Division of labor gave rise to technology. With trade and commerce came mathematics and literacy and science, and all the rest. The whole thing was under way at last, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into a paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.
One of the most striking feature of the Taker culture is its passionate and unwavering dependence on prophets. (Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Muhammad) Aside from these, there is no tradition whatever of prophets rising up among the Leavers to straighten out their lives and give them new sets of laws of principles to live by…I mean, it’s no great surprise that savages have no prophets. God really didn’t get interested in mankind until those nice white neolithic farmers came along.
“A minute ago you said, ‘We need prophets to tell us how we ought to live, because otherwise we wouldn’t know.’ What is that? Why wouldn’t you know how to live without your prophets?”
We have a certain knowledge about all these things, why don’t we see if any such knowledge can be found about how we live? -Doesn’t that seem strange to you? Considering the fact that this is by far the most important problem mankind has to solve-has ever had to solve—you’d think there would be a whole branch of science devoted to it.
We now know two highly important things about the Taker mythology. One, there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, and two, they have no certain knowledge about how they ought to live—and will never have any.
This wall is an axiom stating that certain knowledge about how people should live is unobtainable. I reject this axiom and climb over the wall. We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.
It’s your craft that’s carrying you toward catastrophe…and the worst part of it is…that the survivors, if there are any, will immediately set about doing it all over again, exactly the same way.
There are three things the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community:
- They exterminate their competitors.(other species never hunt competitors down just to make them dead, the way ranchers and farmers do.)
- The Takers systematically destroy their competitors food to make room for their own.
- They deny their competitors access to food. (you may deny your competitors access to what you’re eating, but you may not deny them access to food in general)
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself
We’re destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
It is holy work, in Taker culture. The more competitors you destroy, the more humans you can bring into the world, and that makes it just about the holiest work there is. Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes as enemy to exterminated.
Any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
You need to take a step back from the problem in order to see it in global perspective. At present there are five and a half billion of you here, and, though millions of you are starving, you’re producing enough food to feed six billion. And because you’re producing enough food for six billion, its a biological certainty that in three or four years there will be six billion of you….and so on and so on…
Crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are features of an advanced culture
If you go among the various people of your culture-each people will give you a completely different account of themselves, but they are all enacting in a single basic story, which is the story of the Takers.The same is true of the the Leavers. In all, it isn’t the tale you tell that counts, it’s the way you actually live.
Culture is a mother everywhere and at every time, because culture is inherently a nurturer- the nurturer of human societies and lifestyles. Among Leaver peoples, Mother Culture explains and preserves a lifestyle that is healthy and self sustaining. Among Takers peoples she explains and preserves a lifestyle that has proven to be unhealthy and self-destructive.
Doubtless that any of these people had their own tales to tell of this revolution, their own ways of explaining how these people from the Fertile Crescent came to be the way they are, but only one of these tales survived-the one told be the Semites to their children about the Fall of Adam and the slaughter of Abel by his brother Cain. It survived because the Takers never managed to overrun the Semites, and the Semites refused to take up the agricultural life. Even their eventual Taker descendants, the Hebrews, who preserved the story without fully understanding it, couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for the peasant lifestyle. and this is how it happened that with the spread of Christianity and the Old Testament, the Takers came to adopt as their own a story an enemy once told to denounce them.
One of the clearest indications that these two stories were not authorized by your cultural ancestors is the fact that agriculture is not portrayed as a desirable choice, freely made, but rather as a curse. It was literally inconceivable to the authors of these stories that anyone would prefer to live by the sweat of his brow. So the question they asked themselves was not, “Why did these people adopt this toilsome lifestyle?” It was, “What terrible misdeed did these people commit to deserve such a punishment? What have they done to make the gods withhold from them the bounty that enables the rest of us to live a carefree life?”
Adam in Hebrew, means Man; where Eve means Life
Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won’t be enlightenment, it will be death
Leaver peoples are always conscious of having a tradition that goes back to very ancient times. We have no such consciousness. For the most part, we’re a very “new” people. Every generation is somehow new, more throughly cut off from the past than the one that came before.
The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.
People can’t just give up a story. That’s what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can’t just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in….I don’t think you can start wanting something till you know it exists.
The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man. The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.
The world doesn’t need to belong to man-but it does need man to belong to it.
You can’t change these things with laws. you must change people’s minds
The Leaver lifestyle isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live- and agriculturalist can do that as well as hunter-gatherers. What I’ve been at pains to give you is a new paradigm of human history. The Leaver life is not an antiquated thing that is “back there” somewhere. your task is not to reach back but to reach forward.
I’m afraid it’s a cause to which almost none of humanity will subscribe. White or colored, male or female, what the people of this culture want is to have as much wealth, and power, in the Taker prison as they can get. They don’t give a damn that it’s a prison and they don’t give a damn that it’s destroying the world.