Summary of Ishmael

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This book is the Winner of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship

The following story is my interpretation of the book by Daniel Quinn. My writing of this summary was an exercise for myself as an aid to understanding the philosophy laid out by Quinn. I also wrote it with hopes that it would spark interest in readers who would not or have not been exposed to the book.

All the ideas presented are the creation of Daniel Quinn. Most of the better written paragraphs are direct quotes. I recommend getting a copy of the book. This is only a summary and the story is much more complete and interesting in entirety. I tried to present the book as accurately as possible but may have failed due to a lack of understanding or a push for brevity.

I recommend this book to anyone with a care for the environment and a desire for growth. For me, it opened my eyes to an entirely different way of looking at human beings, and why they have a responsibility to the planet yet have failed to recognize it. For information on the environment, spelling it out like it really is, go to SALUSTRA.

As with any discussion which may challenge ones beliefs and habits, I recommend that you read this with an open mind. Someone once said, 'A mind is like a parachute, it only works when it is open'. You may not agree with everything in the story; you may not agree with any of it. But, being closed to new ideas offers no value to anyone.

It is useful and sometimes fun to reconstruct the path that made you think the way you think, and be the way you are. The book Ishmael helped me to do this. It was a leap of understanding, and a tickle of the brain.

In the following dialog, the teacher is Ishmael (I), a telepathic gorilla, and the student, is the student (s).

I- My subject is captivity.
s- What does this have to do with saving the world?
Among the people of the world, which want to destroy it?
As far as I know, non of us wants to destroy it.
And yet, you do destroy it, each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. Why don't you stop?
Frankly, we don't know how.
You are captives of a civilization system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.
Yes, that is the way it seems.
So you are captives and have made a captive of the world itself.
I have that impression, but can't explain why..
A few years ago many young people felt the same way and made a disorganized and ingenuous effort to escape, but, they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can't understand what is keeping you in, the will to get out becomes confused and ineffectual. In fact, the world is not going to survive much longer as humanity's captive.

s- I feel that in some small way I am being lied to, but I don't quite know why. I used to feel stronger about this but now I realize that it doesn't make any difference; whether we are being lied to or not, we still have to get to work and pay the bills.
I- Of course, if you alone found out what the lie was, you are right, it wouldn't make any difference. But, if you all suspected you were being lied to, and found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.
True.
Then this is what we must hope for.

I- The people of Germany, during WWII were held captive by a story, a story in which the Aryan race had been deprived of their rightful place in the world, bound, spat upon, raped, and ground into the dirt under the heels of mongrel races.

Of course there were people in Germany who recognized the story as rank mythology, and saw that the people were captivated by a tale which gathered its strength through not only through the ordinary means of propaganda but by an intensive program of education of the young and reeducation of the old. Even if you weren't personally captivated by the story, you were made captive like an animal being swept along in a stampede of others who were willing to give their lives to make it a reality. I am telling you this because like the people of Nazi Germany, the people of your culture are captive to a story. You are unaware of the story because you know it by heart by the time you are six or seven; every Black and White, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian. And you all hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And hearing it incessantly you don't listen to it, as if it were a faint humming in the background. Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way. And this explanation wasn't given to you all at once. You assembled it as a mosaic: from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation.

Once you know this story, you'll hear it everywhere in your culture, and you'll be astonished that the people around you don't hear it as well but merely take it in. The reason you have the impression of being captive is because there is enormous pressure on you to take place in the story your culture is enacting on the world. This pressure is exerted in all sorts of ways but the message is the same: Those who refuse to take a place do not get fed. Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again 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 not 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.

s- That I can stand.
I- If I were to make up two groups of people, the Takers and the Leavers, would it seem like I were setting up one group to the be the bad guys and the other good?
s- No, they sound pretty neutral to me.
Good, so I will call the people of your culture Takers and the people of other cultures Leavers.
Hmm, I have a problem with that. I don't see how you can lump people into groups like that.
But that is what you have done in your culture except that you have used a pair of heavily loaded terms instead of these relatively neutral terms. You call yourselves civilized and all the rest primitive.

s- I still don't know what the story is.
I- You will. Don't fret about it. For the moment all you have to know is that two fundamentally different stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One began being enacted here some two to three million years ago by the people we've agreed to call Leavers and is still being enacted by them today, as successfully as ever. The other began to be enacted here some ten or twelve thousand years ago by the people we've agreed to call Takers, and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.

s- I hear people talking about the end of the world and they are no more excited then if they were talking about laundry detergent. People talk about the destruction of the ozone layer, devastation of the rain forests, about deadly pollutions that will be with us for millions of years, and about the loss of dozens of species of life every day. Why aren't people more excited?
Because they have been given an explanation which covers the pollution of the ocean, the extinction of the thousands of species and more. And it satisfies them, or rather, it pacifies them. They put their shoulders to the grindstone by day and stupefy themselves with television or drugs by night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving for their children to cope with. You yourself were given the same explanation of how things came to be this way as everyone else, but it apparently doesn't satisfy you. Somehow you feel as if you have been lied to.

I- I'm talking about your culture's mythology.
s- Mythology? As far as I know we don't have a mythology.
I'm talking about living mythology. Not one recorded in any book; it is in the minds of the people and enacted all over the world. You are not aware of anything like that in your culture because you think of mythology as a set of fanciful tales. If you went up to a man of Homeric Greece and asked him about what fanciful tales he tells his children about gods and heroes of the past, he wouldn't know what you were talking about. He'd say 'As far as I know there is nothing like that in our culture.'
What is your creation myth?
We don't have a creation myth, unless you are talking about the one in Genesis.
If you were invited by an eighth grade teacher to explain how all this began, would you read the class the first chapter of Genesis?
No.
What would you tell them?
I would give them a factual account.
And, naturally, you wouldn't consider it a myth. No creation story is a myth to the people who tell it. It's just the story. So tell me the story in your culture of how this all began.
Ok, here's the story. Parts of it are in question I suppose, and future research might make some revisions on it, but it is certainly not a myth.

Ten or fifteen billion years ago, the universe was created with a big bang, or something. Blobs of material coagulated and cooled and biological organisms appeared in our ancient oceans three and a half billion years ago. They formed into more complex forms until mammals appeared, about a quarter billion years ago. Species followed species until man finally appeared about three million years ago.

That is a myth.
That is not myth, and I don't think that many people would disagree with me that this is indeed how things came to be.
I agree that you could find much support for your account, but did I not say that the story is ambient in your culture? There are indeed facts embedded in your story, but, the arrangement of these facts is purely mythical.
Is it because I used the word, "appeared"?
No, it is evident from the context that this is just a synonym for "evolved". Maybe this will help, let me tell you a story.

Imagine that you are an anthropologist wandering about on a shore a half billion years ago. There is not much to see, just dirt and water. You notice a blob floating out in the water; you wade out to it and see that it is a creature. You strike up a conversation and soon are chatting away. As an anthropologist you ask the creature about some of the stories they tell amongst themselves, such as their creation myth. The creature says they have no creation myth, just a factual account of creation. You then ask for a scientific explanation and find out that things began ten or fifteen years ago but life didn't appear until about three and a half billion years ago. Things went along for a while, and then jellyfish appeared!

So what's the point; what does that mean, 'jelly fish appeared'?
It means that is what it all lead up to, the creation of jelly fish. Why doesn't your account end with jelly fish?
Because, more happened after that.
But it does end with man?
Yes.
When man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.
That seems to be the unspoken assumption.
It's certainly not always unspoken. The religions of your culture aren't reticent about it. Man is the end product of creation. Man is the creature for whom all the rest was made: this world, this solar system, this galaxy, the universe itself.
Yes
And this is not mythology?

I-As you tell it, the birth of man was a central event indeed the central event in the history of the cosmos itself. From the birth of man on, the rest of the universe ceases to be of interest, ceases to participate in the unfolding drama. For this, the earth alone is sufficient; it is the birthplace and home of man, and that's its meaning. The Takers regard the world as some sort of human life-support system, as a machine designed to produce and sustain human life. And, in the telling of your story, you naturally left out any mention of the gods, because you didn't want it to be tainted with mythology. Obviously since the entire universe was made so that man could be made, man must be a creature of enormous importance to the gods. But this part of the story gives no hint of their intentions toward him. They must have some special destiny in mind for him, but that is not revealed here. Tell me, what is the premise of this story?
That the world was made for man.
And as such?
That the world belongs to man and we can do what we damn well please with it.
Exactly. That is what has been happening here for the past ten thousand years. You have been doing what you damn well please with it.
And, you hear this fifty times a day, people talking about OUR oceans, OUR environment, OUR wildlife. Not as if it relates to us but as if it is our possession; our birthright!

I-I want you to tell me the middle of the story.
s- Ok. The world was made for man, but it took him a long, long time to figure that out. For nearly three million years he lived as though the world was made for jellyfish.
What do you mean?
I mean that man lived as if he were no better than any other creature. He lived at the mercy of the world, without having any control over the environment. This was a problem for him because in this condition, man could not truly be man. He needed to develop, and in order to develop he needed to stay in one place. This was not possible without first devising some way to not run out of food. Thus was born agriculture. With agriculture, man was finally released from the constrains of the hunter-gatherer way of life and could make some real progress.
And from this part of the story what can we say about man's purpose?
We can say that man's destiny was to live a life better than a jellyfish. We can say that man's destiny was to accomplish great things.
It is more than that. What does the myth tells us? Imagine yourself on the earth several thousand years ago.
Uh, I would rather not. It's dangerous down there; its a jungle.
And, without man, the world was unfinished, was just nature, red in tooth and claw. It was in chaos, in a state of primeval anarchy. So, the story goes: the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it, to fix it and put it in order.

I-The world defied man. Storms tore at his dwellings, jungles grew in his fields, animals and insects bit at him and ate his food. The world would not submit to man's rule, so man had to conquer it.
s-Man conquering nature is something else that you hear fifty times a day.
As the Takers see it: man had a destiny and he had to fulfill this destiny. The gods gave man a choice, a brief life of glory, or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.
And we just shrug and say, 'destruction of the world is the price that we must pay to have indoor plumbing and automobiles'.
Yes, and what I am saying is that the price you've paid is not the price to become human. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world."

s-Man's destiny was to conquer the world, and he has, almost. The problem is that man's conquest of the world, has itself devastated the world. Its hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse. Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world until our rule over it becomes absolute. Then when we are in complete control, everything will be fine. We will have fusion power, feed the population using a square centimeter of land per person and control the weather in any way we like. We will manipulate the environment the way a programmer manipulates a computer. And if we manage to do this, if we finally manage to make ourselves the absolute rulers of the world then nothing can stop us. Then we move into the Star Trek era. Man moves to outer space to conquer and rule the entire universe. And that may be the ultimate destiny of man: to conquer and rule the entire universe. That is how wonderful man is.
I-And, if you had been telling this story only one hundred years ago, you would have been telling only of the paradise to come, and not of how we will reconstruct the damage to the world on our way to this paradise. The story as we know so far is: The world was made for man to conquer and rule, and under human rule it was meant to become a paradise.....but. It has always been followed by a 'but'. Because, the Takers have always perceived that the world was far short of the paradise it was meant to be.

And, the story has an explanation of why the conquest of the world has resulted in destruction. Man was bound to screw it up; there is something fundamentally wrong with man. Man was destined to turn the world into paradise but tragically he was born flawed and so the paradise has always been spoiled by greed and shortsightedness. And yet, the conclusion that man is flawed is based on his taking evidence from only recent history, a small portion of his actual history. I propose to you that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

I-One of the most striking features of the Taker culture is its passionate and unwavering dependence on prophets. There is no tradition whatever of prophets rising up among the Leavers to straighten out their lives and give them new sets of laws or principles to live by. Why this dependence on prophets? Why do you need prophets to tell you how to live?
s-We need the prophets to tell us how to live because otherwise we wouldn't know.
Questions about how life is supposed to be lived ultimately become religious questions amongst Takers. And they find the answers to these questions worth dying for. Take the question of legalization of drugs and abortion, for example. Why do you need the prophets, why don't you know the answers yourself?
Because Mother Culture tells us that we can find out certain answers to things like atoms, but not answers about how we should live. No matter what we decide to do about legalizing drugs we will never be sure if it was the right thing to do. The knowledge of how to live is just not out there.
Are you sure? Have you looked? Finding the answers to matters of how man ought to live is one of the biggest problems facing him. Does it not seem strange to you, no one is looking? You'd think there would be a whole branch of science devoted to it.
But we know the answer is not there.
In advance of looking you mean?

I-So we know two more things about the how the Taker culture sees things. For one thing, man is fundamentally flawed, and for another, he doesn't know how to live. If man knew how to live, then he would know how to handle human nature. Could it be that the only flaw in man is that he doesn't know how he ought to live? The story so far states that the world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he is bound to screw it up because he is fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live but he doesn't, so, however he might labor to try and fix things he will fail. It's a sorry story you have there, a story of hopelessness and futility, a story in which there is literally nothing to be done. Mankind rushing helplessly into oblivion.
s-Yes that is the way is seems.
No wonder so many of you go mad or become suicidal.
Is there another story, another way of seeing things?
Yes, there is another story to be in, but the Takers are doing their best to destroy that along with everything else.

I-We confront a wall at the boundary of thought in your culture. This wall is an axiom stating that certain knowledge about how people ought to live is unobtainable. I reject this axiom and climb over the wall. You don't need prophets to tell you how to live; you can find out for yourselves by consulting what's actually there. A century ago, man was in the same situation with regard to learning how to fly. He had no certain knowledge about how to fly, just a number of theories. He could argue those theories to his hearts content at the time because there was no certain knowledge about any of them. Without knowledge of a law which described what always happens when air flows around a wing, they had to proceed with trial and error; just as they are proceeding with trial and error around how they should live. They pass laws, but these are not true laws, they can be changed with a vote. The law which describes how air behaves when it flows across a wing cannot be changed just as the laws about how life should be lived cannot be changed.

I-Where do you think we should look for the laws regarding how humans should live?
s-In human behavior I suppose.
Only human behavior? I have news for you. Man is not alone on this planet, he is part of a community upon which he depends absolutely. Have you ever had any suspicions to this effect?
Yes.
What's the name of this community of which man is only one member?
The community of life.
And can the answer to how man ought to live, be found by looking in this community?
No, because Mother Culture says that we are far above the rest of the community and if there were such an answer it wouldn't apply to us.
And can you think of any laws that effect the rest of the community but from which you are exempt?
Such as?
The law of gravity? The law of genetics? The law of aerodynamics? The law of Thermodynamics?
No. But the laws of how a turtle ought to live surely don't concern us.
Did the laws of aerodynamics concern you thousands of years ago?
No.
When did they become relevant?
When we wanted to fly.
And when you are on the brink of extinction and want to live for a while longer, the laws governing life might conceivably become relevant.

I-When Newton discovered the law of gravity, was anyone astonished?
s-No.
This is because he did not discover the phenomenon of gravity, everyone was aware of its effects; he simply made it a law. In the same way, nothing you discover about life is going to astound anyone. My goal here is similar; to formulate a law about how to live life.

Would you say that the law of gravity is about flight?

I would say that it affects rocks and airplanes in the same way.
Good. The law we are looking for describes a phenomenon which effects flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between humankind and beehives. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception.

I- The gods have played three dirty tricks on the Takers. The first was not putting the world at the center of the universe. The Takers really hated hearing this. The second was evolving man out of the slime like the rest of the life on earth. The Takers hated hearing this even more. But, to these things they have learned to adjust. Even if man was not the center of the universe and came from the slime it was still his destiny to rule the universe. No adjustment will be possible for the third law. The law which is applicable to both mankind and the rest of life alike.

The effects of the law are simple: species that follow the law will live forever, environmental conditions permitting. This should be good news for man, for if he follows the law, he too will live forever. If he does not, he will assuredly become extinct.

I-The law we are looking for is like the law of gravity. It is always in effect. We cannot escape it. We can understand it, and in conjuction with other laws we can learn to live with its effect.

By understanding the laws of aerodynamics we learned to fly in spite of the law of gravity. By understanding this third law, we can build a civilization that will work. Imagine a man learning to fly, he builds a contraption and pushes it over the side of a cliff. On the way down he might say 'Look I am flying!', not realizing that his craft in no way utilizing the laws of aerodynamics. Since his demise is a long way off, if it were a high enough cliff, he might say 'So far, so good'. As the ground rushes toward him he might be slightly alarmed and pedal harder, but he would have faith in his craft that has taken him this far without so much as a scratch or a bruise. What he doesn't realize is that the craft is unsuitable for flight, and his efforts to pedal it are futile, yet he believes that with more effort he will be fine.

Ten thousand years ago, man embarked on a "civilization flight" in a craft that wasn't designed according to anything at all. At first it was terrific; the Takers were pedaling away, pleased with themselves to have been freed from the constraints of the laws of biology. They couldn't have known that they were in the air, but not in flight. They see and wonder at the remains of crafts that were abandoned by the likes of the Mayans or the Anasazi and wonder, but are content to be airborne, oblivious to the fact that they are bound by the law of the community of life. Unfortunately, ignorance of the law affords no protection from its affects and they will be in trouble in the not to distant future. Man used to say, 'If we only pedal a little bit harder and more efficiently, we will be ok'. But pedaling harder only increases the destruction. And, such simple answers are not enough to reassure the people of your culture nowadays. Everybody is looking down, and it's obvious that the ground is rushing up faster and faster every year.

I-Suppose you come across a society that you have never heard of before. The people are friendly, cheerful, healthy, prosperous, vigorous, peaceable, and well educated. Their kind has survived for three million years. You ask them how they can manage and they tell you that they all have a law, and they follow it invariably. You need to find out what the law is. You cannot ask directly. You have to find out by observation. How would you go about it?
s-I would have two things that I would need to observe. The first is to see what they never do; and the second is to see what the people who are punished do that the others never do.
Very good. I will tell you more about these people. The Takers draw back from this community thinking it to be a culture of lawless chaos, and savage relentless competition where every creature lives in terror of its life. But those that live in the community do not see it as such a place and would fight to the death rather than be separated from it. It is in fact an orderly community. One in which plants are eaten by the plant eaters who are in turn eaten by the predators who are then eaten by other predators. Scavengers get the rest. The animals return to the earth the nutrients which enrich the earth for the plants. The plant eaters don't eat the plants out of hate. And the predators don't eat the plant eaters because they are at war with them. They eat because they are hungry and stop when they are satisfied. And all of this comes about because there is a law that is followed invariably within the community. Without it the community would indeed become complete chaos and disintegrate rapidly. Man owes his very existence to this law. It is a law that protects not only the community as a whole but entire species right on down to the individual. It is a peace-keeping law that has been followed by every species...up until about ten thousand years ago when the family of Homo sapiens sapiens said, 'Man is exempt from this law'. And now that man has brought the entire world to the point of death, the Takers explain that the problem is not that man might be doing something wrong, but that there is something fundamentally wrong with human nature itself.

About the time that the Takers came in and started kicking everything to pieces, the Leavers were trying to figure out a way to achieve settlement that is in accord with the law that they had been following for three billion years. They proceeded by trial and error, and had the sense to abandon civilizational crafts that they knew wouldn't fly. They understood there was no hurry, and that they didn't have to get into the air. There was no sense in committing themselves to disaster the way that the Takers have.

So your task, knowing about this society and how is operates, and knowing that there is a law that they follow invariably, is to tell me that law. It is a fundamental law. It is the true explanation of how things got to be this way. If this law had not been followed for the last three million years, the world would still be dust and chaos. And now, after five hundred generations, man is about to pay the penalty that any other species would pay after living contrary to this law.

s-I have an answer. I think I understand why you had me figure it out myself. If you had just told what the Takers do that is never done in the natural community, I probably would have just said 'Yeah, so what?'. As I make it out, there are three things that the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community, and these are all fundamental to their civilizational system. First, they exterminate their competitors, which is something that never happens in the wild.
I-And how can you be sure that this is not something that the rest of the community does?
Well, if this had been going on since the beginning of time, there would only be one species left by now, the strongest.
Go on.
Secondly, the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food supply to make room for their own. In the natural community, the law is: take what you need and leave the rest alone. Third, the Takers deny their competitors access to food. Since every square foot of this planet is ours, we claim it and put it all to use to make food for ourselves, then our competitors are just plain out of luck.
So, the law, what might it entail?
You may compete with other species, but you cannot wage war on them. If species had been waging war on each other for the last three billion years there would probably be only a few hundred species left at the various levels of competition.
And what is the difference between what the community is like now and what you described it could be like? What does following the law promote?
Diversity.
And what is so great about that?
I would think that a community of few species would be very fragile. Diversity is a survival factor for the whole community itself. Within a community of millions there will always be thousands that will be able to survive the conditions of some calamity.
And every day, dozens of species are eliminated as a direct result of the way the Takers compete outside the law. We are destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

I-In the natural community, whenever a population's food supply increases, so does its number, and visa versa. If you wanted to increase your number what would you do?
s-Kill off whatever else is eating your food.
Right, and this is considered holy work by the Takers. Kill off everything but your food supply and your food supply's food supply. You end up with a community in which every other species is systematically exterminated in order to support the expansion of your own. You also end up constantly worried about how to feed an ever expanding population.

I-What does Mother Culture say about this?
s-Mother Culture says that it is possible to increase the food production without increasing the population.
And why increase food production?
To feed the starving millions.
And if you feed the starving millions?
Then they will reproduce and increase the population.
Is this a problem? What does Mother Culture have to say about this?
Mother Culture says it is not a problem, because if it becomes a problem we will just resort to birth control. But despite all the ads urging us to send food to others who are starving, there are precious few that suggest that we send birth control devices.

As long as man is acting out a story which says that the world belongs to him, living that story will mean increased food production for today and population control tomorrow. Only tomorrow never comes.

But shouldn't we attempt to eliminate famine?
Famine is not a phenomenon unique to humans. All species are subject to it, everywhere in the world. And, when a species runs out of food, its population decreases until the current food supply is enough to support it. Man says that he is exempt from this law; when he sees a community that is suffering from lack of resources, he rushes in with resources from the outside; thus ensuring that there will be more people to starve in the next generation. Man in First world countries exercises his philanthropy by maintaining millions in Third world countries in a state of chronic starvation.

I-So we have discovered a law by which the community of life must live in order to avoid extinction.
s-Still, people won't accept it.
Let's be clear about what the people will and will not accept. The law itself is beyond argument, clearly in place amongst the community of life. What the Takers will deny is that it applies to humankind. Mankind has to see that they are effected by this biological law.
I don't think they will do that.
Then the law will make them see. If they refuse to live under the law, then they simply won't live. You might say that this is one of the law's basic operations: Those who threaten the stability of the community by defying the law automatically eliminate themselves.

Luckily I think that people want to hear something new.

I-So tell me another way to phrase the law.
s-The world was not made for any one species.
And...
Mankind was not needed to bring order into the world, it was in fine shape before we began to mess with it.
The people of the world cling with fanatic tenacity to the specialness of man. They want desperately to perceive a vast gulf between man and rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies their doing whatever they want, just the way Hitler's mythology about Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe.

I-Among the Leavers, crime, mental illness, suicide and drug addiction are great rarities. What does Mother Culture say about this?
s-Mother Culture says that this is the price of civilization.
The story that the Leavers have been enacting here for the past three million years isn't a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn't give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them. They're not seething with discontent and rebellion, not incessantly wrangling over what should be allowed and what forbidden, not forever accusing each other of not living the right way, not living in terror of each other, not going crazy because their lives seem empty and pointless, not having to stupefy themselves with drugs to get through the days, not inventing a new religion every week to give them something to hold onto, not forever searching for something to do or something to believe in to make their lives worth living. And I repeat: This is not because they live close to nature or have no formal government or because they are innately noble. This is simply because they are enacting a story that works well for people a story that worked well for three million years and still works well where the Takers haven't yet managed to stamp it out.

I-There is a very special knowledge that you must have if you are to rule the world. The Leavers lack this knowledge, and the Takers are very surprised at this because they believe the knowledge to be self evident. Who else has this knowledge?
s-The gods.
Yes, and I will tell you a story about how the gods came to have this knowledge. The gods one day were contemplating sending a cloud of locusts down upon a great plain so that the locusts could feast on the vegetation and the lizards and birds could flourish by feasting on the locusts. They then thought that this might not be such a great idea since then the animals which ordinarily feasted on the plants might suffer. This presented a problem because whichever way they went, they would be favoring one species over another. While they were debating they saw a fox and decided to send a quail for the fox to eat. But then they thought that it would be a crime to make the quail suffer. As they turned this over they saw that the quail was about to eat a grasshopper and they began to fret about whether they should spare the grasshoppers life by sending the quail to the fox. This was a great puzzle; if they acted then they would inflict evil on some and good on others, yet the same would occur if they did not act. Finally they perked up and remembered that at one time they had made a garden that contained the fruit of good and evil. They went to the garden and ate of the fruit and their eyes were opened. So they then went about and decided one day to spare the fox and another to spare the quail. They decided that this was great knowledge, for it was the knowledge of who should live and who should die. Then along came Adam. They discussed whether they should allow Adam to partake of the fruit. They knew that the fruit would not give Adam the knowledge of good and evil because the fruit only nourished the gods. Their main concern was that after he ate the fruit, Adam would then have the misperception that he had the knowledge of good and evil since he had eaten of the fruit of the gods. The gods surmised that if Adam ate the fruit he might begin to rationalize that whatever he could justify doing was good and whatever he could not justify doing was evil. In so doing they felt that he might attempt to consume all within the garden until he might finally consume himself in an effort to grow without limits. He would feel that he had a right to do this because having eaten of the fruit he was the equal of the gods and as such was not subject to limitations of growth and what he had a right to consume. In fact he might ultimately decide that no matter what calamity might become him, to grow without bounds was a good thing and to be limited was a bad thing. And he might say to the people as they suffered in the filth that resulted, 'Your suffering must be borne, for we suffer in the name of good, see how great we have become? Isn't it sweeter to live in our own hands than in the hands of the gods?'

Once the gods had reasoned all of this out, they decided to discourage Adam from eating of the fruit. They told him that he could partake of all in the garden, but that if he ate of the fruit, he would die.

Do you understand why the Takers could never understand why the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to man? After all, this knowledge is what man needs to fulfill his destiny. But there is nothing in the Bible about why the fruit was forbidden. The Takers have never been able to understand the reason why the knowledge is withheld from them.

In fact, it was just ten thousand years ago when the Takers assumed the responsibility of the gods over the world and decided that they were the ones with power over life and death. The story of Adam, was written by the Leavers and is called, The Fall of Man. If it had been written by the Takers it would then be called, The Ascent of Man. Man's primary difficulty is in giving up all that knowledge. Unlike Leavers which abandon ways of life which seem difficult and troublesome, the Takers will cling to their way of life until it destroys them. To give up their way of living is to admit that what they have been doing all along is the wrong thing.

I-How do you think the people who wrote the stories in the Bible knew that the Takers had usurped the role of the gods, that they had eaten of the fruit and thought that they had the knowledge of good and evil?
s-I really have no idea.
Read chapter 4.
Cain is killing Abel. That is, the Takers are killing the Leavers so that they have more land for expansion. The Leavers of the time were the Semites and they were eyewitness to the whole thing, the expansion of the Takers, everything. Most Biblical scholars don't understand this because they interpret this part of the Bible as if it takes place in some sort of mythical never-never land when in truth it actually took place in the Fertile Crescent. They also think that the Bible was written by people who think like them rather than the Leavers who see the world in an entirely different way.
Ok. So again; how did the Leavers know that the Takers thought they had the knowledge of good and evil?
The Leavers at the time looked at the people they were fighting and said, 'What is wrong with these people, they are not just trying to protect their own territory, they intend to kill us all. They will not allow any of us to live! In fact they do not want anything to live, they want to kill all of the animals as well except for the ones that they want to eat. They want to kill everything. They are acting as if they are the gods themselves.' And so the authors of Bible do not portray agriculture as a bounty bestowed by the gods, a fantastic advancement in technology or a prelude to the ascent of man, but rather as a curse as the Takers were cast from the Garden of Eden to a doomed life of toil in the fields, the lot of the fallen from grace.

s-So how does Eve figure into the story?
I-Eve in Hebrew means Life. The Takers were tempted by life, growth without limit. Of the Leavers one of the most critical issues facing them was overpopulation. Given that one hundred men and one woman only makes one baby but one hundred women and one man means one hundred babies, it can be seen that a balance among the sexes in those times was critical to controlling the population. The Leavers who wrote the Bible saw that the Takers cared not for the balance of their population and as they expanded they merely cultivated more fields around them to support that population.

Whenever a couple nowadays decides to have a big family they are playing out the story of the Takers. They are saying, 'It is fine for us to have as many children as we please, it is our right. We will just plow under another few acres of the Rainforest to feed them and who cares if another dozen or so species dies?'

I-What we see from all of this is that the story that is told about Adam and the Fall of Man does not really mean what it is commonly understood to mean. It is really the story of the agricultural revolution as told by some of the early victims of that revolution. It tells us that anyone who runs about behaving as if they have the knowledge of good and evil is not bringing about glory but his own death and others

I-How is knowledge past on?
s-I would say that it is accumulated. Each generation takes what the generation before it gave them and then adds to it.
And what would you say is one big difference between how the Takers pass on knowledge and how the Leavers pass on knowledge?
The Leavers will pass on accumulated knowledge in whatever form that it comes to them. Leavers are always conscious of having traditions that go back thousands of years. Takers have no such consciousness. We get rid of old ways of life as each generation passes. We become more cut off from the past each time we decide what the right way for man to live is. And Mother Culture tells us that this is a good thing, that the past is worthless and to be rejected.
This is how you became to be cultural amnesiacs.

I-There is one bit of knowledge that Mother Culture tells you to save. What is that?
s-I would say, anything to do with production. Of course, the Leavers have knowledge of production although they don't put it to use fashioning periodic quotas of arrowheads or cooking pots.
Yes but what is the characteristic of this information that the Leavers save that is so different from the information that the Takers save?
The Leavers will always teach their children what works well. The Takers are continually working on this knowledge; it changes with every generation. The lessons that each generation receives from the past generation tend to be fairly useless. In fact, we are currently working on our own version of what the right way to live is and it will probably be useless to our own children. The Leavers are developing knowledge of how to live from a chain which extends back to the beginning of man. Each piece of knowledge is built upon the last and tested over thousands of generations.

Another difference is that the Leavers are searching for what works well all around. The Takers have this need to find the one right way. In this quest to find the one right way they invent laws out of the blue and say, this is the one right way, they don't even give a damn if the laws don't work. They listen to their prophets who say what is the one right way, and then they bicker amongst each other about who has the one right way.

Lets also phrase this another way and explain why these differences arise. The Takers are accumulating knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers are accumulating knowledge about what works well for people, and not all people, just some of the people. Each Leaver has a set of laws that works well for them because it evolved among them, helping them to live with the environment they have. And ultimately, every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver population they are stamping out a wisdom that has been tested since the beginning of time, just as when for instance, they are stamping out a type of bird, a species that has evolved and been tested for millions of years.

Ugly.

s-Tell me more about the story that the Leavers are enacting.
I-Why do you want to know?
Why wouldn't I.
That's not a good enough reason for me to tell you. Why is it useful for you to know the story that the Takers are living?
Well, because it is destroying the planet. We need to know what that story is so that we can stop enacting it.
And how do you stop enacting a story?
Unless we have another story to enact it is impossible to stop enacting our current story. So we need another one to adopt.

I-What kind of event was the agricultural revolution?
s-It was a technological event.
Any implications about deeper human resonances, cultural or religious?
No, I don't think so.
Well there is a great deal more to it than what Mother Culture teaches you. Mother Culture teaches that before the revolution man's existence was devoid of meaning, stupid and worthless. Do you believe that?
Yes, I suppose I do.
Who would be the exceptions?
People who have some knowledge of that life. Although, Mother Culture teaches us that life was unspeakably miserable.
Can you think of any circumstances under which you would trade your life for that kind of life?
No.
The Leavers would. The Takers have found that the only way to tear the Leavers from their roots is by brute force and slaughter. The Takers feel that the Leavers just don't know what they are missing.

I-Why was the agricultural revolution necessary?
s-It was necessary if man were to get somewhere.
You mean have central heating and universities?
Yes.
I want a deeper answer. For millions of you today, things like central heating and universities are remote possibilities. To people who are homeless or live in squalor and despair in slums, prisons, or public institutions not much better than prisons, your facile justifications for the revolution are meaningless. Yet, do you think that they would give it all up to live in pre-evolutionary times?
I don't think so. We seem to believe in our way of life even if we don't enjoy any of its benefits.
And why is that?
Because we are taught that in ancient times man was constantly scrambling along in the twilight, desperate for food and terrified that he himself would become food. Forever trying to stay alive.
But do you think that was the extent of his existence?
Actually no. At first my gut reaction is to imagine that, but I realize that the intelligence and dexterity of man along with his immensely omnivorous dietary range put him at the top of the heap in terms of ease of survival. In fact hunter-gatherers were among the best fed people on earth, needing only two to three hours a day to feed themselves. The rest is just leisure time.
So, does it still seem so repugnant a way of life to you?
Yes it does. It seems as if they were living like animals.
And what is wrong with that.
Well it is not right for humans to live like animals. For one thing, we would have no control over our food supply.
And don't Takers ever run out of food?
No, when we want food we just go to the store and buy it.
And how many people worked to put that food on the shelf?
Hundreds: there were growers and packers and truckers and cleaners...
That sounds crazy, going to all that inconvenience for the all that convenience.
The convenience isn't the point, the point is that we don't have to live at the mercy of the world. We can always eat what we want to eat when we want to eat it. We don't have to live at the mercy of the gods, that is not the human way to live. Besides, what happens to the Leavers when the food supply which they have no control over, withers up and is not more?
Then they to will whither up and die.
Ha! That is the point.
It is shameful to die?
No but man should know better than to die at the hands of the gods. The human way to live is to trust only yourself with your life.
But for the Leaver, life was good. In the hands of the gods, all of the work of producing food was done for them by the gods.
But they were naked and hopeless, without security, without comfort, without opportunity. In the hands of the gods they were no more important than any other animal. The gods only provided for man to live like an animal. For man to live like a man he has to provide that for himself.
So there is something that man needs that the gods don't give to him?
Yes, if man has control over his own environment then he is no longer at the mercy of the gods. He can control the environment, stockpile food. With control over his own life, man can thwart the gods.

I-So your lives are in your own hands?
s-Yes.
Then what are you worried about? Everything is under control, you have the power to say whether the world becomes a paradise or suffers an environmental collapse.
Well not quite. We are still working at it. We will only be safe when the whole world is in our competent hands. When the gods have no power over anything.

s-Far and away the most futile admonition that Christ offered us was to say, 'Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you are going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don't you think he will do the same for you.' In our culture the answer is a resounding, 'NO!'

I-So we have more to add to the names of man. The Takers are the ones who know good and evil. The Leavers are the ones who live in the hands of the gods. What happens to people who live in the hands of the gods that does not happen to people who live by the knowledge of good and evil?
I'm afraid that I don't know.
Let's ask this. Did Australopithecus become Homo sapiens sapiens by knowing difference between good and evil?
No, because if they had that knowledge they would have ceased to be under the conditions that allows evolution to take place. So the answer to what happens to people who live in the hands of the gods is that they evolve.
So, how did man become man?
He evolved.
And now what are the Takers doing?
We have put an end to evolution.
In the Bible creation ends with the beginning of man. And that is the story that man lives by, for certainly if he continues to live the way that he is living, creation will indeed cease.

I-We can add more description to the stories that the two peoples are enacting. The premise of the Taker story is that the world belongs to man, the gods made the world for man, but the gods botched the job, so man has to take matters into their own more competent hands.

The premise to the Leaver story is that man belongs to the world, the gods made man for the world, the same way that god made everything else for the world, and this seems to have worked out ok, so they can take it easy and leave the running of world in the hands of the gods.

s-I have been thinking about divine intervention and such and have come to some thoughts about what God has meant for the world; really. It seems that what God wants for us, the living community, is an increase in intelligence and complexity, and, by the living community I am saying it has meaning for every creature on the planet. And there is a distinct purpose for man. His destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try and thwart the gods and perish in the attempt or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But its more than that. His destiny is to be the Father of them all. By giving all the rest their chance; the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons he becomes in some sense their progenitor.

Oddly enough its even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. The world is a fine place and in fine shape, it does not need to be ruled by or conquered by man. A way of putting it is that, the world does not need to belong to man, but it does need man to belong to it. I think this is a good way to look at it. Man doesn't need a vision of doom to get him motivated. He needs a vision of the world and of himself which is positive and inspiring.

I-You have now reached a point that all of my previous pupils have reached. You have come to a realization of a positive vision of man's role and future on earth. But you also will say, 'So what, no one is going to change.' But, unlike my other pupils you are of a more recent time. You have seen man changing slowly. Years ago the fall of the Berlin wall was unthinkable and now there is an entire unification of Europe. Yes, we can see that change in other ways just might be possible.
s-So what do I do now?
Well, first the story must be reversed. Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you are to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world, they are the ones that can show us that there is not one right way to live. You must also spit out the apple and relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.

I-I have one last point. In prison, the inmates are a very differentiated lot, much like the rest of world. There are the poor and the rich and the rich live much better than the poor in the respect that they can get more drugs, food, sex and comfort. The world has become a prison. Man has made it a prison full of Takers but with a handful of Leavers intermingled. These Leavers were given a choice: to accept imprisonment or be exterminated. Most of these Leavers have not adapted well to imprisonment.

Naturally a well run prison must have an industry. What do you think that industry is?

s-Consuming the world.
Exactly.

WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?

WITH GORILLA GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?

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