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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

by Parker · 138 things on Twos

Must have an earnest desire to save the world
You don’t need a teacher
It’s hard to turn the world upside down
The sky is bluer and you can dance
Giving up on the world because no one cares and what did you really expect?
He’s looking for secret knowledge
We are brothers. Be nice
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
If you are still, then you will be better able to hear
Tigers ask why why why why why?
We used to be families rather than individuals
Five fingers don’t make a hand
Life in one cage is not like life in any other cage
Feeding times only became a thing when he was in the zoo
Changing your location changes you
Everyone is trying to get attention
Dogs aren’t aware that they have a name
When you understand you have a name you a born in that moment as a person
“Yes, I was right. You are not Goliath. You are Ishmael.”
And once again I was thunderstruck-but this time by a feeling of profound relief, for I had been redeemed from oblivion. More, the error that caused me to live as an unwitting impostor for so many years had been corrected at last. I had been made whole as a person —not again but for the very first time.
Doubtless you will have surmised that all these breathless apperceptions were just so much moonshine. Nonetheless the truth (as I later learned it) was not much less fantastic.
You can speak with your mind
Bad situations can turn out good. He got sad about the name and ended up in a better place
There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
"I failed because I underestimated the diculty of what I was trying to teach— and because I didn't understand the minds of my pupils well enough."
We don’t want to destroy the work but we each contribute daily to the destruction of the world. We don’t stop because we don’t know how.
You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.
You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.
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 will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.
Perhaps you will tell me a story that explains how you come to be here.
You may have any number of moments
I can’t shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that were being lied to about
"Because I've found out that, as a practical matter, it doesn't make any dierence. Whether we're being lied to or not, we still have to get up and go to work and pay the bills and all the rest."
At last—it’s happening in reality and not in a dream!
This is my habitual condition, by choice—or so I tell myself
Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me.
Even so, it could be a dream. One can sleep in a dream, even have dreams in a dream
It was my benefactor who awakened my interest in the subject of captivity and not my own condition
It was not only the Jews who were captives under Hitler. The entire German nation was a captive, including his enthusiastic supporters
Charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them. What he had to tell them was a story
"A story in which the Aryan race and the people of Germany in particular 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, Communists, and Jews. A story in which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Aryan race would burst its bonds, wreak vengeance on its oppressors, purify mankind of its delements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races." "True."
Even if you weren't personally captivated by the story, you were a captive all the same, because the people around you made you a captive. You were like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede.
"I'm telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story."
Ishmael nodded. "That's because there's no need to hear of it. There's no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you're six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And you 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. There's no need to listen to it. It's always there humming away in the background, so there's no need to attend to it at all. In fact, you'll nd—at least initially —that it's hard to attend to it. It's like the humming of a distant motor that never stops; it becomes a sound that's no longer heard at all."
"Belief is not required. 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."
"Yesterday you told me you have the impression of being a captive. You have this impression because there is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world-any place at all. This pressure is exerted in all sorts of ways, on all sorts of levels, but it's exerted most basically this way: Those who refuse to take a place do not get fed."
"A German who couldn't bring himself to take a place in Hitler's story had an option: He could leave Germany. You don't have that option. Anywhere you go in the world, you'll nd the same story being enacted, and if you don't take a place in it you won't get fed."
"Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a reward, being fed. There is no 'something else.’ To step out of this story is to fall to the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.”
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 stu 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. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you're going to nd yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on."
"First, some vocabulary. Let's have some names so we don't have to go on talking about 'the people of your culture' and 'the people of all other cultures.' I've used various names with various pupils, but I'm going to try a new pair with you. You're familiar with the expression 'Take it or leave it.' Using them in this sense, do the words takers and leavers have any heavy connotation for you?"
It’s the journey itself that’s going to change you.
First definition: story. A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.
Second definition: to enact. To enact a story is to live so as to make the story a reality. In other words, to enact a story is to strive to make it come true
Third definition: culture. A culture is a people enacting a story
For the moment all you have to know is that two fundamentally dierent stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One began to be enacted here some two or 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."
"They've been told an explaining story. They've been given an explanation of how things came to be this way, and this stills their alarm. This explanation covers everything, including the deterioration of the ozone layer, the pollution of the oceans, the destruction of the rain forests, and even human extinction —and it satises them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it pacies them. They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their children to cope with."
"I'm talking about living mythology. Not recorded in any book— recorded in the minds of the people of your culture, and being enacted all over the world even as we sit here and speak of it."
“As far as I know, there’s nothing like that in our culture.”
You’re looking for your own cultures creation myth
The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation
The story the people of your culture are enacting is about the meaning of the world, about divine intentions in the world, and about human destiny
Human life is not the meaning of the world
If the world was made for man then it belongs to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
Live at the mercy of the world. Live without having any control over your environment
You need to settle down and have a permanent base from which he could begin to master his environment
The limitations of the hunting-gathering life had kept man in check for three million years. 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 the rise of technology came trade and commerce. 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.
Takers believe the world is a human life support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life
The world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order
The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
We cast ourselves as the enemy of the world
Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world
We have to go on conquering it until our rule is absolute. Then, when we’re in complete control, everything will be fine.
Man was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidity, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.
We can argue about it for a thousand years, but there's never going to be an argument powerful enough to end the argument, because every argument has a counterargument. So it's impossible to know what we should do. That's why we need the prophet. The prophet knows.
The flaw in man is that he doesn’t know how he ought to live
"The people of your culture are in the same condition when it comes to learning how they ought to live. They have to proceed by trial and error, because they don't know the relevant laws— and don't even know that there are laws."
"That's right. Obviously there are made-up laws, like the laws against drug use, but these can be changed by a vote. You can't change the laws of aerodynamics by a vote-and there are no laws like that about how people should live."
Man is not alone on this planet. He is Art of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
The ground is rushing up towards us constantly
The crash could happen anytime
Survivors, if there are any, will immediately set about doing it all over again, exactly the same way
Trial and error isn’t a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization
The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers. The lion that comes across a herd of gazelles doesn't massacre them, as an enemy would. It kills one, not to satisfy its hatred of gazelles but to satisfy its hunger, and once it has made its kill the gazelles are perfectly content to go on grazing with the lion right in their midst.
I didn’t just want a teacher—I wanted a teacher for life
There are four things 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. In the wild, animals will defend their territories and their kills and they will invade their competitors' territories and preempt their kills. Some species even include competitors among their prey, but they never hunt competitors down just to make them dead, the way ranchers and farmers do with coyotes and foxes and crows. What they hunt, they eat."
"It should be noted, however, that animals will also kill in self-defense, or even when they merely feel threat-ened. For example, baboons may attack a leopard that hasn't attacked them. The point to see is that, although baboons will go looking for food, they will never go looking for leopards." "I mean that in the absence of food, baboons will organize themselves to nd a meal, but in the absence of leopards they will never organize themselves to nd a leopard. In other words, it's as you say: when animals go hunting-even extremely aggressive animals like baboons-it's to obtain food, not to exterminate competitors or even animals that prey on them."
"Next, the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. Nothing like this occurs in the natural community. The rule there is: Take what you need, and leave the rest alone."
"Next, the Takers deny their competitors access to food. In the wild, the rule is: You may deny your competitors access to what you're eating, but you may not deny them access to food in gen-eral. In other words, you can say, 'This gazelle is mine,' but you can't say, 'All the gazelles are mine.' The lion defends its kill as its own, but it doesn't defend the herd as its own."
"Again ... Our policy is: Every square foot of this planet belongs to us, so if we put it all under cultivation, then all our competitors are just plain out of luck and will have to become extinct. Our policy is to deny our competitors access to all the food in the world, and that's something no other species does."
"This law that you have so admirably described denes the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war."
"Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself A community of a hundred million species can survive almost anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees-which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all."
We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
"All right. I was assuming you knew the ABC's of ecology. In the natural community, whenever a population's food supply in-creases, that population increases. As that population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in bal-ance."
'Intensication of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population' Peter Farb said it in Humankind."
"We've discovered that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion."
If the will is there, the method will be found.
The American Heritage Book of Indians
No one species shall make the life of the world its own
The world was not made for any one species
The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy ter-ritory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness."
"Among the Leavers, crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are great rarities.
Living close to nature is wonderful got your mental health
It isn’t the tale you tell that counts, it’s the way you actually live
Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to go hungry
Be at peace, for we know how to rule the world, and today is your day to die just as yesterday was your day to live
Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals
Ruling is all about how every single thing you do is good for some but evil for others
We don’t pretend to know which way is right. We just know which way we prefer
Spit out the tree of knowledge and give the rule of the world back to the gods
You can see that these tillers of the soil have no sense of restraint when it comes to expansion. They don't control their population; when there isn't enough food to go around, they just put some more land under cultivation."
Culture is the sum total of everything that makes a people a people
Culture comes into existence by people living
"It's the sum total of what's passed along, of course, not just information and techniques. It's beliefs, assumptions, theories, customs, legends, songs, stories, dances, jokes, superstitions, prejudices, tastes, attitudes. Everything."
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 thoroughly cut o from the past than the one that came before."
"Until Darwin and the paleontologists came along to tack three million years of human life onto your history, it was assumed in your culture that the birth of man and the birth of your culture were simultaneous events-were in fact the same event. What I mean is that the people of your culture thought that man was born one of you.
the Zuñi don't think their way is the way for every-one, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them."
"Back at the beginning, when I said that there was no such thing as certain knowledge about how people ought to live, what I meant was this: Certain knowledge is knowledge of the one right way. That's what we want. That's what Takers want. We don't want to know a way to live that works well. We want to know the one right way. And that's what our prophets give us. And that's what our lawgivers give us. Let me think about this.... After ve or eight thousand years of amnesia, the Takers really didn't know how to live. They really must have turned their backs on the past, because all of a sudden, here comes Hammurabi, and everyone says, 'What are these?' and Hammurabi says, 'These, my children, are laws!' 'Laws? What are laws?' And Hammurabi says, 'Laws are things that tell you the one right way to live.'
After a few thousand years, the descendants of these neolithic farmers were scratching their heads and say-ing, 'Gee, I wonder how people ought to live.' But in that very same time period, the Leavers of the world hadn't forgotten how to live. They still knew, but the people of my culture had forgotten, had cut themselves o from a tradition that told them how to live. They needed a Hammurabi to tell them how to live. They needed a Draco and a Solon and a Moses and a Jesus and a Muhammad. And the Leavers didn't, because they had a way— had a whole bunch of ways
"Every one of the Leavers' ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. No one said, 'Okay, let's form a committee to write up a set of laws for us to follow.' None of these cultures were inventions. But that's what all our lawgivers gave us-inventions. Contriv-ances. Not things that had proved out over thousands of gener-ations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live. And this is still what's going on. The laws they make in Washington aren't put on the books because they work well —they're put on the books because they represent the one right way to live. You may not have an abortion unless the fetus is threatening your life or was put there by a rapist. There are alot of people who'd like to see the law read that way. Why? Because that's the one right way to live. You may drink yourself to death, but if we catch you smoking a marijuana cigarette, it's the slammer for you, baby, because that's the one right way. No one gives a damn about whether our laws work well. Working well is beside the point...
The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people."
Someone who knows what works well for people has wisdom
The whole world of life is food
Not trusting the gods with our lives but trusting ourselves is the human way to live
The gods plant only what you need. You wil plant more than you need.
When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you
We want to take the whole world out of the hands of the gods
Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever oered was when he said, 'Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you're going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don't you think he'll do the same for you?' In our culture the overwhelming answer to that questionis, 'Hell no!'
Any anthropologist will tell you that. Hunter-gatherers are far less anxiety-ridden than you are. They have no jobs to lose. No one can say to them, 'Show me your money or you don't get fed, don't get clothed, don't get sheltered."
The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers are those who live in the hands of gods
Man became man but living in the hands of the gods and evolving
To enact a story is to live so as to make it come true
The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man
The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world
"Then here is a program: The story of Genesis must be reversed. First, Cain must stop murdering Abel. This is essential if you're to survive. The Leavers are the endangered species most critical to the world-not because they're humans but because they alone can show the destroyers of the world that there is no one right way to live. And then, of course, you must spit out the fruit of that forbidden tree. You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet."
"What you do is to teach a hundred what I've taught you, and inspire each of them to teach a hundred. That's how it's always done."
You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ideas and leave a void behind; you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost-something that makes better sense than the old horror of Man Supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't serve his needs directly or indirectly."
You never really know how you’re going to handle a problem until you actually have it
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla? With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?