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‘The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past.’
Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
My subject is: captivity.”
“Because I’ve found out that, as a practical matter, it doesn’t make any difference. 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.”
I stared at him balefully. “We have no creation myth,” I said. “That’s a certainty.”
“So: Without man, the world was unfinished, was just nature, red in tooth and claw. It was in chaos, in a state of primeval anarchy.” “That’s right. That’s it exactly.” “So it needed what?” “It needed someone to come in and…straighten it out. Someone to put it in order.” “And what sort of person is it who straightens things out? What sort of person takes anarchy in hand and puts it in order?” “Well…a ruler. A king.” “Of course. The world needed a ruler. It needed man.” “Yes.” “So now we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.”
“No, the world defied him. What man built up, the wind and rain tore down. The fields he cleared for his crops and his villages, the jungle fought to reclaim. The seeds he sowed, the birds snatched away. The shoots he nurtured, the insects nibbled. The harvest he stored, the mice plundered. The animals he bred and fed, the wolves and foxes stole away. The mountains, the rivers, and the oceans stood in their places and would not make way for him. The earthquake, the flood, the hurricane, the blizzard, and the drought would not disappear at his command.”
“If the king comes to a city that will not submit to his rule, what does he have to do?” “He has to conquer it.”
“In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.”
And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought.
It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children. “Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world.
“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 out into 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’s how wonderful man is.”
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.”
Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn’t know how he ought to live.”
“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. Man is flawed, so he keeps on screwing up what should be paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t know how to live so as to stop screwing up paradise, and there’s nothing you can do about that. So there you are, rushing headlong toward catastrophe, and all you can do is watch it come.”
“With nothing but this wretched story to enact, it’s no wonder so many of you spend your lives stoned on drugs or booze or television. It’s no wonder so many of you go mad or become suicidal.”
“The gods have played three dirty tricks on the Takers,” he began. “In the first place, they didn’t put the world where the Takers thought it belonged, in the center of the universe.
“The second of the gods’ tricks was worse. Since man was the climax of creation, the creature for whom all the rest was made, they should have had the decency to produce him in a manner suited to his dignity and importance—in a separate, special act of creation. Instead they arranged for him to evolve from the common slime, just like ticks and liver flukes. The Takers really hated hearing this, but they’re beginning to adjust to it.
“But the last of the gods’ tricks was the worst of all. Though the Takers don’t know it yet, the gods did not exempt man from the law
Peter Farb calls it a paradox: ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’
And so they built a civilization that flouts the law at every point, and within five hundred generations—in an eye-blink in the scale of biological time—this branch of the family of Homo sapiens sapiens saw that they had brought the entire world to the point of death.
First, they exterminate their competitors, which is something that never happens in the wild.
“Next, the Takers systematically destroy their competitors’ food to make room for their own.
Take what you need, and leave the rest alone.”
“Next, the Takers deny their competitors ...
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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.”
“I suppose the community I’ve just described would consist of a few dozen or a few hundred different species. The community as it is consists of millions of species.” “So the law promotes what?” “Diversity.”
“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.
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.”
“You’ve killed off your competitors for the game, but your game has competitors as well—competitors for the grasses.
We’ve killed off our direct competitors and our competitors once removed. Now we can kill off our competitors twice removed—the plants that compete with the grasses for space and sunlight.”
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 an enemy to be exterminated.”
“That’s what the Takers have been doing—and are still doing. That’s what their agricultural system is designed to support: not just settlement—growth. Unlimited growth.”
“To what end? Why increase food production?” “To feed the millions who’re starving.” “And as you feed them will you extract a promise that they will not reproduce?” “Well…no, that’s not part of the plan.” “So what will happen if you feed the starving millions?” “They’ll reproduce and our population will increase.”
You’ve seen the ads for sending food to starving peoples around the world?” “Yes.” “Have you ever seen ads for sending contraceptives?” “No.” “Never. Mother Culture talks out of both sides of her mouth on this issue. When you say to her population explosion she replies global population control, but when you say to her famine she replies increased food production. But as it happens, increased food production is an annual event and global population control is an event that never happens at all.”
“Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow.”
When the population of any species outstrips its food resources, that population declines until it’s once again in balance with its resources. Mother Culture says that humans should be exempt from that process, so when she finds a population that has outstripped its resources, she rushes in food from the outside, thus making it a certainty that there will be even more of them to starve in the next generation. Because the population is never allowed to decline to the point at which it can be supported by its own resources, famine becomes a chronic feature of their lives.”
“True. But all the same, it’s hard just to sit by and let them starve.” “This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler: ‘I will not let them starve. I will not let the drought come. I will not let the river flood.’ It is the gods who let these things, not you.”
you must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion.”
“Tell me this: What do the people of your culture do if they get tired of living in the crowded Northeast?” “That’s easy. They move to Arizona. New Mexico. Colorado. The wide open spaces.” “And how do the Takers in the wide open spaces like that?” “They don’t. They put bumper stickers on their cars that say, ‘If you love New Mexico, go back where you came from.’ ” “But they don’t go back.” “No, they just keep coming.”
All you have to do to transform yourself into an Arizonan is to cross that imaginary line and settle down. But the point to note is that around each of the Leaver peoples on that map was a boundary that was definitely not imaginary: a cultural boundary. If the Navajo started feeling crowded, they couldn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, the Hopi have a lot of wide open space. Let’s go over there and be Hopi.’
They limited their growth because for the most part this was easier than going to war with their neighbors. And of course there were some who made no great effort to limit their growth, because they had no qualms about going to war with their neighbors.
It will tell you how you have to live if you want to avoid extinction, and that’s the first and most fundamental knowledge anyone needs.”
In Taker mythology, the world needed a ruler because the gods had made a mess of it. What they’d created was a jungle, a howling chaos, an anarchy. But was it that in fact?”
Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world.”
But in the end this mythology is not deeply satisfying. The Takers are a profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, 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. How does Mother Culture account for this?” “I’d say it’s because…Mother Culture says it’s because the Leavers are just too primitive to have these things.” “In other words, crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are features of an advanced culture.”
“The story 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. This is what you’ll find if you go among 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
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The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It’s the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.”
“What sort of story would a Leaver people tell about the appearance of the Takers in the world?”
