Ishmael (Ishmael, #1)

by Daniel Quinn

These questions were also asked by the man who is possibly history’s most persistently influential theorist on the subject of population growth, Thomas Robert Malthus. His 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply is expected to be arithmetical, thereby inevitably resulting—he reasoned—in a not-too-distant global famine (which in fact has never materialized).

Mathusian modeling

His answer was this—please listen closely—‘Population does invariably increase when the means of subsistence increase.’ In other words, he recognized that growing more food invariably results in an increase in population; every time you increase food production, your population is going to increase.

-Malthus

“What ‘process’ are you talking about? Wholesale genocide? Everyday extermination of female infants? Genetically-engineered epidemics spread globally?

Reading in 2020

“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

-Ishmael

you have made a captive of the world itself.

“What he had to tell them was a story.” “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 defilements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races.”

Scary

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.

like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede.”

Phrasing

“Okay. So you’re saying that the people of my culture are enacting their own story about man, the world, and the gods.”

it pacifies them.

Phrase

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.”

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. “And that’s the middle of the story.”

The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.”

Mythology premise

“You hear this fifty times a day. You can turn on the radio or the television and hear it every hour. Man is conquering the deserts, man is conquering the oceans, man is conquering the atom, man is conquering the elements, man is conquering outer space.”

Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was born to do.”

People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central heating and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’

the price you’ve paid is not the price of becoming human. It’s not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It’s the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”

This book is very interesting

And we’ll manipulate them the way a programmer manipulates a computer.

Phrasing

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.”

“There’s 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 to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world.

Very applicable on todays world

As I make it out, 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,

1

the Takers systematically destroy their competitors’ food to make room for their own.

2

“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 general. In other words, you can say, ‘This gazelle is mine,’ but you can’t say, ‘All the gazelles are mine.’

3

Our policy is to deny our competitors access to all the food in the world, and that’s something no other species does.”

“What’s wrong with a global community that consists of nothing but grass, gazelles, and lions? Or a global community that consists of nothing but rice and humans?” I gazed into space for a while. “I’d have to think that a community like that would be ecologically fragile. It would be highly vulnerable. Any change at all in existing conditions, and the whole thing would collapse.”

“Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself

Phrase

WHEN THE GODS SAW THAT Adam was awakening,

The true story behind the tree of knowledge and evil; entire chapter

“They got to be this way because they’ve always believed that what they were doing was right—and therefore to be done at any cost whatever. They’ve always believed that, like the gods, they know what is right to do and what is wrong to do, and what they’re doing is right.

“And biblical scholars don’t understand this?” “I cannot say, of course, that not a single scholar has ever understood this. But most read the story as if it were set in an historical never-never land, like one of Aesop’s fables. It would scarcely occur to them to understand it as a piece of Semitic war propaganda.”

“But when it’s read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: 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.”

Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture.”

In short, ancient customs are nice for institutions, ceremonies, and holidays, but Takers don’t want to adopt them for everyday living.”

Ex from my life: My parents often recite Nigerian proverbs of wisdom, but by no means do we live exactly how those peope lived the entirety of their lives

“Why don’t you teach them what works well for people?” “I’d say it’s because we don’t know what works well for people. Every generation has to come up with its own version of what works well for people. My parents had their version, which was pretty well useless, and their parents had their version, which was pretty well useless, and we’re currently working on our version, which will probably seem pretty well useless to our own children.”

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 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.

“I think what you’re groping for is that people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.”

You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”

Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can’t, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can.

2020...