Ishmael (Ishmael, #1)

by Daniel Quinn

Let it go. I was being irrational. It happens, it’s allowed.

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

“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’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.”

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.

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 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 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.”

“Every story is based on a premise, is the working out of a premise. As a writer, I’m sure you know that.”

“This was the turning point. The world had been made for man, but he was unable to take possession of it until this problem was cracked.

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.

“I’m saying that 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.”

“It’s because there’s something fundamentally wrong with humans. Something that definitely works against paradise. Something that makes people stupid and destructive and greedy and shortsighted.”

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. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like 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.”

“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.”

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.”

Kill off everything you can’t eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn’t feed what you eat.”

I say nothing, except that your species is not exempt from the biological realities that govern all other species.”

“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.”

“In other words, crime, mental illness, suicide, and drug addiction are features of an advanced culture.”

“Certainly the knowledge of good and evil is a powerful knowledge, for it enables us to rule the world without becoming criminals.

“This is indeed the proper knowledge of the gods: the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die.”

“Yes, that’s obvious now. In our own cultural history, the adoption of agriculture was a prelude to ascent. In these stories, agriculture is the lot of the fallen.”

They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”

“Innocence in this context presumably being a synonym for blissful ignorance.”

In his book on stone age economics, Marshall Sahlins described them as ‘the original affluent society.’

“We should not trust the gods with our lives?” “Definitely not. You should trust yourselves with your lives. That’s the human way to live.”

WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA? The message on the other side reads: WITH GORILLA GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR MAN?