The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

by Daniel Quinn

I wrote a paper proposing that, although belief in an afterlife may have given rise to the practice of burying the dead with their possessions, it’s just as plausible to suppose that the practice of burying the dead with their possessions gave rise to a belief in an afterlife.

I got out of there like a drunk who has just remembered where he stashed a bottle.

There are plenty of things we don’t know and will never know, but everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn’t the case, if Moses or Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad held something back for an inner circle, then revelation is incomplete—and by definition useless.

With each successive talk, this summary would grow in comprehensiveness—and proportionately diminish in effectiveness.

our task is to grit our teeth and cling faithfully to the vision that is destroying us.

Paul was the message. But even with the writings of Paul and all the evangelists, it still took three hundred years of Christian thought to reconstitute Christ’s message—to piece together the hints, reconcile apparent contradictions, cut away heresies and lunacies and irrelevancies, and organize it into a self-consistent, coherent creed that more or less everyone could agree on.

“Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along. God didn’t speak to the Alawa of Australia or to the Gebusi of New Guinea or to the Bushmen of Africa or to the Navajo of North America or to the Ihalmiut of the Great Barrens of Canada. God didn’t speak a word to any of the other hundreds of thousands of peoples of the world, he spoke only to us. Only to us did he reveal the order and purpose of creation. Only to us did he reveal the laws essential to salvation.”

Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.

lifestyle strategies adopted in a culture aren’t necessarily logical. They don’t necessarily benefit people in obvious ways. They aren’t necessarily adopted because they make life more comfortable—though people may use this rationale to explain them to children and outsiders. In our culture, for example, the adoption of our style of agriculture is presented to our children as an inevitable step forward for the human race, because it makes life easier and more secure.”

“The Aztecs had territorial ambitions, but once they conquered you, they didn’t give a damn how you lived. They weren’t interested in turning their neighbors into Aztecs.

You’d have to make them cultural missionaries if you wanted them to blow up into a world-dominating culture.”

“They would have to be believers in the rightness of their way of life.”

But the belief alone wouldn’t be enough. The people of our culture have always held this belief—have throughout history demonstrated that they held this belief—but they needed another mechanism as well. I suppose you could call it a spreading mechanism. A mechanism that would push them across the face of their earth as they spread the gospel of their cultural enlightenment.”

We believed (and still believe) that we have the one right way for people to live, but we needed totalitarian agriculture to support our missionary effort. Totalitarian agriculture gave us fabulous food surpluses, which are the foundation of every military and economic expansion. No one was able to stand against us anywhere in the world, because no one had a food-producing machine as powerful as ours. Our military and economic success confirmed our belief that we have the one right way for people to live. It still does so today. For the people of our culture, the fact that we’re able to defeat and destroy any other lifestyle is taken as clear proof of our cultural superiority.”

our culture, which in just a few centuries is reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.”

How long have people been living the way we live?

“Their answer would be, people have been living this way from the beginning.” “In other words, Man was born living this way.”

“It tells me that Man was meant to live this way. Man is meant to live as a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder the way bees were meant to live as honey collectors and hive builders.”

if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds—not by programs but by people with changed minds.”

“They didn’t begin to live a new way because they were starving, because, as I’ve said, starving people don’t invent lifestyles any more than people falling out of airplanes invent parachutes.

What these founders of our culture fundamentally invented for us was the notion of work. They developed a hard way to live—the hardest way to live ever found on this planet.”

“We know what ethnic group these people belonged to—evidently they were Caucasians—but

Why did they become agriculturalists? What did totalitarian agriculture give them that foraging didn’t give their neighbors and their ancestors?” “You already showed me this. Totalitarian agriculture gave them power.”

And just like the monkey, no one wants to quit pushing that button, and we’re in serious danger of pleasuring ourselves to death with unending jolts of power.”

‘Let’s minimize the effects of pushing the button.’ People with changed minds will say, ‘Let’s throw the box away!’

“The easiest way to see it is by example. According to totalitarian agriculture, cows may live but wolves must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, chickens may live but foxes must die. According to totalitarian agriculture, wheat may live but chinch bugs must die. Anything we eat may live, but anything that eats our food must die—and not merely on an ad hoc basis. Our posture is not, ‘If a coyote attacks my herd, I’ll kill it,’ our posture is, ‘Let’s wipe coyotes off the face of the earth.’ When it came to wolves and cows, we said, ‘Let the wolves be destroyed,’ and the wolves were destroyed, and we said, ‘Let there be cows by the billion,’ and there were cows by the billion.”

Now, the way the Zeugen imagined it, the gods have a special knowledge that enables them to rule the world. This knowledge includes the knowledge of who should live and who should die, but it embraces much more than that. This is the general knowledge the gods employ in every choice they make. What the Zeugen perceived is this, that every choice the gods make is good for one creature but evil for another, and if you think about it, it really can’t be otherwise.

“When the Zeugen saw what the Tak were up to, they said to themselves, ‘These people have eaten at the gods’ own tree of wisdom, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’”

Even the authors of the story in Genesis described it as a matter of changed minds. What they saw being born in their neighbors was not a new lifestyle but a new mind-set, a mind-set that made us out to be as wise as the gods, that made the world out to be a piece of human property, that gave us the power of life and death over the world.

They eventually came to view Nixtian magic as just part of weaving—just the way people of our culture eventually came to view totalitarian agriculture as just part of being human.

“The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed—and therefore destined—to become us.

Occasionally someone will think I’m referring to what is sometimes called the ‘Old Religion’—paganism, Wicca—but of course I’m not. In the first place, paganism isn’t old. It’s a farmer’s religion through and through, which means it’s just a few thousand years old, and of course it was never a universal religion, for the simple reason that farming was never universal.

“Someone inevitably asks why I speak of gods rather than one God, as if I simply hadn’t been informed on this matter and was speaking in error, and I ask them how they happen to know the number of the gods.

This is like reasoning that the earth must be the center of the universe, because no other place makes as much sense.

“The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood.

“That’s the world, the universe.” “That’s where the real gods of the universe write what they write, Jared. The gods of your revealed religions write in books.”

“Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness.”

“Here’s a generalization that can be made about the Law of Life: Those who follow it tend to become better represented in the gene pool of their species than those who don’t follow it.”

the law favors life over kindness.

What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind.”

It now seems clear that evolution promotes what’s good for the individual, in the sense of assuring the individual’s reproductive success—what

“The Law of Life in a single word is: abundance.”

“Animism is bound up with that community and resonates with it. The Law of Life, represented by the pen, is written in the community of life, and animism reads this law, as does science in its own way.”

To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same.

Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or by rising above it.”

There is in fact no such religion as animism—that’s the construct: animism as a religion. What exists—and what is universal—is a way of looking at the world.

weltan-shauung.”

Man was ready-made to rule the world but the world wasn’t readymade for him to rule it.”

So, this is the Taker vision: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.”

the Law of Life is just a collection of evolutionarily stable strategies—the