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

by Daniel Quinn

the Law of Limited Competition, which he expressed this way: ‘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.’

That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.”

Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we’re fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive.

we’re in the process of eliminating ourselves.

In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or racism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will be fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense self-eliminating.

’We’ve always lived as though the world was made for us, so it must have been made for us.” “The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision.

“I wish you knew sign language,” she added rather wistfully. “Barriers fall right away in sign.”

There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.

And this was how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars.

Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest.

We didn’t cross the line when we started using tools, we crossed the line when we became hunters. Our nonhuman ancestors were tool-makers and -users but they weren’t hunters, because they didn’t have the mental equipment to be hunters. In other words, we became human by hunting—and of course we became hunters by becoming human.

became human when we developed a new lifestyle. Nonhuman primates make their living by foraging, but foraging doesn’t require much communication.

Hunting teamwork is what pays off—but in primates no hunting teamwork is genetically wired in, the way it is with wolves or hyenas. In primates, hunting teamwork can only come about through communication.”

The first is that we became human by reading the signs—and of course by talking.

The theory I’m putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren’t—and this success translated directly into reproductive success.

You see what I’m saying? Sitting right here, we’ve gained the capacity to foretell the future. We’ve become seers! A few minutes ago I tried to make it plain that becoming hunters didn’t endow us with an irresistible urge to slaughter wildlife, but it does give us some other urges that do seem irresistible. For example, we do seem to be irresistibly attracted to stories, everywhere and everywhen.”

“Here’s another urge that came to us through hunting: the urge to know what we’re going to encounter on that track ahead of us. Each and every one of us wants to know the future—by any means whatever, rational or irrational, sensible or fantastic. This is so deeply ingrained in us, so much taken for granted, that we don’t give a moment’s thought to how remarkable it is.

something that cuts across all cultural lines. Belief in divination is found in every human culture, everywhere in the world.

Doctors in all cultures are associated with divination, including our own, and we expect them to be trained readers of predictive signs.

The scientific method is itself fundamentally based on making predictions.

“Because we were born as hunters, we have a genetic craving to know where the track leads and what lies at the end of it.

But if you bet someone that the next toss of a coin will turn up heads, being right has nothing to do with it. The issue is, will the universe back you up? If you say heads and it turns up heads, it doesn’t mean you’re right, it means God is with you. You could just as easily have said tails, and if God wanted you to win, then it would have turned up tails. This is what every compulsive gambler is really trying to find out: ‘Are you with me, Lord, or against me?’

“This oceanic feeling you describe has often been conjectured to be the source of the religious impulse, but only B traces that oceanic feeling to this patch of ground here in front of us, with its beetle scratchings and mouse scratchings. This is where we first began to reach into a dimension beyond the ken of any other creature on earth, a dimension that is surely not our own domain. But if we can imagine it to be anyone’s domain, then whose must it be?” “It must be the domain of the gods.”

“To flip a coin and bet on heads is to enter the domain of the gods. To draw a card to a four-card straight flush is to enter the domain of the gods. To read the marks on this patch of earth and begin a hunt is to enter the domain of the gods.

Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods. Crossing the border, you can’t help but meet them.”

“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ‘live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”

“Living in the community of life did give them something we’ve lost, which is a complete understanding of where we come from. Children in our culture think that life comes to us from our human parents and that food is just another product we manufacture, like paint or plastic or glass. Children in hunting-gathering cultures know that life doesn’t come to us only from our parents. It comes to us just as truly from all the living things we subsist on. These plants and animals aren’t products any more than we are, and if we live in the hand of the god, then so do they in exactly the same way.”

These caves aren’t art galleries or shamanistic temples, they’re schools of the hunting arts—the equivalent of one of our museums of science and industry.”

The Sorcerer?”

I thought, ‘Hey, you’re in complete control of what goes on the page, so why shouldn’t it come out the way you want it to?’ I suppose the answer is that what we hope to achieve is always beyond human power. We want to make the earth tremble and the stones weep and the skies open up. I wanted to do that for you here, right now, but I know I haven’t.”

“Like the beetle and the mouse, once upon a time, I was here. And if another comes to study these marks, he or she will say, ‘All three were here, at different times, all held in the hand of the god—and all still held in the hand of the god though they’re no longer right here.’ Every track begins and ends in the hand of god, and every track is a lifetime long. Hunter and hunted are both standing in their tracks when they meet, and there are no tracks, however far-flung, that fall outside the hand of god. All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together.

We make our journey in the company of others. The deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are.

To each of us is given its moment in the blaze, Jared, its spark to be surrendered to another when it’s sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever—not any at all.

Real secrets can be kept by publishing them on billboards.”

“The world is a sacred place and a sacred process,” I told her, “and we’re part of it.”

You see, she showed me more clearly than any advocate of ecumenism why we are a confraternity, Jared—we Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus. We’ve drawn ourselves up from the slime in which animism grovels so proudly. We represent what is highest, what is most upward reaching, transcendental, and sublime in mankind. What stands between the members of the confraternity are minor rifts. What stands between the confraternity and animism is a gulf as wide as the gulf between Man and brute, spirit and matter.”

The books were not written by people who think like B. They were written by people who in their heart of hearts believe that Man was divinely shaped to conquer and rule the world. They’re scandalized by prehistoric warfare. They don’t explain it, they lament it. They’re embarrassed, because the creature destined from all time to be the ruler of the world should have been finer, nobler, more angelic.”

How do we know that modern tribal peoples live the way ancient tribal peoples lived? B’s answer is this: The tribal lifestyle survived to the present moment because it works. What is extant in the world is what has endured, what is stable, what works. Failed experiments disappear, successful ones are repeated and repeated and repeated.

The closest thing to warfare in the nonhuman community is all within species, not between species. Predation isn’t war.

What’s working is that cultural identities and cultural borders are being preserved. When X attacks Y, it doesn’t annex it. It doesn’t destroy Y’s identity or erase its borders, it just inflicts a certain amount of damage, then turns around and goes home. It’s no different when Y attacks X. In other words, every attack serves as a demonstration and affirmation of identity to both sides: “We’re X and you’re Y, and here’s the border between us. We cross it at our risk, and you cross it at yours. We know you’re strong and healthy. Every once in a while, we’re going to make sure you know we’re strong and healthy too. We know that if we mess with you, we’ll suffer. We want you to know that if you mess with us, you’ll suffer too.”

Evolution is a process that sorts for what works, and “better” is discarded as easily as “worse”—if it doesn’t work. What works, evidently, is cultural diversity.

And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we’re in the process of proving right now.

We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way.

In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable.

Tribal warfare—casual, intermittent, small-scale, and frequent—worked well for tribal peoples, because it safeguarded cultural diversity.

“Yes, it’s future is dust. It had no other future from the moment Charles handed it to me. Even if I hadn’t smashed it, it had no other future. One day, in a week or a million years, it was going to become rubble, and no other destiny was ever possible for it.”

There’s no one in reach of these words who is incapable (at the very least) of handing them to another and saying, “Here, read this.”

The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.

Anywhere in the world, East or West, you can walk up to a stranger and say, “Let me show you how to be saved,” and you’ll be understood. You may not be believed or welcomed when you speak these words, but you will surely be understood. The fact that you’ll be understood should astonish you, but it doesn’t, because you’ve been prepared from childhood by a hundred thousand voices—a million voices—to understand these words yourself. You know instantly what it means to be “saved,” and it doesn’t matter in the least whether you believe in the salvation referred to. You know in addition, as a completely distinct matter, that being saved involves some method or other. The method might be a ritual—baptism, extreme unction, the sacrament of penance, the performance of ceremonial works, or anything at all. It might, on the other hand, be an inner action of repentance, love, faith, or meditation. Again in addition, and again as a completely distinct matter, you know that the method of salvation being proposed is universal: It can be used by everyone and works for everyone. Yet again: You know that the method has not been discovered, developed, or tested in any scientific laboratory; either God has revealed it to someone or someone has discovered it in a supranormal state of consciousness. Although initially received by divine means, the method is nonetheless transmittable by normal means, which explains why it’s possible for a perfectly ordinary individual to be offering the method t...

But all this barely scratches the surface of what is meant when someone says, “Let me show you how to be saved.” A complex and profound worldview is implicit in such a statement. According to this worldview, the human condition is such that everyone is born in an unsaved state and remains unsaved until the requisite ritual or inner action is performed, and all who die in this state either lose their chance for eternal happiness with God or fail to escape the weary cycle of death and rebirth.