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

by Daniel Quinn

“The point I want to make here is that I have no idea what people with changed minds will do. Paul was in the same condition as he traveled the empire changing minds in the middle of the first century. He couldn’t possibly have predicted the institutional development of the papacy or the shape of Christian society in feudal Europe. By contrast, the early science-fiction writer Jules Verne could make a century’s worth of excellent predictions, because nothing changed between his time and ours in terms of vision. If people in the coming century have a new vision, then they’ll do what is completely unpredictable by us. Indeed, if this were not the case—if their actions were predictable by us—then this would prove that they didn’t have a new vision after all, that their vision and ours were essentially the same.”

“Evidently it isn’t just the history of the world that the victors get to write, it’s the theology of the world as well.”

The tendency of biological evolution is toward diversity—is now and always has been. Evolution isn’t tending toward ‘the one right species.’ From the beginning, it has been tending away from the singularity from which all life sprang in the primordial stew.

“Let’s go back again to the foundation thinkers of our culture—Herodotus, Confucius, Abraham, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Socrates, and any others you can think of. Assemble them all in one room and ask them this question: How long have people been living the way we live? What would be their answer?” “Their answer would be, people have been living this way from the beginning.” “In other words, Man was born living this way.” “That’s right.” “And what does this tell you about the nature of Man?” “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.” “So tell me, Jared: What else could this be except the one right way?” “Yes, I see that.” “What was missing from the education of these thinkers? What was forgotten during the Great Forgetting?” “What was forgotten was the fact that Man was not born a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder. What was forgotten was the fact that our way was not ordained from the beginning of time. If this hadn’t been forgotten, then we would never have been able to persuade ourselves that ours is the one right way. This is why the Great Forgetting was an ingredient essential to our cultural explosion.”

it’s a wonder that our cultural revolution ever took place. It really is a wonder. It wasn’t destiny, it wasn’t divinely ordained from the foundation of the universe, it wasn’t something that was just inevitably going to happen. It hadn’t happened in two hundred thousand years of people as smart as we are. It might not have happened in another two hundred thousand years—or in another million. It was a quirk, a fluke. Combine one never-before-seen cultural element with a second never-before-seen element, add a third just as odd, and you come up with a cultural monster that is literally devouring the world—and will end by devouring itself if it isn’t stopped.”

About ten thousand years ago people who had been living in the Fertile Crescent for tens of thousands of years began to live a new way, the way I’ve called the Taker way.” “I see that.” “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. And their new way to live wasn’t adopted because it was so pleasant that it was just an inevitable next step forward. 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.”

“But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind. We don’t understand what they had in mind as they lived through tens of thousands of years without trade and commerce, without empires or kingdoms or even villages, without accomplishments of any kind.” “That’s very true. I’d say it’s our impression that they didn’t have anything in mind. It’s not that we don’t understand it, it’s that there was nothing there to be understood.”

“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. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results.

“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.”

The earliest humans, unlike those from whom they descended, were hunter-gatherers. Throughout the rest of the primate order, all are merely gatherers—foragers. They will and do kill for food, opportunistically, but none live as hunters. Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual.

We didn’t cross the line when we started using tools, we crossed the line when we became hunters.

hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren’t, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn’t just found here and there among human cultures, it’s found universally.”

“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. For many of us, every smallest action gives us purchase on the future. On getting up, we dress a certain way in anticipation of meeting a certain person. We read the paper not so much to find out what has happened as to find out what’s likely to happen—in

“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. We have an appetite for the future that is as persistent as our appetite for food or sex. To say that it’s genetic is of course to propose a theory, but again I see nothing implausible in it. The hunter who’s not only hungry but avid to know the future is certainly going to have an edge over the hunter who’s just hungry.”

Historians wouldn’t touch this other stuff, and here’s the excuse they fashioned for themselves. They didn’t have to touch it … because it wasn’t history. It was some newfangled thing called prehistory. That was the ticket. Let some inferior breed handle it—not real historians, but rather prehistorians. In this way, modern historians put their stamp of approval on the Great Forgetting. What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was not something important, it was just prehistory. Something not worth looking at. A huge, long period of nothing happening.

Many different styles of agriculture were in use all over the world ten thousand years ago, when our particular style of agriculture emerged in the Near East. This style, our style, is one I call totalitarian agriculture, in order to stress the way it subordinates all life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food. Fueled by the enormous food surpluses generated uniquely by this style of agriculture, a rapid population growth occurred among its practitioners, followed by an equally rapid geographical expansion that obliterated all other lifestyles in its path (including those based on other styles of agriculture). This expansion and obliteration of lifestyles continued without a pause in the millennia that followed, eventually reaching the New World in the fifteenth century and continuing to the present moment in remote areas of Africa, Australia, New Guinea, and South America.

Totalitarian agriculture is more than a means of getting what you need to live, it’s the foundation for the most laborious lifestyle ever developed on this planet. This comes as a shock to many listeners, but there isn’t any question about it: No one works harder to stay alive than the people of our culture do. This has been so thoroughly documented in the past forty years that I doubt if you could find an anthropologist anywhere who would argue about it.

Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: 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 on your competitors.

Q. Wasn’t agriculture developed as a response to famine? A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn’t cure famine, it promotes famine—it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support—and that’s exactly where famines occur. For example, agriculture made it possible for many populations of Africa to outstrip their homelands’ resources—and that’s why these populations are now starving.

Please don’t overlook the point I’m making here. I’m not collecting signals of human evil. These are reactions to overcrowding—too many people competing for too few resources, eating rotten food, drinking fouled water, watching their families starve, watching their families fall to the plague.

The voices in our long chorus of distress have been added a few at a time, age by age. First came war: war as a social fixture, war as a way of life. For two thousand years or more, war seems to have been the only voice in the chorus. But before long it was joined by crime: crime as a social fixture, as a way of life. And then there was corruption: corruption as a social fixture, as a way of life. Before long, these voices were joined by slavery: slavery as world trade and as a social fixture. Soon revolt followed: citizens and slaves rising up to vent their rage and pain. Next, as population pressures gained in intensity, famine and plague found their voices and began to sing everywhere in our culture. Vast classes of the poor began to be exploited pitilessly for their labor. Drugs joined slavery as world trade. The laboring classes—the so-called dangerous classes—rose up in rebellion. The entire world economy collapsed. Global industrial powers played at world domination and genocide.

Just a few thousand years separates the bare beginning of our culture in rude farming villages from the age of the god-kings, when the royal classes lived in mind-boggling splendor and all the rest—the suffering masses—lived like cattle.

The Great Forgetting was complete. The tribal life had been gone for thousands of years. No one in the entire civilized world, East or West, remembered a time when perfectly ordinary people—the kind of people who now made up the suffering masses—lived well, and human society was not divided into those who are expected to suffer and those who are exempt from suffering. Everyone thought it had been this way from the beginning. Everyone thought this was the nature of the world—and the nature of Man. They began to think that the world is an evil place. They began to think that existence itself is evil. They began to think (and who can blame them!) that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans. They began to think that humankind was doomed. They began to think that humankind was damned. They began to think that someone needed to save us.

The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has abated, so we no longer imagine that Man was ill-made. We no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. We no longer think they know how to make every single thing in the whole vast universe except a human being.