Ishmael

Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all.

If the will is there, the method will be found.

“One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’”

“That of course is an inane idea,” Ishmael said. “The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.”

Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world.

Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist.

“‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.”

“You said it was a paradox?”

“No, he said it was a paradox.”

“Why?”

Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”

Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated.

You must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion.

“The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leaver people in North America was given a choice: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjusting to prison life.”

“Yes, that seems to be the case.”

Ishmael fixed me with a drooping, moist eye. “Naturally a well-run prison must have a prison industry. I’m sure you see why.”

“Well…it helps to keep the inmates busy, I suppose. Takes their minds off the boredom and futility of their lives.”

“Yes. Can you name yours?”

“Our prison industry? Not offhand. I suppose it’s obvious.”

“Quite obvious, I would say.”

I gave it some thought. “Consuming the world.”

Ishmael nodded. “Got it on the first try.”

The premise of the Taker story is the world belongs to man.... The premise of the Leaver story is man belongs to the world.

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

The world was not made for any one species.

Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. Obviously it has to have this result, and to predict any other is simply to indulge in biological and mathematical fantasies.

It should be noted that what is crucial to our survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler.

Daunting isn’t nearly strong enough. To call it daunting is like calling the Atlantic damp.

In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it.

“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 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?’”

Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow.

The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories, based on entirely different and contradictory premises.

Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. We’re not destroying the world because we’re clumsy. We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

“As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.”

“Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central hearing and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are you saying?”

“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.”

But, alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects.

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.

In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can’t be found on a shelf in the public library.

We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.

The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world.

People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me.

The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product.

It’s pointless to argue with mythology.

The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers.