My Ishmael

People seldom look very hard for things they don’t want to find.

By the simple act of being locked up, food was transformed into a product—the fundamental product of your economy.

They’re sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with ever tribal way of life, and of course they’re correct—if you mean by “wrong” something you don’t like.

Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario.

That’s what governments are there for, to keep good things from happening.

No two journeys are ever alike, because no two pupils are ever alike.

A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system.

The schools are there to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market.

Mother Culture’s deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact, they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you’re seeing at work in your schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency.

Don’t make faces. It won’t hurt you to hear a new word.

“This may be totally wrong,” I told him. “This may just be the simple truth, but this is what I hear: ‘sure, you can save the world, but you're really going to hate it. It's really going to be painful.’”

“Why is it going to be painful?”

“Because of all the stuff we have to give up. But as I say, this may just be the simple truth.”

“No, it's not the simple truth, Julie. It's Mother Culture’s simple lie. Although Mother Culture is a metaphor, she really does behave uncannily like a real person sometimes. Why do you think she would tell this particular lie?”

“She wants to discourage us from changing, I guess.”

“Of course. Her whole function is to preserve the status quo. This is not a peculiarity of your Mother Culture. In every culture, it's the function of Mother Culture to preserve the status quo.”

Six billion of you wake up every morning and start devouring the world.

I told him these numbers were hard to believe.

“Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it.

No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nursery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems.

Of course, there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs.