Having first covered Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael in extensive fashion, then The Story of B in a mega-post, it was basically inevitable that I would finish the loose trilogy and offer a treatment of My Ishmael.
This third book in the series connects much more closely with the first book than did “B”—both in time and space. It follows the relationship between Ishmael, the wise gorilla teacher, and a precocious teenager named Julie who studies under Ishmael in overlap with an oblivious Alan Lomax (narrator/pupil from the first book).
As Ishmael customizes lessons to individual students, we see that Julie’s education is complementary to Alan’s—conveniently justifying a whole different book providing a new set of provocative insights.
Format
The book is arranged into 36 short, chronological chapters. Headings below reflect chapter titles and starting page numbers in parentheses (1998 printing). As I did for the other books, I mainly stay away from narrative elements—focusing instead on lessons. The exception in this case is in the setup. Part of my rationale is to encourage folks to read the original, treating this post as highlights of the “boring” portions—ideal for a refresher after having read the book.
All the chapter titles and page numbers are represented until the end of lessons, when the book shifts to more of a traditional novel. Note that the 20th Century Daniel Quinn often uses “man” to mean “humans” more broadly. As in the other treatments, I attempt to confine my own slant to [square brackets].
Hello There (1)
We meet Julie Gerchak, age 16, recounting her story from four years prior when as a 12-year-old she saw the same ad Alan Lomax had seen in the paper:
TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
The notion that a teacher might actually want a student ran counter to Julie’s experience. She was intrigued, and began to daydream about it.
Room 105 (4)
Julie finds her way downtown to the almost-empty Room 105, and like Alan was startled to find a gorilla placidly munching leaves behind a dark glass window on the right-hand wall. Stilling her panic, she spotted the poster on the wall behind the gorilla: WITH MAN GONE, WILL THERE BE HOPE FOR GORILLA?
Julie’s initial reaction was: of course gorillas would be better off without man, seeing as they’re currently on a rapid glide path to extinction. The gorilla grunted, as if in displeasure over her thought. She continued to muse: it made sense that saving the world would involve saving gorillas. “But not saving people?” popped into her head, in a most unnerving, alien way. Looking into the gorilla’s eyes, Julie instantly knew the thought came from the gorilla! She bolted.
I Take on the Ape (9)
Collecting her thoughts while bumping around a department store, Julie decided she was unusual enough to be open to a telepathic ape, so returned to Room 105. Prior to entering, she heard a man’s voice within, and held back. Eventually, Alan Lomax came out, awkwardly answering Julie’s question to clarify that he was not the teacher, before scurrying away like a real “dork.”
In front of Ishmael again, Julie had difficulty engaging him, but when he did “speak,” he expressed extreme reluctance to take on so young a student. Julie was incensed, and gave Ishmael what-for. She parried his logic with a deft agility that knocked him off balance. Unlike Alan, this prospective pupil was a real firecracker!
We Lurch to the Starting Line (15)
Ishmael explains his style as that of a maieutic teacher [is it legal to have four vowels in a row?]: like a midwife helping students deliver ideas gestating inside them. Probing what was in Julie that needed to be developed, she offered that the world was increasingly dangerous and on the brink. Then, she mentions the daydream she had about her hopes and expectations for what might happen in Room 105, which Ishmael agreed would be a fine place to start.
The Daydream (21)
Julie’s daydream was that the ad was scooping up people intent on learning how to live on a planet without destroying it. The catch was—worked out in stumbling steps—no one on Earth had a clue how to do so. Thus, they were going to visit wise aliens to learn from those who had figured it out, then bring this treasure back to Earth.
Meet Mother Culture (26)
Ishmael explains that Mother Culture has whispered in our ears since birth, in every medium from personal relationships to comic strips to the nightly news. Every teacher, joke, movie, pop song, and book reinforces the lessons. Every culture has the equivalent, each conveying different messages.
The People of the Curse (30)
Everything in the universe besides humans seems to work, offering as examples clouds, trees, turtles, germs, atoms, mushrooms, birds, lions, worms, Sun, and Moon. Something about the exclusion of humans seems very “off.” This is why Julie believes that if aliens exist, they are unlikely to be inexplicably “broken” like us.
A bit of maieutic massaging—which impressed Julie—extracted that what made us different, according to Mother Culture, was that we’re civilized. Or maybe the problem is that we’re not civilized enough. It’s like we’re tainted—in limbo.
We’re awkwardly caught between being too intelligent to work as well as turtles and mushrooms, but not intelligent enough to be like angels or gods. The flaw, then, is intelligence, which gives us enough power to screw up the world. It’s a special curse.
Yet, we need not invoke interstellar travel to find people who have lived sustainably and without difficulty. Julie has no idea what fairy-tale gibberish Ishmael is spouting.
“Your Culture” (38)
Defining culture can be tricky, but Ishmael offers a guideline and a belief that identify “our” culture as opposed to others:
- “food is all owned […] all under lock and key.”
- “[Humans are] fundamentally flawed and inherently doomed to miserable suffering.”
Having food under lock and key—rather than freely available like the air we breathe or sunlight that warms us—”is the cornerstone of your economy.” It’s a unique and bizarre arrangement to own food and require payment for its release—yet true of all modern cultures. [“No such thing as a free lunch,” we convince ourselves.]
Our “doomed” status explains why so many aspects of life are broken and committing ecocide. We don’t allow that it may be the system that’s bad, so the problem must be intrinsic to humans: baked into our DNA. Our culture blames human nature for our woes, which we are powerless to change and therefore (conveniently) off the hook.
We are so convinced that the answers for how to live on this planet are nowhere available to us that a 12-year-old assumes any such knowledge would have to come from billions of miles away.
The History of Man in 17 Seconds (46)
Ishmael extracts the history of humanity from Julie, as instilled by Mother Culture: After several million years of foraging, humans settled down about 10,000 years ago to start farming and building civilization. Julie is confused as to why Ishmael calls this a lie, unable to find any factual error. [See if you can figure out where to insert the word “some” in the statement above.]
The conceit is that our [now wholly dominant] culture represents all of humanity. The history of how one culture swept the globe over many millennia is not emphasized in schools, but is the most vital history for us to understand.
Tunes & Dancers (51)
Picking up on a metaphor Julie offered in which agriculture was a new tune that everyone in the world began dancing to, Ishmael spins out a story on another planet where the Leaver people learned to (metaphorically) “dance” certain steps on occasion to increment availability of their favorite foods—the balance coming from the usual time-tested naturally-occurring sources. Some abstained, some danced a few steps per year, some danced a few hours every month, and others danced a little each day. All this was fine: no one right way to “dance.”
But one group (Takers) decided it would be great to live entirely on these favored foods, and began dancing several hours every day. So successful was this practice that soon they had food surpluses, requiring a manager-class to stop dancing themselves so they could tend to the logistics. Under the threat of people slacking off to dance just one hour per day (which was sufficient to meet their needs), the managers—who stood to lose their jobs and go back to dancing if the surplus stopped—decided to lock up the food, and apportion it according to number of hours danced. Of course, they would need to also pay others (in food) to stop dancing and guard the food supply.
The new system required an ever-expanding set of specialized labor to produce storage pots, weapons, barrels, tools, etc. [see River post]. Food surplus fueled expanding population, which promoted expansion into neighboring lands. Convinced that their style of intensive dancing was the right way to live, they sought to convert surrounding Leavers to this superior way of life.
Various outcomes ensued. Some Leavers embraced intensive dancing. Some resisted but were soon surrounded and assimilated by virtue of youth beginning to dance and guard for the Takers—loosing their subsistence practices. Some refused to give up their treasured leisure, but were moved away from their land so that it could be put to “more productive” dancing use. These folks were unable to support themselves in their traditional ways on small inferior parcels, forcing them to accept food donations from the Takers as compensation for keeping out of the way. They soon lost their traditions and became dependents.
Still others refused to be assimilated or moved, prepared to meet force with force, and give their lives to keep their treasured lifestyle. They would leave the Takers alone if left to their home territory. The Takers explained that the Leaver way was wrong, and that Takers’ expansionist success was all the proof one needed to see the truth. The Leavers disagreed: they witnessed the intense work of Taker life and wanted no part of such an obviously-unsuccessful lifestyle. It goes without saying that these stubborn and proud people were wiped from the face of the earth by a “superior” force.
So it went for centuries and millennia. Takers left no room for Leavers wherever they went. By Takers’ telling, no one knew about dancing until brilliant Takers came along, and it was an instant hit: immediately obvious to all who were introduced that it was the right way to live. Only those too dumb to recognize this inarguable fact held out, to their great loss.
The Parable Examined (59)
The first lesson is that the Agricultural Revolution was more about converting to full-time horticultural labor rather than hobby-level practice. Contrary to what Mother Culture tells us, the role of seeds has long been understood (not that hard)!
The next bit sang a tune quite familiar to me. Continuing to double human population every 35 years would fill 100 billion planets (one for every star in our galaxy) with 6 billion humans each in a mere 1300 years. The next galaxy would take only 35 more years. All the galaxies in the universe are filled in 2500 years (all impossible, of course, even at light speed).
Julie is stunned. Why isn’t this common knowledge—or is it? So many “truths” are turned to lies: that humans (as a whole) switched from foraging to agriculture 10,000 years ago; that everyone had been waiting for this relief from misery; that dominance proves success as the right way to live.
Compounding the predicament, Takers are convinced that knowledge of how to live as we are meant to be—without destroying the planet—is unavailable to us: known only in the realm of gods, angels, aliens, or spirits [occasionally glimpsed by prophets].
A Visit to Calliope (67)
We now go to yet another planet, named after the muse of epic poetry. Evolution works on Calliope just as it does on Earth: success survives and failure disappears. While it’s certainly possible (even common/inevitable) for a once-successful species to fail and disappear as conditions and interactions change, it is not possible for a species to fail its way into existence. To arrive is to have succeeded, somehow.
Ishmael then offers an extended example of a creature on Calliope that behaves similarly to white-footed mice on Earth: both males and females engage in infanticide of helpless pups in dens that are not their own, either within or outside of their territories according to gender.
The point is that the practices, standards, or sensibilities of one species may not apply to others. What matters is what works for them: what’s evolutionarily stable; optimized; tuned in relationship to their ecological context. Deviating from the emergent behaviors would affect a net harm to the species.
Calliope, Part II (76)
Ishmael points out that his (contemporaneous) explorations with Alan focus on competition between different species (e.g., Chapter 8), while he and Julie are looking at intra-species competition. The white-footed mouse would derive some small benefit from killing shrew pups (or any number of other species’ pups), based on some overlap of resource demand, but only other white-footed mice share a complete overlap of resource demand, making that choice a far more impactful focus. Mating opportunities also twist intra-species competition into something that would make no sense between different species.
Yet, if every competition between members of the same species (which can occur hourly) were fatal, the species could find itself quickly wiped out. Thus, evolution explores many strategies for resolving contests non-fatally. We turn to the Awks of Calliope (monkey–ostrich sort of cross). The Awks engage in a multi-layered pattern of displays whose outcome may depend on degree of need, just as much as size or strength. Baring teeth, jumping and stomping, and fisticuffs are all possible in escalating scenarios that again depend on multiple variable factors, each having some associated probability depending on level of desperation.
While the decision tree is somewhat algorithmic, the creatures find that a balance of predictability and unpredictability serves them best. In fact, it is the way it is precisely because it’s a successful strategy. Even wisdom received from a distant corner of the galaxy could not improve upon this arrangement.
When animals defend a “territory” against members of their own species, it isn’t about the land itself, but the food and/or mates within. Whether operating individually or in troops or in cultural tribes, the usual logic is to attack intruders in your own territory and retreat from attacks if wandering in others’ territories—but not always.
Tribal laws—which are less about prohibiting specific acts than they are guidelines for responses to inevitable behaviors—might vary widely, but all emerged in time as a coherent bundle that works for their people.
While cooperation prevails within the tribe, inter-tribal relations are best described by the strategy of Erratic Retaliation: “Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable.” Mostly, it’s a live-and-let-live strategy, but if attacked, return the favor in equal measure. Occasional raids out of nowhere let neighbors know you’re still there and still strong, and some retaliation can be expected. The pattern emerges and survives simply because it works well for long-term stability. Counter-intuitively, it is an effective peace-keeping strategy, to mostly allow tribes to keep to themselves, secure against the threat of being overrun.
It’s not aberrant, abhorrent, or bloodthirsty to execute such a strategy. Its absence would lead to worse outcomes. If one group broke the standard-practice agreement and annihilated another, the other groups in the region would be on a hair-trigger and unite to annihilate the annihilators if their aggressive behavior continued.
Intermission (92)
The joke’s on you: there is no intermission! Julie is ready to truck on!
People of modernity pass harsh judgment on (constant, low-level) inter-tribal warring, and rather than ask whether it has merit, conclude that it is no way to live and vow to stop it. We would never presume to decide that white-footed mice should not kill pups, that bears ought not hibernate, or that birds shouldn’t bother migrating. Yet, despite presiding over a fleeting disaster, moderns arrogantly presume expertise on how all humans should live, everywhere—unimpressed by the very long success achieved by these other ways of being.
Even though Leavers know in their bones that their way of living works well for them, they would find it ludicrous to imagine that theirs was a universal right way for all humans everywhere. The spirits that move a region are quite obviously different from place to place: evident at a glance.
Ironically, though projecting confidence that we know the right way to live, a deep insecurity tells us (moderns) that such knowledge is actually unobtainable, except by divine revelation or super-intelligent alien instruction. [In other words, deep down, we know we’re full of it, and doth protest too much.]
While every tribal culture might have elements we consider to be flawed or repugnant, these people are satisfied with their frameworks. They do not find them lacking, are not suffering in misery, are not feeling depressed, anxious, or alienated. Such troubled people do not persist, and would not survive as a culture. Before extinguishing themselves, such people would change an intolerable system. The only way to keep people suffering an intolerable lifestyle is to lock up their food: remove their capacity to vote with their feet. [Many hunter-gatherers practice fission–fusion arrangements, melting into adjacent groups if dissatisfied.]
The Fertile Crescent (97)
A parallel to the “dancers” is made for people around the (then) Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago: the people there practiced a wide variety of horticultural intensity, but were all still “Leavers” in that they left their fates in the hands of the gods—enacting an Erratic Retaliator lifestyle. One group began complete reliance on agriculture and began to break the norms of erratic retaliation, instead overrunning neighbors via assimilation, driving elsewhere, or extermination.
By the time Europeans got to the New World, they had lost contact with erratic retaliation. Just when they thought they had achieved peace with a Native American tribe, an attack would seemingly come out of nowhere. This was unacceptable to the Europeans, further justifying the obliteration of tribal life.
In both the Fertile Crescent and the New World, the agriculturalists had essentially unlimited supply and were able to overpower surrounding tribes. Their “winning” track record served to self-validate their lifestyle as superior and reflect human destiny. [Metastatic cancer would have the same sense of righteousness based on dominant “success” and a (tragically-false) sense of destiny to be the only one left standing.]
Our culture has decided that going to war (whose objectives tend to be seizing control of a region and/or putting an end to unwanted behavior) is acceptable, whereas Erratic Retaliation is not (a random, purposeless, destructive behavior that must be stopped). Both are a form of war, but very different in motivation and expression. Takers need to exercise control. Erratic behavior thwarts control. Because Takers can’t go to war over every little flare-up, peace-keeping largely becomes a newfangled administrative task, rather than something left to time-tested dynamics.
The Crescent, Part II (107)
Leaver laws were tailored not for some idealized notion of people, but for…
…dealing with humans as they are. They didn’t think of humans as flawed beings, but this doesn’t mean that they thought of them as angels. They knew very well that humans are capable of being troublesome, disruptive, selfish, mean, cruel, greedy, violent, and so on. […] A system that works for tens of thousands of years is going to be a system that works for people who are always capable of being [all these things].
Tribal laws are not geared toward forbidding bad behavior (would be pointless: guaranteed to fail), but toward handling inevitable situations in a way that minimizes overall damage to individuals and to the community.
When the newly-minted Takers found themselves expanding under unprecedented food surplus, their old ways of Erratic Retaliation no longer made sense. Rather than protecting a long-lived status quo, the expansionist drive, premium on productivity, and protection of surplus led to a different security apparatus intolerant of erratic displays. They therefore found themselves on unfamiliar ground [like a dog chasing a car actually catching it by the bumper: now what?]. They declared “no fighting” [and fought anyone who disagreed]. In the vacuum of shattered tribal law (now a hodgepodge of dying cultures), the inevitable bad behavior was now forbidden, rather than simply addressed as per time-tested custom.
To Leavers, it makes no sense to make a law against acts you know will never cease. Any “thou shalt not…” law is obviously going to be disobeyed (hourly). Tribal law didn’t bother outlawing mischief, instead focusing on ways to remedy inevitable damage, to the extent possible. It did good things for the tribe, so why would anyone break these completely different kinds of laws?
Modernity, on the other hand, stresses punishment of predictable acts.
For ten thousand years you’ve been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken.
No person beyond infancy has avoided breaking some law. Lawmakers [especially?] do as well. It’s all broken, and comes off as a sham.
By the time the first attempts at writing human history were made (which happened in Greece), the Great Forgetting (introduced in The Story of B) was already fully developed. According to the first written histories, humans emerged a few thousand years prior around the Fertile Crescent, instantly identified as farmers and civilization-builders every bit as much as bees are hive-builders. Our much longer tribal past was utterly forgotten.
Meanwhile, those few untouched tribal people still found today appear to be perfectly content with their lives, are not at war among themselves, and are:
not plagued by anguish, anxiety, depression, self-hatred, crime, madness, alcoholism, and drug addiction. They don’t complain of oppression and injustice. They don’t describe their lives as meaningless and empty. They’re not seething with hatred and rage. They don’t look into the sky, yearning for contact with gods and angels and prophets and alien spacemen and spirits of the dead. And they don’t wish someone would come along and tell them how to live. This is because they already know how to live [much as bees and badgers do]…
[Moreover, their physical fitness, dental health, and mental health tend to be far superior when compared to members of modernity.]
Takers had to destroy this knowledge in order to assert control and rule. Hubris told them they could replace the knowledge with something even better. Millions of laws and distracting pursuits later, we’re still trying and failing to get it right. The result is a whirlwind of innovation: locking up food; extreme inequality, famine, crime, hierarchy, market economics, a sixth mass extinction—as a very partial list.
Major religions sprung up to account for the broken suffering of the world. It was at least clear that something was profoundly wrong.
A Goddamned Pride Thing (118)
Ishmael clarifies that he is in no way insinuating that we go back to being hunter-gatherers: even a dozen Earths would not accommodate 6 billion human hunter-gatherers. But we can learn a great deal from them: we can learn how and why that lifestyle worked, without the need for an alien visit.
Takers somehow (naively) assumed they could invent a way of living that worked.
You can’t just slap something together and expect it to work as well as a system that has been tested and refined for three million years.
The Leaver way came into being by working from the start, building on many millions of years of evolution in a continuous manner. The discontinuity of modernity builds on no vetted legacy. The systems of modernity (going back 10,000 years) have not been tested to work well for people, from which we erroneously conclude that things would go okay if only people were better. A system inexpertly designed for imaginary, idealized people won’t work well for actual, real people. Efforts to punish, inspire, and educate people into being better than humans hasn’t panned out. Leavers, meanwhile, had systems for dealing with people as they are, which worked well for people. Gee, what if the principal flaw is in a notional system [hurled out of meat-brains] rather than in people?
Julie squirms a bit until she puts her finger on the fact that while wisdom from an alien species might be welcomed, our pride prevents us from tolerating wisdom from “savages” of past ways. Ishmael suggests that Leavers would not necessarily be able to articulate the theory behind their actions, any more than an average member of modernity could articulate why we lock up our food. It’s just obvious to the acculturated that this is a reasonable thing to do. Essentially no successful strategies in the living world are practiced with explicit knowledge of how and why they work: they just do, and their success is why they exist. We would do well to appreciate what leads to success.
Leaver ways sat in plain sight the whole time, but very few Takers were at all interested: obsolete dreck. Now that extinction threatens, more people will be interested in how humans managed not to devour the world for millions of years.
People of modernity are trapped in a prison that they themselves enable, each generation preparing their own version of the prison to stay within. Breaking out requires installing a new operating system: teaching the next generation something entirely different [or allowing them to teach themselves, in rejection of the wishes of failed generations]. Culture only propagates if people subscribe to it. If people on Earth lost faith in the current culture, they would not bother teaching it to the next generation, and it could vanish surprisingly quickly.
School Daze (130)
A 12-year-old doesn’t take much convincing that school is dumb. Any excuse to miss school seems worth it: even the sniffles! Mass-produced education (stratified, parallel, rigid, deadline-driven) quickly teaches students an important lesson: don’t ask questions and derail the machine. Just shut up and pretend the learning is working.
By their early teens, kids in Leaver cultures acquire all of the basic skills relevant to their way of life by simple exposure, curiosity, relevance, and rotating, informal “apprentice” relationships. If disaster hit and wiped out the elders, the teenagers would have gained enough knowledge (and not a trivial amount!) to carry on successfully. By contrast, our kids emerge from school at 18 years old, and have almost zero self-sufficient survival skills: they utterly depend on the system, and require jobs to access the food that’s under lock and key.
Our educational system purports to be preparing kids for life, but really it is structured to give kids something to do while holding them out of the job market—ever longer, as trends go. It’s a win–win for the market: don’t saturate the job market, and create a decade-long consumer class spending their parents’ money.
Retention of pedagogical material is abysmal, no matter the dwell time [I can attest], yet exams kind-of go okay, somehow. This is exactly what one expects when the subject matter has no obvious immediate application to the context of the student’s life.
Just as in the case of blaming modernity’s failures on intrinsic flaws in people (rather than a flawed system), educational woes are blamed on lazy students, incompetent teachers, stingy politicians, but never the conceptual structure—which is unquestionably correct.
Then there’s a mismatch problem. The market can’t tolerate everyone in top jobs. If our educational system were truly excellent in its ostensible goal, students would be too well-prepared for most actual jobs, and the market can’t have that. Entry-level jobs need to be filled. Excessive leap-frogging creates resentment and instability.
Meanwhile, teaching survival skills would counteract the essential leverage of locking up food. Someone who can easily acquire food without a job won’t bother getting a job. Thus, the perceived failings of the educational system are more feature than bug. Only a tiny fraction of students (e.g., graduate students) crucially rely on their education, in practice.
School Daze II (146)
Kids are natural learners: curious, incessant questioners. They absorb any/all languages they’re exposed to with little deliberate effort. Just try to hold them back! For a few years of school, they soak up useful knowledge and skills like sponges. Only later does school become tedious and seemingly pointless (because largely it is: designed to hold them out of the job market). When a kid wants to learn something, they do so quickly and often retain it for life.
Tribal educational systems are so effortless and invisible that their people might not even acknowledge that they have an educational “system.” Kids create their own curricula—driven by fascination and an urge to imitate—and adults are on hand to guide and channel interests. [Play mimics adult activities, so that the “work” of adults becomes an extension/perfection of life-long “play.”] Each child’s educational path is unique to them, and it isn’t essential that every child receives the whole cultural package so much as every generation does [with some redundancy].
Ishmael offers to Julie a parable about migrating blue-winged teals trying to enforce a scientific (rather than intuitive) approach to the question of when to migrate (the effort is a total flop). Natural selection has shaped incredibly good instincts tuned for actual survival in the actual real world. The situation is too complex to hand over to the spare capacity of puny meat-brains. Children possess a natural instinct to learn all that is (apparently) needed for survival. For a Leaver child, it’s a considerable amount that takes a decade to absorb, and it sticks because it’s immensely relevant. Meanwhile school learning fails to stick because it’s filler material—and the kids know this, deep down.
Unschooling the World (159)
Like many systems associated with modernity, educational design is guided by utopian fantasy: for a people that do not exist. The systems work better for businesses than they do for people. For us, the first 4–5 years of life still look like the tribal system: free exploration in widening circles. Then it’s the slammer (institutionalized).
Turn a kid loose in a new environment and they’ll buzz around learning how everything there works—also eager to help adults with tasks. It’s in our DNA.
But “free range” education will never be implemented in a culture that values business more than people. Home schooling doesn’t address the problem: still regimented, scripted lessons (not curiosity-driven), and sequestered rather than having access to the wider world and crucial social development.
Wealth, Taker Style (168)
Takers imagine that they started from scratch, having to invent everything (poorly) on their own. But that’s only because the treasure of Leaver culture had already been tossed. It takes a gorilla to see from the outside the relative values of different ways of living.
Our economic system serves as one of many examples of “invented-from-scratch” systems that don’t work well for people—many of whom live “at the bottom” while a few others enjoy wealth and comfort. Socialism was nominally imagined to address this state, which is quite an old one among Takers. The fall of the Soviet Union was taken gleefully as vindication of capitalist superiority: a preference even among the poor that at least one might dream of becoming rich (and if you didn’t it’s no-one’s fault but your own, as equal opportunity is imagined to be open to all).
The Taker engine is drawn as an arrangement connecting MAKE products and GET products in a never-ending cycle. Locking up food is what kick-started this cycle. In Leaver cultures, products—pots, for instance—are made for individual use, but not manufactured as commodities to be exchanged. Once food was locked up, having more pots meant more food and more everything.
The Leaver economy can be characterized as the never-ending cycle between GIVE support and GET support. While modernists make and sell a gazillion products to support feeding, clothing, educating, and regulating people, Leavers accomplish the same ends without any visible effort: no making and selling.
A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that.
Inequality is a feature, not a bug. Capitalism is only a recent highly-efficient engine running the same Taker enterprise that has persisted for millennia. Then comes a great metaphor to describe the failure of communists to make the changes they dreamed of:
They thought they could stop the merry-go-round if they captured all the horses. But of course the horses don’t make the carousel go round. The horses are just passengers like the rest of you.
[This is why toppling governments, oil companies, or drug kingpins never changes the underlying dynamic of demand that powers the system.]
Revisiting the inevitable concentration of locked-up wealth, the distinction is made that product-based economies exhibit this feature. Julie asks about Aztecs and Incas: they locked up the food and concentrated wealth, so were they Leavers or Takers? Ishmael puts them in transition between. The key Taker trait they lacked was thinking everyone in the world ought to live their way. Aztecs would conquer a territory without imposing their lifestyles on inhabitants. They were not proselytizers.
Wealth, Leaver Style (179)
Leaver wealth does not tend to accumulate: “not […] because Leavers are nicer people than you are,” but because it’s a different type of wealth that cannot accumulate. No one can lock it up and own it.
By Taker standards, Leavers have essentially zero wealth (possessions), and are thus the poorest of the poor. But what they do have is “cradle-to-grave security for each and every member.” Everyone possesses the means to live in their environment, and “the only time anyone goes hungry is when everyone is going hungry.” This isn’t because they’re superior humans, but because of simple material realities. Without food stores, everyone is hit with the same shortage, and everyone is out scraping for food. If one finds food, the best strategy is to share so-as to keep more “boots on the ground” searching for lucky breaks. [Individual survival is not a “thing” in such circumstances.] Humans are not the only animals that work in groups and share food. It’s what works for these species, while selfish hoarding does not and is discarded as an evolutionary failure.
Cradle-to-grave security can’t be hoarded. Individual survival depends on group survival. Takers can often make inroads with the young by the allure of shiny baubles, interrupting transfer of knowledge from the elders and essentially killing the group. But while the group persists, its members enjoy the tremendous (hoard-proof) wealth of having no fear of crime or of being left out or of carrying burdens alone. A problem to one is a problem to all, and all participate in its mitigation.
Takers try to buy these services via police, school systems, elder-care, etc. Despite obvious failings, more money is spent each year trying to improve fundamentally-flawed and failing systems.
When Julie asked for some synthesis, Ishmael offered:
If you want to survive on this planet, Julie, the people of your culture are going to have to start listening to your neighbors in the community of life. Incredible as it may seem, you don’t know it all. And, incredibly as it may seem, you don’t have to invent it all.
Enough with modernity’s flimsy contrivances! Humans came into being enjoying cradle-to-grave community support, non-commodified. The Community of Life holds answers for how to live, already tested and worked out. We’ll need to listen and begin living differently to avoid the worst.
Less Is Not Always More (187)
People of Taker culture fear the suggestion that big changes are necessary. The implicit assumption is that Takers have it best (near-perfection), while Leavers suffer the misery of having nothing. The “understanding” is that evolution inexorably leads to “better,” and that giving up anything would by definition be going backwards, reverting toward misery. Therefore, if saving the world involves giving up anything, then the deal is off: the world can’t be saved [so we’re doomed—caught in the monkey trap].
Rather than focusing on what we give up, we could focus on what we already have given up that works well for people. The word “wealth” refers to a state of well-being (just as warmth is the state of being warm). We are actually quite poor in many important respects. We need to learn to demand the sort of “wealth that aboriginal people all over the world are willing to die to defend”—the wealth that Takers foolishly discarded in trade for baubles and the conceit that they rule the world.
It’s completely in our power to seize the available, but most in our culture don’t have any inkling that other ways of living have worked (and still work) very well for people—imagining only misery and fear of that unknown existence [See Chapter 11 of Ishmael for a smashing of this fallacy]. As humans are consuming the world, the only way to save the planet is to save humans from ourselves. To do that, more people must be able to see that other options exist.
My God, It Isn’t Me! (196)
Ishmael tells the story of Jeffrey, a talented and affluent youth who had every opportunity in life but could not find meaning or purpose. His wanderings [reminding me a bit of Christopher McCandless; see related episode on Human Nature Odyssey] continued year after year, full of support and encouragement from family and many friends until one day he ended it all for himself. He was only unusual in our society in that he had the means and support to be indulged. Scads of youth are not at all inspired by career choices actually available to them, but when the food is locked up, they resign themselves to uninspiring jobs.
Some choose not to conform, learning how to survive on waste streams and leakages in the system. We call them homeless. [Some fraction—I don’t know how large— of homeless would rather remain in this internally-supportive subculture than conform to the ways of “the man.”]
For every Jeffrey-like tragedy, thousands of despondent, destitute youths perish without much notice. These poor individuals (and Jeffrey in his journals) constantly ask themselves “What’s wrong with me?” Others in society ask “What’s wrong with you?” Well, maybe nothing. Maybe it’s no flaw to find lack of meaning in Takerville.
Revolutionaries (205)
What would be so bad about allowing homeless people to coexist, content to take what we discard? Why not try new schemes: new ways of living; make space for others who are willing to try.
Ishmael has encouraged innovation before. In contrast to the Industrial Revolution—concerned with the invention of things— we need an innovative revolution centered on people and how they live.
Ishmael details the rich heritage of incremental advances preceding James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine, and the incredible diversity of uses found for coal and its process byproducts. The point is that such revolutions contain millions of facets, communications, and elaborations feeding off each other.
The Industrial Revolution was not designed as a utopian program, but simply unfolded of its own impetus. It didn’t depend on people being better than they are (like laws, school, governance). The ideas that flowed out were not locked up: virtually anyone could try their hand at improvements or alternatives. For clarification:
I’m not recommending its goals or its shameful features—its relentless materialism, its appalling wastefulness, its enormous appetite for irreplaceable resources, its readiness to flow wherever greed took it.
Only the unimpeded manner in which it transpired is relevant as a model. A similar “outpouring of human creativity” is needed to see how living differently isn’t about “giving up” anything truly important.
Of chief significance is the recognition that what we have is failing miserably and a willingness to try bold experiments that break conventional norms. Others will watch, learn, and try variations. What if we tried turning kids loose in mixed-age groups to learn whatever they were drawn to each week? Once free of market dictates, many paths are possible.
A Look into The Future (214)
For an inherently unsustainable system, revolution must happen. But only fantasy revolutions involve trading likes for dislikes [see how tangled]. The revolution must employ a positive vision. It has to promise something better than the present, even if evaluated by entirely different values. It would need to trade toys for real wealth of the type Leavers enjoyed.
Unlike inventors in the Industrial Revolution, who had no applicable templates from the past, we do at least have access to a tremendous and relevant history of living differently. The highly-evolved, optimized Erratic Retaliator strategy promoted regional diversity and the idea that “There is no one right way for people to live.” In part, this means that bows and arrows and “living in caves” need not be part-and-parcel of a “New Tribal Revolution.”
Ishmael lays out a “Seven-Point Plan” that captures aspects we might expect in a revolution (using the Industrial Revolution as a guide). Such a revolution will:
- not happen all at once, monolithically;
- be achieved incrementally, people feeding off others’ ideas and trials;
- be distributed and leaderless;
- not be driven by governmental or religious organizations: organic;
- set no established target end-point;
- not unfold according to some plan;
- repay in kind: support begets support.
Following the principle that there is no one right way to live, the revolutionaries won’t bother outlawing Taker ways: that’s not at all how it’s conceived. The comparatively inferior Taker way, locking up food and all, will simply fade as an undesirable way to live. Open the prison door, and most will decide to pursue freedom. Those few choosing to remain within can suit themselves.
Intentional communities may have good intentions, but are still operating within the Taker prison, as Takers basically own the earth at present. Intentional communities tend to play by Taker rules rather than live an outlaw life like gangs or cults might [note culture is a mature cult]. Consider that in gangs and cults, membership is worth dying for.
Julie dislikes comparing Leavers to cults and gangs. Ishmael chalks this up to our tendency to categorize things as purely good or evil, without allowing confusing mixtures. Cults often attracted people willing to trade earthly possessions for a sense of deep belonging and security. This deeply-human urge should not be discounted as crazy, but friction with Taker society inevitably arose and escalated, making continuance of cults non-viable [much as Takers cannot abide Erratic Retaliation]. Since cults are not tolerated, only crazy individuals with delusions of grandeur tend to start them, which poisons the outcome. But what they tap into in people is not at all crazy: it’s part of who we really are and always have been.
The Amish are compared to a cult, but one that is not “centered on a lunatic or a con man,” and is tolerated by Taker society [because they are Takers themselves, fundamentally].
Another example of a tribal lifestyle in our midst is a traveling circus. The close-knit group enjoys solidarity, a sort of freedom, and nomadic stimulation. All pitch in to carry out the many and varied tasks involved in setting up, performing, and tearing down. It’s a diverse family of cultural misfits that support each other.
The overall lesson is that labels short-circuit critical evaluation, by triggering automatic good/bad associations. Operationally, cults and tribes share much in common, and it’s the operational aspects that we want to emphasize. Don’t let Taker-dictated negative associations on a label or megalomaniac aggrandizement obscure our ability to see what people like about unconventional arrangements. Open the prison bars and let people find what they want.
The Man from Africa (227)
I’ll only give away that man referred to in this chapter title is Art Owens—the carnival owner from the end of the first book. He’s a central character in the schemes that occupy the rest of this story. As in my coverage of The Story of B, I’ll leave out the dramatic plot line as encouragement to read for yourself. New light shines on the unsettling ending of Ishmael. As fine as the rest of My Ishmael is, the primary lessons have come to an end, and my notebook sat idle through these ten final chapters as I kept turning pages.
I thank Alex Leff for reading a draft of this post and offering valuable suggestions.