AUSTIN, TX & THE
FATE OF THE WORLD
[Quinn interview, part 2]
by Lance Pierce
You said that when Ishmael
first came out you felt in some way that your destiny had been fulfilled, but
you’ve had to revise that since then. If the mystery is perpetual, are you realizing
now that this fulfillment probably will never be fully attained?
I don’t know. It’s possible. It will be
fascinating to watch. For so long I was fixated on solving the problem that is solved in Ishmael,
that when it was done, I just heaved such a sigh of relief. It didn’t occur to me
that there was another problem to be solved that was just as great or greater and was only
suggested in Ishmael.
Can you define the
problems, the one that was solved in Ishmael, and the one that The Story of B
addresses?
The problem in Ishmael is: how did we get here? We
have our cultural mythology that explains how we got here and that says the world was made
for us and we were made to conquer and rule it. This would have worked out fine, except
for the fact that supposedly there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, which is
why it is all screwed up. But we’re working on these problems and hopefully we will
someday solve all these problems, and then everything will turn out to be just the way
it’s supposed to be, which is paradise on earth - for humans.
Now, this is not how we got to be this way. This is not
how we got here. So I went back and I said, here is where we began - about three million
years ago. In the past, people lived really the way other creatures on the planet lived.
They took whatever is given to them. If there was deer there, they killed it. If there was
no deer, they didn’t kill it. But now we think we have discovered a better way, and
as we pursued this new vision, we developed a new way of looking at the earth, saying,
"Well, whatever is here, we can do whatever we please with, and if there is a
species, for example, that we don’t want to be here, we can destroy it. This is our
right. We will foster the life of the species that we prefer and we will get rid of the
others." It wasn’t people who did this...it was people of one culture. There
were agriculturists all over the world, but they did not have this particular vision that
the world had been given to them to do whatever they pleased with it. One key to this is
that they stayed home. The Aztecs, for example, conquered the people around them, but they
stayed home. They did not turn the people around them into Aztecs. They stayed where they
were. What we did, though, was to overgraze the middle east, desertify the middle east,
and move out. Of course, we moved upward into Europe, all across the continents, and
finally into the Americas, where we arrived in the 15th century.
I present a new paradigm of human history. The old
paradigm says for three million years people went along living the same way, accomplishing
nothing, and then about ten thousand years ago, people suddenly decided to live a
particular way, and they did. Quinn’s paradigm is, people lived for about three
million years a certain way and still live that way to the present moment. But
about ten thousand years ago, one culture began to live a different way and
developed a distinct, peculiar, unusual, and unshared cultural vision for our own. Because
our vision gave us tremendous power, we were more powerful than any other people in the
world, ever, and we spread that power all over the planet, because the surpluses in food
and power also fueled a population explosion.
In The Story of B, what I set out to do was to
destroy the false paradigm of human culture that our children learn in school,
universally, everywhere. In Ishmael, I presented the Taker story. In The Story
of B, one of my goals was to reinforce an idea in Ishmael that we are subject
to the same laws as all other species. One of the things that you will hear from people in
our culture, that I hear from people all the time who write to me, is that we have put
ourselves outside of nature. This is a deeply embedded notion.
But it is quite impossible for us to live outside of
nature, and we do not live outside of nature, which is why we’re in trouble. If we
could live outside of nature it would be no problem. The fact is we live inside
nature, we have always lived inside nature and we cannot live anywhere else. Because we
live inside nature and are subject to all of its laws, we are fast on the road towards
making ourselves extinct, as any other species would that lives this way. This point was
made in Ishmael, but was made much more thoroughly, much more forcefully, in The
Story of B.
One of the laws to which we are subject is that as a
species the controlling factor in our growth is food availability. We know that this is
true of any species. There is a mechanism in the natural community that governs
population. When there is a decline in a food population, in vegetation perhaps, then
there will be a decline in the population that feeds on that population. So if the
greenery goes down, the deer go down. And because the deer are not eating as much, the
greenery eventually comes back and the deer will come back. And as the deer population
grows, the green population declines. And as that declines the deer population declines.
What you have is a balance that goes on forever. Of course it is infinitely more complex
than that, but this way of putting it is understandable and absolutely true.
Now the human population lives under exactly the same
regime. During most of its lifetime - nearly three million years - when food was
available, our population increased. When it was not available, our population went down.
So if you go to old desolate areas in Africa, you will find it very sparsely populated by
Stone Age peoples. When food is plentiful, their population will go up, and when it is not
plentiful their population will go down.
What we did, of course, from the bounty of our great
generosity, was go ahead and say, "Hey folks! We can show you how to increase your
population. We can show you better methods of agriculture. We can help you have a
population explosion here." And we did. And now they’re starving. Then we say,
"Oh, my god, we better rush in some food! We’ve got to keep these people from
starving!" Agriculture gives us the means of defeating this negative feedback system.
A negative feedback system is like the system which
governs your furnace. When it’s warm the thermostat shuts your furnace off, and turns
it on if it gets cold. This is negative feedback. Positive feedback, of course, is the
opposite. If you had positive feedback on your thermostat, then if it got cold it would
turn your furnace off, and if it got hot it would turn your furnace on. The hotter it got
the higher the furnace would go. Of course, positive feedback is always destructive.
By adopting a certain kind of agriculture we were able to
defeat the negative feedback mechanism that controls population growth in the natural
community. Now we can say, "Hey, we can have as much food as we want." So, we
say, "Oh, we’ve got a lot of people here, we better grow some more food."
The result of this is that you have more people. And then we say again, "Oh, we have
more people, we’d better grow more food." Well, more people, more food, more
people, more food, more people, more food, more people, more food...This has gone on for
ten thousand years.
Space is the other constraint. What we did was to move out
from the east to all parts of the world. Every year we make more food for more people, and
we say, "Oh, we can, if we want to, make more food and have less people." This
is like saying, we can put more food in a park and have less deer. It just doesn’t
work that way!
The thing that people don’t realize is that we behave
as a species. Individually, you can say, "Yes, I will not have any children."
And you probably won’t. But if you continue to provide more food for us, we will grow
as a species, just like any other species. This is the sense in which I mean we are
subject to the same laws as any other species. When we fall off a building, we fall to the
center of the earth just like any other animal. We must not only follow the same
aerodynamic laws, we must follow all of the same laws. We’re not exempt from
any of them. This is something people don’t want to hear. And this of course goes
against traditional Christian teaching, which exempts us from the same laws as other
species.
The whole idea of birth control is that we can go on the
way we’ve been going. People say we can have more food this year, but we can have
fewer children if we can control birth. But I’m saying birth control is a futile
strategy. If you’re going to control human population, you’re going to have to
control the food. No one wants to hear that one. People say, "Oh, you shouldn’t
say that."
A common argument is to
say we cannot let these people starve. We cannot let them starve.
Yeah, the idea of "letting" is an indication of
how godly we have become. We let. We let the rains fall, we let the clouds form, we let
people live, we let people die.
You wrote Ishmael,
in a manner of speaking, over a period of twelve years, over eight different versions. Do
you feel you were driven to write this book, that you had to write this book? That you
were destined to?
Well, first, it was the thing that I knew I could do
uniquely, that no one else could really do. If I didn’t do it, I was never going to
do the one thing that I was born to do. At the time, yes, I did think I was destined to do
it. I felt that this was the meaning of the dream, and the meaning of the experience at
Gethsemani, and that I was playing a part in the development of this planet and that the
gods had set things up or picked me out to articulate something that needed to be
articulated.
You see, the Leaver peoples of the world have been sitting
on these things forever, and they’ve been saying them to us forever, but because they
don’t have a college education, they don’t talk our lingo, nobody ever listened
and nobody ever heard them. Everybody discounted them. They thought it was very pretty,
thought it was very charming, but that it was all bullshit. And it took someone like me,
someone inside the Taker culture, to make the Taker people see it and acknowledge it. So I
did feel destined or selected to do that.
Not an easy task, because
while we believe that the world was here for us, don’t we also believe that the world
was not here for the Leavers, in a manner of speaking, that we are the guardians of the
world and the Leavers are not?
Yeah. I see what you mean. (thinks for a moment)
See, the mythology can’t deal with current events. Our own mythology started about
ten thousand years ago with our culture. With the development of our particular strange
agricultural revolution and with the development of our particular civilization in the
near east, progressing to the far east, and then spreading into Europe...during this time
it was forgotten that there was any other way to live. In The Story of B I call
this The Great Forgetting. The intellectual founders of our culture were literally unaware
that there was any other way to live. They thought that humans had been born growing their
food and building cities. Aristotle had no way of remotely realizing that people had lived
quite a different way for quite a long time. Working back from what they saw in the world,
they said, "Well, the earliest known cities are there in the middle east, those are
the most ancient cultures, and they go back about four thousand years, and so one can
assume that people appeared on this planet not very long before that and began building
what we see here." Now, in the 18th century and the 19th century when paleontology
began to change this vision, people began to realize that the human race was much older.
When paleontologists forced us to rethink the history of
the human race, people of our culture were eventually compelled to see that, yes, humans
have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years, and they
were not living like us. They were living like these despised primitive people that we
still see from time to time. But, you see, there’s no real mythological way of
handling this news, and so it was just put aside. "These people don’t count.
This part of history doesn’t count. This is merely prehistory. History is what began
when we began, when we Takers began, that’s history. Before that, these people
don’t matter."
You mean instead of
changing our mind or revising our view in light of this new knowledge...
Right. And going back and saying, "We have to go back
and throw out everything we started with and rethink the whole thing." That’s my
task, my personal task, and that’s what I’ve done in Ishmael and much
more successfully in The Story of B. It is to go back there and say, "What
would it have looked like to Aristotle if he had known that humanity was three million
years old? How would he have dealt with that? What would he have thought?" He would
not have thought what he did then. Nor would any of the founders of our civilizational
culture think what they thought, if they had known that humanity had lived a different way
for three million years.
One of the reasons for despair among people is because the
assumption is if we don’t know how to solve the problem, then there’s no way to
solve it. We are the smart people here, we are the favored, we are the chosen of God. God
didn’t start speaking to humanity until he began to talk to us about 3,000 years ago.
Before that God was silent. This is our cultural mythology. And so whenever we come up to
a problem we say, "Oh, sure, prisons don’t work, we know that, but it’s the
only solution there is. We don’t know of another one, so there isn’t
another one." Makes sense, doesn’t it? And almost everything we currently use
doesn’t work. Government doesn’t work. Laws don’t work. Everyone knows that
laws don’t stop crime...they only address it after it happens. We say, "Thou
shalt not use drugs anymore." It doesn’t work!
But where else would we look? Where else would we look for
solutions except in our own past, the Taker past? History. We say nothing existed before
that. All we’ve got is a big vacuum there. And instead, I’m saying, "Well,
look at how people got along for three million years, folks. Perhaps there is some wisdom
there that we could learn something from." And in fact, people who lived that way,
three million years ago, not only lived very successfully and lived well, but people who still
live that way think of themselves as living well. They’re very reluctant to join us
and to live the way we live. They think we live terribly.
I can understand why they
would think that.
Yeah. Given a chance to see it as opposed to it just
gradually happening...such as has happened among the Eskimos for example. Their contact
with us has been gradual. They were subverted over a period of time by the offer of trade,
and lost their values a little bit every generation so that now it’s mostly gone...as
opposed to suddenly taking a bulldozer and driving it into the rain forests of Brazil.
People who live there are Stone Age people, pure and simple, and all they have heard about
us are rumors. They can look at us and say, "We would rather die than live like you
do." And they do. They die. We kill them. They fight us to the death, whereas the
Eskimos, because it was done gradually say, "Well, it’s not very appealing, but
it’s not so horrible that I would say I’m ready to die."
Would you say most
takeovers are done gradually, as opposed to...?
No, not now, most are brutal, except in areas where we
have absolutely no interest. The Kalahari Desert, for example. Who wants it?
So most takeovers, then,
are driven by economic factors.
Well, it’s driven by the same thing that’s
driven it from the beginning. When we arrived in this country, we said, "Oh, this is
our land here." We planted flags and said this belongs to the Queen or King of
England at that time, or to Spain, and people here were just out of luck. So they moved in
and said, "You can join us and live this way or we will kill you. Take your pick. Or
we will set aside some land and you can live there." It depends on the situation.
There is no prime land left that is still inhabited by Leaver peoples - that’s all
been taken away - and it is a signal to us that God is on our side and that we have the
One Right Way because we can kill them and they can not kill us back. That proves we have
the better way.
Why do you think we
don’t see the flaws in our own paradigm? Are we blinded by our success?
Mythology says the flaw is in humans, not in the system. I
will hear from people who read Ishmael and write to me almost universally and say,
"You finally made it clear why humans are no good." I have to write back and say
that’s not what I said, over and over again. It’s not humans who’ve
done this. It’s the people of one culture. Everywhere else in the world people
went on living exactly the same way they always had. This is the Great Revelation that I
have to bring, and this is what puts it in startling contrast to every history book that
children use throughout our culture. So the problem becomes a different one than saying,
"How will we change people?" You can’t change people. It becomes a problem
of one culture.
Perhaps an easier one to
solve.
I think so, yeah. Because it has nothing to do with the
nature of humanity. We are not this way by nature; there’s no evidence for that at
all. If you had to look at what we were by nature, you could say that we were
hunter-gatherers by nature. But we are capable of not being hunter-gatherers, as well. It
doesn’t mean it’s in our nature to not be hunter-gatherers, or that it is or
isn’t in our nature to build civilizations.
In Ishmael, you
gave more than one definition for "Leavers." The one, though, that seemed the
most fitting is that Leavers are people who leave the care of their lives in the hands of
the gods.
I would say rather that they leave the rule of the world
to the gods. That includes them, of course.
And the Takers, of course,
take that control. I got the sense, though, that you weren’t quite happy with those
terms, as if they didn’t convey exactly what you wanted them to.
(laughs) It isn’t that they don’t convey
what I want, it’s almost that they convey too much. It would almost be better to have
used nonsense syllables for them.
As opposed to words that
might be loaded with some meaning or the other.
Exactly. Taking is viewed as a naughty thing. And leaving
is now viewed as a good thing. I’ve had people "improve" on them and say,
"Well, there are Givers and Takers." Well, this is not what I’m talking
about at all! So there is an implied virtue and viciousness that I’m unhappy about,
that Takers are a vicious people, and that it is vicious to be a Taker. That’s bad in
itself, too, because people will write to me and let me know that they believe that they
have become Leavers by reading my book. They believe that being a Leaver is a matter of
something in your heart, that it is an attitude thing. It’s not. It’s a
lifestyle. You become a Leaver by changing your lifestyle. It’s an entirely different
problem. You could become a Buddhist by changing your mind. You cannot become a Leaver by
changing your mind. So I’ve never been quite content with those terms.
It’s very natural to
try to project things you want into the term. For example, to say that one of the basic
qualities that Leavers seem to have is that they live in accord with their environment...
I don’t even see virtue in attempting to define it.
To say that they live in accord with their environment to me is as meaningless as saying
that cockroaches are in accord with their environment, or rattlesnakes, or sea urchins.
Well, yeah, but it isn’t something you would maybe have sat down and said,
"Well, how would we live in accord with this place here?"
So it’s not a
deliberate intent; it’s just the natural condition of things...
But, you see, so do we; we live in accord with our
environment. We are unable to stop living in nature. I think it would be very useful if
people will stop making decisions along those lines. "The Leavers live close to
nature and we do not." It’s a useless way of thinking about it.
go to page 4 (part
three of interview)
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