AUSTIN, TX & THE
FATE OF THE WORLD
[Quinn interview, part 3]
by Lance Pierce
Well, it is difficult for
some people to grasp. How can we be living in nature and yet be so out of balance with it,
so destructive toward it, so callous of it?
Because there is slack in the system. This is an essential
concept. The same is true of the thermostat. There has to be slack in the system,
otherwise, the furnace will go on and on and on and on, and destroy itself in a very short
time. So, there has to be 8 or 10 degrees of slack. Somewhere on the thermostat it will
stop for a while and then the temperature will go down 4, 5 or 6 degrees until it goes on
past the ideal point before the furnace kicks in again.
Our system is a huge and extremely complex system, and a
tough system, also. We have inflicted a lot of damage on it, and it can obviously stand a
lot more, but it will eventually reach the end of the slack, and then it will very quickly
go to pieces. It will give us as much slack as is possible, but you will be eliminated
very quickly when the end comes.
As a culture, you mean.
Well, by now, if a calamity occurs it will wipe out our
culture but it will also wipe out most if not all of humanity as well, because most
humanity belongs to our culture. Still, people living in the Kalahari probably will
survive; it depends on how catastrophic it is. What we need to be clear on is that once we
topple the ecological system of which we are a part, all of the people and all of the
species like us are probably going to go. We will become extinct. When I say like us, I
mean, the primates are going to go, the elephants are going to go, the cows are going to
go, the antelopes are going to go, the rabbits are going to go, probably all mammals will
go. Probably most of the reptiles or all the reptiles will go. However, the world will
still turn and at the base, this wouldn’t even be noticed. Life will go on.
We are, in fact, more vulnerable than those further down
the evolutionary scale. We talk about how hard it is to stamp out cockroaches. You just
can’t do it! But there are lots of things that we can stamp out. We can stamp out
lions. We can stamp out elephants. It would be easy. The estimate is that we’re
killing off 40 to 250 species a day. One of these days, we’re going to be one of
them.
Funny thing is - and I think this is typical - I was
invited to be the keynote speaker at a renowned forum on population. I kept asking them,
"Are you sure you want me doing this?" and they kept saying, "Yes,
definitely. You are just what we’re looking for." So I prepared my material and
brought some free literature to give away, some of which was incorporated into The
Story of B. I made all the same points we’re making here.
How did it go?
Disastrous. In fact, it became the scene in Stuttgart in The
Story of B; what happened there ended up as part of the novel. They basically said,
"You have not said anything. What you said does not exist. There is nothing here to
think about, there is nothing to talk about, what you said doesn’t apply to
anything."
The most dangerous thing I’m saying in The Story
of B is this material on population and I keep showing it to biologists and saying,
"Is this right? Have I got this right?" They say, "Absolutely, you’ve
got it right." Wow, this is incredible! Biologists know this, ecologists know this,
but the populous doesn’t know it. Historians don’t know it, social scientists
don’t know it, lots of us don’t know it. When they hear it, they just say
"Pigshit! This is nonsense I will not accept!" And you can say, "This is
just biology, folks," and they will say, "Nope I didn’t hear it. No, no,
no, this is completely irrelevant."
Which leads us to another
topic that I was wanting to touch on...you’ve received a lot of feedback through
correspondence and other sources. Many readers of Ishmael and Providence,
for whom you’ve tried to clarify a lot of the issues, still have misconceptions and
misperceptions about what you are saying.
I know, and I can’t nail them all down. People are
actually debating why they should even care. It is just amazing to me. I answered a
question not long ago. These were people who were asking, "Why should I care? Why
should I work to save the human race? Why is the human race worth saving?" What I
said was, "Ishmael does not at any time say why the world is worth saving or
even that the world is worth saving, and if you don’t think life is worth
saving, then find something else to do. It’s not for everybody." I mean, if it
doesn’t seem to you worth saving, what’s the problem? But this person was really
upset - really upset.
As a matter of fact, if I
remember correctly, all Ishmael did say was, "If you do this, this is what will
happen."
Yes. I don’t - I can’t - provide motives for
people. I just don’t think that way. It occurred to me at 3 o’clock this
morning; I was awake and thinking about this. And I was thinking that many people - not
necessarily this person, but many - are like someone who goes into a restaurant. They
can’t find anything they want on the menu and so they say, "I want you to cook
me a meal to my specifications." But then they get angry if people in the restaurant
won’t do this. People say, "Well, I can’t find anything on your menu that I
want, so cook me a meal to my specifications." Of course, I can’t do that. I
don’t have time to cook a meal to the specifications of everyone who has read Ishmael.
I’m good, but this is the menu, folks.
But that is what The Story of B is. It is, in
effect, a new menu - it has a whole new intellectual cuisine. And again, if you don’t
find anything you like in Ishmael or here, don’t expect me to come up with
something. I may, but it isn’t that I owe it to anyone - it can’t work that way.
So many people seem to say, "You can’t just say this. You can’t just say
that. You’ve got to do something for me." No, really I don’t. I’m
sorry...I can’t.
And yet, you continue to
make yourself available. Would you have changed that direction earlier if you had had this
foresight?
No. I would not. In hearing all of these things, all of
the questions that people ask and the thoughts they have, it compelled me to reassess what
I had given them in Ishmael and say, "Okay, here is what is missing. Here is
the cuisine I have to offer now. So The Story of B is a totally new offering. Providence
is not. Providence was people wanting to know how the book had come to be, and I
was glad to tell them. I enjoyed it; that is something that I wanted to do. But, the new
offering is in The Story of B.
One example is: "Does this mean we should all go out
and be hunter-gatherers?" Now that was the question that I got so many times from
people who read the first edition of Ishmael that I revised the book. So in the
second edition, the question is specifically answered - and the answer is no.
Ishmael says it is totally absurd to think of going
back and becoming hunter-gatherers. It is out of the question. You can’t have five
billion people on this planet going out and being hunter-gatherers; it would never work!
There is no such thing as "going back." It is the same with the people who talk
about putting the Great Plains back to the way they were some 400 years ago. It’s
ridiculous. It’s unevolutionary. It’s unbiological. Change is what evolution is
about. There is never any going back, never, never, never, never. You can’t go
counter to the flow of life, as if that was the good way; that was the perfect way
for life to go on forever and ever and ever, as if the world was finished ten thousand
years ago. That again is a cultural thing. In our culture, the world was finished 10,000
years ago. There are lions, bunches of giraffes, gazelles, geese, ducks. That was the
stock. God made this stock on this planet, here you are for all time.
But this was not final then; the Great Plains were not
finished, the Climax Forests were not climaxed. It is all going to change. It is all going
to change whether we are here or not.
And there are certain
other topics that people seem to have problems with over and over and over again. For
instance, technology. And, of course, one that seems to come up everywhere: agriculture.
I have said over and over that many Leaver peoples are
agriculturists. That message does not get heard, and that’s why it was necessary in The
Story of B to give a new name for our style of agriculture: Totalitarian
agriculture. We practice agriculture of a special kind. The Navajos did not practice
totalitarian agriculture. No one practiced totalitarian agriculture but us. It was our
way, our contribution to the world. I go into this in depth in B.
And as for technology, this is a knee-jerk reaction. This
is the Unabomer crap. It’s that, "Technology is a bad thing" that people
say. Well, the fact is, humans were technologists for 3 million years. It was not a bad
thing. Of course, we didn’t think of the first 3 million years of human life as the
life of technology, but technologists we are. We already had different kinds of
technologies and we did not go in to the big destructive technologies that we currently
use. Nobody was making a living as a technologist and nobody was making a living by
proving technologies. Nobody was hired to sit down and work on tools the way we are. But
technology is as much a part of humanity as laughter or story tellers. So don’t blame
it on technology, that is just so simple minded. People are looking for simple answers
when they go there.
Well, it’s one thing
that they can blame everything on. It seems that we need to think systemically. We need to
think about the system as a whole, but that is so counterintuitive for some...
One of the difficult things about my teachings is they do
not lend themselves to bumper stickers or billboards. And people try to reduce them to
bumper stickers and billboards and inevitably fail to get it. This is too complex for
that. No one has ever managed to reduce subatomic physics to a bumper sticker - or even a
set of Cliff notes. Ishmael is a book where you make new connections all the time
as it penetrates all of your reflexes and you begin to see in a new way. That’s
unusual. Not many people write books that you have to read many times, that you want to
read that many times.
Another book that shares
that quality is Illusions by Richard Bach, but the ideas there are of an different
nature, being individualistic rather than dealing with society. It’s a wonderful
book.
Yes, there is plenty of room for the internal exploration.
And you know, I suppose this is why the Celestine Prophecy is successful. It
continues that internal journey. But I keep trying to say to people, "I’m not
talking about an internal journey here. If you’re on an internal journey, good for
you. You go on. I’m talking about something else."
It’s not what people want to hear. They want to hear
about the other, you see. They say, "What counts here is my internal journey." I
say, "Forget your goddamned internal journey for awhile, because we have got to keep
this planet alive! We’ve got to keep it habitable so our children will have a place
to live. Your internal journey can wait. This can’t." There are people who are
ready to hear that, and there are people who are not ready to hear that.
But some readers out there
are getting what you’re saying - maybe not the whole mosaic, but perhaps large chunks
of it.
Yes. I think the way to look at it is as a mosaic. I think
I say it in Ishmael, but much more clearly in The Story of B, that you
can’t look at every single piece. You have to get an impression the first time, a
little more the second time, and more and more. I would be surprised if anyone who got the
book got a tremendous rush of discovery all at once. If you gave them a quiz and said,
"Well, what position was he taking by this? What is he saying about this? Where does
he stand here?" You would find out it is more impression than exact knowledge, but
this is a beginning.
And it also seems to be
received in a wide variety of ways. Where a person might see it as a great message of
hope, as I do, another might see it as a dismal message of doom.
They do, they do. It’s certainly the
"Rorschach" test in this way, that people who are depressed, get depressed when
they read Ishmael. (laughs) It happens every time.
Ishmael has
obviously had an impact. What do you think it has accomplished? We know, or we have a
general idea of what there is to be accomplished, but what do you think has been?
I think it’s created a seminal group who are aware
what the problem is. They don’t say "Oh, it’s technology," or
"Oh, it’s flawed humanity," because so long as you are thinking along those
lines we cannot make any progress. If you were to ask Sigmund Freud, five years after
publication of his first book, what he had accomplished, I presume he would have said
"Nothing." That’s because at that point probably a thousand people had read
his book. Yet, a century later everyone in the world has taken in those ideas. They have
filtered down, and filtered down, and filtered down, and they no longer even think of it
as Freudian. They don’t know it has anything to do with Freud, but his conception of
the human personality is so close to being universal in our culture, that people think
it’s just simply the truth.
Almost ambient in our
culture like many of the myths Ishmael addresses.
Absolutely. It’s sort of like if you drop something
it falls toward the center of the earth. Who could argue? That’s what I’m aiming
for exactly, and my rate of progress is a thousand times better than Freud’s.
I’m not writing for scholars, I have a different approach. The scholars are ignoring
me and they will go on ignoring me probably for some time because I’m not playing
their game. I’m not writing for them. I’m a popular writer, so I don’t
deserve their attention.
Well, their world has not changed in a hundred years. To
go that way would take another century for these ideas to become commonplace in the world.
I had to go the other way. I had to go directly to the people, and let the people spread
the message instead of waiting for the ideas to trickle down from the academic top the way
Freudianism did.
So that’s what I want...when people look at these
ideas as no longer me, when they don’t even know where they came from, and the name Ishmael
is meaningless to them...when they all know this stuff, then it will be done.
So your vision for Ishmael
is that it becomes ambient in our culture...
Absolutely.
...and replaces the
current cultural vision. Some would say, quite a lofty goal.
(laughs) Yeah, right!
But that’s the only thing that will save us. What
Mother Culture says is "Wait. Others will take care of this for you. Government
leaders will take care of this for you. Industrial leaders will take care of this for
you."
I don’t believe it. I’m not going to wait. We
can’t wait. The six billion of us cannot wait for the one to come and make it all
right. It’s not going to happen. We’re the ones who are eating up the world and
no one else will save us. You can’t have police coming down and making us live
another way. That’s what we’re hoping for, that there will come a leader who
will say, "Okay, here are the laws that need to be promulgated, and those who disobey
them will be punished, but if you obey these laws, then all of this pollution will go
away, all this poison we pumping into the world will disappear," and so on and so
forth.
No. That’s not going to happen and it wouldn’t
work if it did. It has to be we who change it. But of course, then you have the
typical response: "Well, what do we have to give up?" Again, this isn’t
something I’ve gone into in either of the books, but it isn’t a matter of giving
up. If you look at the way we live from a Leaver point of view, they say, "God, how
can people live such a miserable life as you live? How can you stand living in such
poverty as you live in? How can you stand living behind locked doors? How can you stand
being afraid to walk in the streets? And you account that to your wealth?! You make me
laugh!"
What I am talking about is wealth of a different kind that
people really want, and that people really had for a long time. People who live in Leaver
cultures still have it and they will not give it up. When we look at it, though, we say,
"Where’s the wealth?" Well, it isn’t visible in terms of objects. It
isn’t there in terms of microwave ovens and computers and VCRs. It’s a different
kind of wealth. It is real wealth. It is a wealth of support for people. For you and me.
That’s inconceivable to us. Our security must be purchased. Okay, I’m pretty
well off so I can have a high quality security system and you can’t. And I can have
great medical care, and you can’t. If you’re poor, that’s just tough shit.
I don’t have to worry about ending up my life living on the streets, but you do.
In Leaver societies, it just doesn’t work that way.
There are not happy classes and miserable classes. The Marxists in my audiences will
always make this point to me, just to let me know that Marx was there before me, that
indeed our troubles began with classes. I’m saying, "No, they antedated
classes." If you go back and say, "It’s just classes," it’s like
saying "It’s just technology."
It is perfectly true that in Leaver societies,
particularly in hunter-gatherer societies, there were no classes. Leadership was really a
thing of very little importance. It usually is very casual. There’s no government as
we would recognize it. There’s no elections. There’s nothing like that, usually
because people were living on the band level - sixty people. You don’t need a very
elaborate organization to keep sixty people going. They all knew what their jobs were. It
didn’t need a lot of supervision or anything like that, and nobody was particularly
better than anybody else. This sounds like a dream, like a utopia, but that’s just
the way it was. That’s why it was so beautiful, and they liked it, and they
don’t like what we’re doing.
You talk about this quite
a bit in The Story of B, which you referred to as the other shoe. I noted where Ishmael
examined Takers more than Leavers - and why that is has become more clear since you talked
about the problem that Ishmael was written to address - but it struck me that The
Story of B examined Leavers more than Takers.
Because I knew I’d not done a great job with them in Ishmael.
The two things I didn’t really nail down in Ishmael was the Leaver Story and
the population question. A few people have asked me, "Well, how have you changed the
way you live? How do you live that is different?" Of course, they’re still
thinking of the old Jesus paradigm, when he said, "Live the way I live," which
is not what I’m saying at all. I’m not setting myself up as a model. I’m in
search of a model.
What I’m saying more clearly in B - what I
certainly set out to say in Ishmael - was that our story is killing us. It
isn’t technology, or consumerism, or the idea that there is something wrong with
humans. This story is deadly. I think people read it and said, "Oh,
that’s very nice. It’s a metaphor." But it’s not a metaphor. I mean it
literally. It is our worldview that is killing us. With this worldview, we’re going
to destroy the world. Now, my attack is on worldview.
I’m not saying recycle your papers. Recycle your
papers or don’t - it makes a very, very, very small difference. I’m sorry, but
that is the case. It is, as Paul Hawkins says, pretty. It looks nice, but it has very
little effect. It is a nice thing to do, and you cannot fault it. Most of the products you
recycle, the product that you get, represents a 5% residual of what has been thrown away.
So you are recycling five percent of what went into this product - and not all of that
gets recycled anyway. So it is a gesture. It’s an effort.
Changing our worldview is the key. It’s not just
something that would be nice to happen. This is the salvation of the human race. So that
is my work, and when people say, "How have I changed the way I live?" Well, I
live to do this thing. This is my life’s work. That’s how I changed the
way I live. I’m a writer. This is the thing I can do to do to accomplish this.
Now, where you are is, "What can I do to change our
worldview?" There is no one who can say, "Oh, I can’t do anything. There is
absolutely nothing I can do." That’s untrue. Everyone is in a position to be
influential in this effort. And every bit of it counts, unlike the recycling thing. But
when you change a mind, you are really accomplishing something. It doesn’t matter,
change just one mind, and boy, you have really done something terrific! I’m in a
position where I can change hundreds of thousands of minds. Fabulous! That’s great! I
worked hard to get to this position. I didn’t fall into it. When people write to me
they often want to fall into something. They want to quit school, for example, so they can
immediately go and do something great, something good. I try to persuade them, I say,
"Look, I’m not telling you to stay in school because of the same reason other
people are, but you have to realize your fullest potential so you can do the most good. It
would be different if it was something you could take care of this summer. Then we could
all quit our jobs and do it this summer, but it’s not going to happen that way."
Changing this culture’s destructive worldview is a goal that is attainable and
decisive.
go to page 5
(conclusion of interview)
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