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Editor’s Note
Some quotations taken from Ishmael and My Ishmael, are from a gorilla character
who addresses civilized humans as, “you,” and, “the people
of your culture.” Quotations from The Story of B and Beyond Civilization
refer to civilized humans using the words, “we,” “us,”
and, “the people of our culture.” I have rearranged paragraphs,
sentences, and even sentence fragments from their original sequence and context.
Minor paraphrasing (such as replacing pronouns with the nouns they refer to
and vice versa) appears inside quotation marks, but any paraphrasing I deemed
significant appears without quotation marks. I have sought to maintain the original
intents and meanings throughout, as well as the full breadth of Quinn’s
thought. I have refrained from any conscious editorializing.
I compiled Gorilla Digest for non-profit study and review purposes.
Introduction
“The bad news people are always prepared to hear: ‘Man is the scourge
of the planet, and he was BORN a scourge, just a few thousand years ago.’
But the news I’m here to bring you is much different: ‘Man was NOT
born a few thousand years ago and he was not born a scourge. Man was born MILLONS
of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He
lived AT PEACE with the world for millions of years. This doesn’t mean
he was a saint. This doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It
means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake. It’s
not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture
out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture. And this is the best
news I have to bring: We don’t have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive.
We only have to change a single culture. I don’t mean to suggest that
this is an easy task. But at least it’s not an impossible one.”
No one specifically wants to destroy the world, but each of us contributes daily
to the destruction of the world.
“You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels
you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”
“It was not only the Jews who were the captives of Hitler. The entire
German nation was a captive, including his enthusiastic supporters. Some detested
what he was doing, some just shambled on as best they could, and some positively
thrived on it—but they were all his captives.” What held them captive
was a story. “Even if you weren’t personally captivated by the story,
you were a captive all the same, because the people around you made you a captive.
You were like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede.”
The people of our culture are captives of a story as well, but it’s hard
to become conscious of it, because it is so taken for granted. “The explanation
of how things came to be this way is ambient in your culture. Everyone knows
it and everyone accepts it without question. I’m talking about a living
mythology. Not recorded in any book—recorded in the minds of the people
of your culture and being enacted by all over the world.”
“There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture
is enacting in the world—any place at all. The pressure is exerted in
all sorts of ways, on all sorts of levels, but it’s exerted most basically
this way: those who refuse to take a place in the story do not get fed.”
“Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples
of the earth are now enacting this story.”
Definitions
Takers are the people of our culture (the civilized world).
Leavers are the people of all other cultures (primitives).
“A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.”
“To enact a story is to live so as to make a story a reality, to strive
to make it come true.”
“A culture is a people enacting a story.
“Culture is the totality of what is communicated by one generation of
a people by means of language and example.”
Quinn anthropomorphizes a “Mother Culture” who inculcates in us
the basic premises we live by.
The Community of Life is all the species, of which humans are only one. Humans
are part of this community, and absolutely dependent on it.
“Lifestyle (or way of life): A way of making a living for a group or individual,”
such as agriculture, scavenging, or foraging.
“Social organization: A cooperative structure that helps a group implement
its way of life,” such as hierarchy or a tribe.
“Civilization: an advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material
development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the
extensive use of writing, and the appearance of complex political and social
institutions. The thing that forces the institutions of any civilization to
become politically and socially ‘complex’ is of course their hierarchical
arrangement.”
“Tribe: a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.”