Taking It
The Bad Revolution
[Letter #020]
Good morning, son.
Your mother and I visited the OB this past Friday and saw the little fella we hope to be you on the sonogram. If that Tiny Bear turns out to be you, then you’re growing rapidly, my boy. Frankly, it’s spooking your mother. She keeps remembering that I was born at a whopping 11 pounds 5 ounces. Our Tiny Bear here is currently measured in the 82nd percentile by gestational age, but your mother says that she has no intention of delivering a 10+ pound baby, so the doctor is going to monitor the developments closely in the coming weeks. Personally, I’m just tired of referring to the fetus as “the baby we hope will be you.” I’m ready for you to be here with us and with a proper name!
In the past week, I have gone through two novels, which is saying quite a bit. I don’t typically go through a single novel in a week, let alone two. Hell, I rarely read novels at all, as I prefer nonfiction, but it’s almost a misclassification to call these books fiction anyway. I mean, they absolutely are, but only in the sense that the fictitious story is a bare framework for the concepts within. What the author is discussing has almost nothing to do with the setting or the characters, although the protagonist does make a rather profound personal journey. What I’m talking about is the book, Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. The other book is the sequel, The Story of B, by the same author. There’s a third in the trilogy, entitled My Ishmael, which I intend to get to this week.
To say that I was impressed by these books would be a gobsmackingly ludicrous understatement. If I’ve never read them to you (or at least taught their lessons to you somehow) before you read this, I want you to grab them and get to it immediately, starting with the first. Unless I’m dead in the near future, I cannot possibly imagine how I would bring you up in life without teaching you the perspectives that I’ve found in them. After finishing the first volume, I was ready to find where the author lives and attempt to communicate my heartfelt appreciation for such an experience, only to find that he had passed away in 2018. It was a shame, but his work will definitely stay with me until I also pass. Yeah, it was that profound.
In the past couple of decades, I’ve been groping around in life, trying to get things figured out. I’ve been feeling a deep-level wrongness that I just couldn’t describe. When I was in my twenties, I thought that the political system was on the wrong track, and that we could get things going back in the right direction if we voted and protested, making the politicians hear us out. The problem, I felt, was that they were in their DC bubble, and they just didn’t understand what average Americans wanted or needed.
In 2015, when I was 31 years old, Bernie Sanders came on the national scene and started running for President of the US. By this point, we had all felt the sting of an economic system that we were told was doing amazingly but never seemed to benefit regular folks. We were all already foregoing trips to the doctor for little things because most of us didn’t have insurance, and the Obamacare insurance that we were forced to get didn’t really cover much. No one could afford housing anymore, inflation was really starting to hit, and climate change was a massive concern (as opposed to clear and present danger like it is today). Bernie was going to get us all universal healthcare coverage, stronger unions, higher minimum wages, and all the other wonderful things from the campaign speeches. It genuinely felt like a real chance to turn things around, and in some ways, it felt like the last chance.
Sanders was a senator from Vermont, and he was the first person since before the Cold War to actually call himself a socialist in the American political sphere. He didn’t actually mean socialist as you would define it. He meant something like “capitalist, but you know, with a Nordic style of government to try to keep it well-regulated so that regular people aren’t crushed all the time.” That’s a mouthful. He was actually a “social democrat,” but to be confusing, he called himself a “democratic socialist,” which you know is a different thing entirely.
Anyway, he got my attention early, and I supported him as much as I could. I even called fellow citizens up on the campaign’s “phone banking” drives once to try to encourage people to vote for him. Long story cut very short, he was defeated. Not even by the election, really. He was defeated by the system that had no interest in someone like him calling the shots. He was popular enough to win, but the system had already chosen a champion before the primaries had even begun, regardless of what the people wanted. That champion did not win the presidency in 2016, of course.
Over time, I began to realize that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Sanders probably would have won the presidency in 2016 had he won the primaries, true, but it’s unlikely that he would have made as much progress as he wanted to. The same system that stifled his progress in the primaries would have kicked into overdrive to stop his presidential ambitions, and then the machine would keep chugging along despite him. He ran again in 2020, and I supported him, but I had long since abandoned the hope that things would get better. I had learned some truths that even the excellent Bernie Sanders wouldn’t be able to overcome. The bigger picture showed that there was something more behind this dog-and-pony show than whatever candidates were running for office.
Some time before 2020, I had learned about TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it). It wasn’t some apocalypse doomsday forecast, but rather the end of our way of living, as humanity has known it, at least since any of us alive today were born. COVID, at first, felt like it was going to trigger an instant collapse, but things kept going anyway. The pandemic was tragic, yes, but it was just a symptom of a bigger, slower process. There was the end of dense energy coming soon (peak oil), the breaking of yet another population record (8 billion humans), the constant record-shattering heat each month, the ever-shrinking polar ice caps inching us closer to a BoE (blue-ocean event). Multiple crisis-level situations were developing and threatening simultaneous conjunctions in our near future. The part of this to keep in mind is the “as we know it” bit.
Simply put, everything that we know is done. We’re currently watching the finale of the fireworks show before the sparks fade into the night. What happens next is hard for anyone to guess. Maybe everything larger than a burrowing mammal goes extinct in the next hundred years. Maybe there are mechanisms that will kick in once humans begin dying off that will begin the stabilization process. However it goes, the planet will be just fine, as it has gone through such heating phases many times before. Life itself, while indeed enduring the Sixth Mass Extinction, will ultimately survive in some form or fashion, even if that ends up being in microbial form. Maybe it will end up being another 50 million years before more advanced life crawls back up on to land to start the evolutionary process over again. Who knows? Regardless, the way that we’ve understood the world to be up until now would be ending. That’s what I’ve been struggling to understand since.
Although I had accepted that this is the fate of civilization (with the hope that maybe humans will survive to the next age), one thing that I was really having trouble with was the “why” of it. There’s the cynical view that humans are innately flawed, and that this is the source of war, famine, disease, inequality, slavery, rape, etc. I’ve always, with visceral revulsion, taken issue with this view. How the hell did we live this long as a species if we were innately destructive? It couldn’t be true. I knew there was something deeper than the oversimplified “original sin” line of thinking. Hobbes was a bastard, and human life is not solitary, nasty, brutish, short, and all of that nonsense!
As you’ve probably gathered by this point in the letters series, I’m not a fan of capitalism at all. You’re astonished, I know. In fact, it was always a source of irritation for me that people like Bernie Sanders wouldn’t just come out and say “capitalism bad.” As a matter of fact, people in the media almost never even use the word at all. The system that we had was basically just part of the furniture. It was just there, not questioned and not even really seen. But, I knew that modern human culture was going to drive us to ruin. It had to. Infinite growth demand; finite planet. That’s not possible. I think I read somewhere that in the war between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated.
It wasn’t enough though. There was something else behind that. The world wasn’t really sustainable before capitalism came out of England and dominated everything. I hadn’t really thought that far before, but as I continued to learn and read, I saw that humans have always plowed through resources at a non-renewable pace. It wasn’t always uranium and cobalt, nor even just copper and phosphates. Humans have historically clear cut entire forests — entire regions of forests. That can take multiple human lifetimes to regrow, if it ever does. The Middle East is largely desert today, but it once held a region called “The Fertile Crescent.” It was covered with trees, grasslands, and all manner of wildlife. It’s gone because humans over-farmed the land and cut down all the trees. We left a desert behind and moved on.
That wasn’t capitalism’s fault, as capitalism wouldn’t exist as a system for another few thousand years. My thinking had to shift, since I still believed that humans are not inherently destructive. Darwin taught us that it’s the species that are most adaptive to their environments who survive, and Kropotkin taught us that cooperation among members of many species is critical to the long term adaptation of those species. Archeology of the past century or so also showed us that humans have been around a lot longer than prior history books had taught us (a period that stuffy historians had unceremoniously dubbed “prehistory”). So, that means that people existed for hundreds of thousands of years before big cities, before big empires, and before kings. Some ninety percent of the timeline of homo sapiens was spent being fairly in tune with our environment, sustainable and renewable in every aspect. They had to be, by definition, if they survived for millennia to become us.
Well, that was it then. What else could it be? Humans were fine and dandy until they developed systems of oppression based on hierarchy, enforced by violence, about 10,000 years ago. Bada-boom. Mystery solved. Violent oppression was my villain. It certainly spoke to my anarchist side, and it fit well within the theory put forward by Malatesta, Rocker, Goldman, Proudhon, de Cleyre, and Reclus. Everything that we could find of human tribal life outside of the systemic oppression seemed fairly positive. Hell, that’s where the “noble savage” stereotype came from, after all. These people just seemed better off and happier than those of us living in civilization.
After we figured out farming with the Agricultural Revolution, which I knew took something like a thousand years to travel most of the globe, humans then had a surplus of food. The concentration of energy (stored harvests) gave the people who controlled it power over the people who needed it. Withholding the food meant that power can be used to control. The root of human problems in the world is violence that produces and enforces hierarchies. End of story, right?
We “civilized” folks are just stuck with it though. The train was moving too fast to stop or even change course. Humanity suffers now due to violence and hierarchical power, and things can’t change for the better until that’s no longer the case. I felt that the worldwide system was now far too large to alter in the way that the 19th and 20th century anarchists desired and fought for. We no longer had time to change course to something more egalitarian. We simply had to endure the fall of civilization and then rebuild it in a better form. We had to simply try again, but do better this time.
That was certainly how I saw things before reading Ishmael. I had to learn that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of values that I have had. It was formed by default as I lived from birth to that point through modern culture, and I had felt that it had that certain wrongness that I just couldn’t describe, as I mentioned before. I knew that capitalism was wrong, hierarchical power structures in general were wrong, and that everything was spiraling toward a sudden and calamitous stop once we could no longer consume everything around us. But, there was another piece missing.
From other things that I had read, I was really doubting whether civilization was itself a good thing, and that maybe that was something to be questioned. Catton taught us about Overshoot and how cities concentrate people as well as waste. Jensen, despite being a transphobe, also made some really compelling arguments against civilizational life. I felt like I was on the cusp of it, but I didn’t quite get it yet. I didn’t quite get how things should be, only that I knew how things shouldn’t be. The connections weren’t — connecting.
In Ishmael, the titular character takes us on a journey by way of several discussions he has with the protagonist. One of the features of this journey through history is the difference between two different philosophies of life — two different “stories”: Takers and Leavers. Ishmael says that this is in reference to the phrase “take it or leave it.” He says that these terms are less emotionally charged than something more like “civilized” and “uncivilized.” Conversely, “Taker” and “Leaver” are generally felt to be neutral in tone and meaning in common parlance. Meanings are, however, inevitably associated with these terms for the reader as the story progresses.
Taker culture, Ishmael explains, is the one that modern humanity is accustomed to. It’s the story that is common among every major people-group on the planet, it’s ubiquitous on every continent and in every country, and its story is known, consciously or subconsciously, by every human of the civilized mindset. It is taught by every major religion (and most minor ones), it is broadcast through every channel of media, and it is the basis for every political organization in every nation. It’s rarely spoken verbatim, but its assumptions are taken for granted and its intentions are considered absolute. Takers live this story every day, even if they don’t tell it directly. Only a few small bands of humans remain who do not subscribe to it.
The Taker story is this: The world was created for humanity, and humanity was created to rule over it. In order to rule over it, humanity must first conquer and subjugate every aspect of it.
That immediately swirled in my mind. That’s a violent hierarchical power structure. That’s dominance over others and over nature. That’s the thing that I was trying to say, trying to wrap my mind around. Ok, this is good. Clearly, the author has been thinking along the same lines and has thought this out before me. But, this was only the beginning, and it only hinted at how much I would need to expand my thinking. On the right track but still miles to go.
His point of contention was actually the Agricultural Revolution. I’ve been suspicious of this time period in the past, but he nails it down. Even in the name, “revolution,” we’re given the suggestion that this was a good thing, a universal benefit to humanity. As Quinn explains, it traded a lifestyle of ease and general abundance for one of drudgery, difficulty, pain, and oppression. This particular lifestyle had another feature though. It required people who didn’t subscribe to it (the Leavers) to get out of the way, assimilate, or be exterminated. It required constant expansion, because agriculture would deplete the earth and new fields would be needed for continued harvests.
The question that lingered has been “why,” and I started to suspect this might be my missing piece. Why do all of this, to yourselves and to neighbors? Why allow tyrants to dominate, why deplete your soils of nutrition and wildlife, and why conquer others who you now view as competition? Quinn points out that homo sapiens has existed for something like 300,000 years, and that our ancestor species, who was much like us, existed for some 3 million. All of that time that we lived before 10,000 years ago is the period we call “prehistory.” That’s the vast majority of the human timeline that modern society mostly ignores, generally because we weren’t writing during that long period. So, we discover farming and, what? We decide that kings are necessary?
Well, sort of, yes, but there are a lot more steps to it than just that cause-and-effect. Quinn says that humans have been trying different styles of living arrangements for pretty much all of our known history. This is backed up by Graeber and Wengrow in their book from a few years back. This “agricultural revolution” was just one of many different attempts to live in a new form of society. This was an experiment to try to control the supply of food. While it was attempted to some degree or another in cultures around the world, most of them abandoned the idea. The attempt that began in ancient Sumeria was the one that stuck around. Maybe it was because of the violence, but it remained while other societies saw the idiocy of toiling in fields.
Quinn points out, particularly in the second book, that in every group of humans in all of history, just as with every group of virtually any animal, reproduction will accelerate to increase the population to consume a surplus of food. If food supplies are kept consistent, which is difficult to accomplish in a real world scenario (that is, non-laboratory), then populations will remain roughly level over time. If food supplies decrease, then populations will decrease, with or without the presence of starvation. Fewer calories over a long enough period of time for all members will reduce population levels naturally.
The thing about the Taker story was what it supplied: more food. If you perform the equivalent of strip-mining your soil in order to extract as much nutrition as possible, you end up with more food than you need. When human societies have a surplus, just like other animals, they make more babies and increase the overall population. When they have too many mouths to feed, Takers do what would seem to be the appropriate response. They plant more fields. This, in turn, will produce more food than is necessary, triggering another population growth. Now, they’ll have too many mouths, so they should plant more food. This might mean that they need to cut down another forest to plant additional crops or to replace the depleted fields. Also, the larger population is getting crowded, so they might need to expand their living territory. Tribes into villages, villages into towns, towns into cities, and cities into kingdoms.
Tending to a field is hard work. It can often require all-day toil, and that will consume most of a person’s time. If more real estate is required for more fields or living space, it may be necessary to annex a neighbor’s usual living area. If they won’t move or won’t assimilate into Taker culture, then there’s only one option left to acquire the new territory: violence. Organizing farmers into an army is challenging though, so maybe the Takers join together to decide to give a little of their food to just one Taker who will put down the plow and take on the task of organizing the army. This warlord could then use the army to acquire new territory for Taker expansion. Also, this force of violence would afford the warlord a tremendous new power that he could use to impose his will however he saw fit. Over time, kings could easily evolve out of this sort of development.
When I was saying that it’s all about food a couple of weeks back, I was within spitting distance of Quinn in my thinking. I just didn’t quite have the connections made yet. One of the best arguments that he uses actually comes from the Bible, in Genesis of all places. Maybe I’ll discuss that another time.
Ishmael goes to great lengths to make the protagonist understand that the way humans are today is not how they’ve always been. In order to protect crops, a Taker will kill all of the “weeds” and all of the “pest” animals. Takers not only kill the rabbit to eat, they’ll kill all of the rabbits they find in order to prevent them from eating the crops. If the reduction of rabbits makes the wolves hungry and causes them to attack a farmer, then the Takers would decide to kill off all of the wolves to prevent this. If the reduction of wolves increases the deer population, and these deer are grazing on the crops now, then the Takers would decide that they need to kill off all of the deer to prevent this. To maintain this way of life, it’s death all the way down. Civilized humans have tried to control every aspect of the ecosystem, often with terrible outcomes and unforeseen consequences.
Before the Agricultural Revolution, we didn’t do it this way. For most of human existence, we weren’t like this. We weren’t perfect creatures, of course. There were always assholes, always some idiot who deserved being put in his place. There were always some societies that tried ways of living that even we civilized folks would think are pretty shit. That is, there weren’t and have never been “noble savages” of any kind. But, people have never been as unhappy, destructive, unhealthy, and wasteful as our modern society is today.
The important part is this: it all came from the outgrowth of one group of people in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago. This — all of this world around us — is all cultural teaching. How we feel today, the things we do — it’s all natural human responses to the conditions that civilization has put on us. All of this is not human nature! None of the everyday garbage — slavery, coercion, epidemics, famine, oppression — none of these effects of civilization is human nature at all! This isn’t how healthy humans behave. It’s not how humans have evolved to be, and it’s certainly not how we managed to survive for millions of years just to end up hating the past 10,000.
We are not humankind.
We are Takers, cultural descendants of a single cultural experiment gone wrong ten millennia ago. We haven’t known any other way, although thousands of other ways have been tried. We’ve had many opportunities to learn other ways as well. The Navajo tried to teach us. The Lakota tried. All of the Iroquois nations tried. If there were any Saxapahaw people left, I’m sure they would try to teach us. Aboriginal Australians tried to teach us. Native Hawaiians tried. The Inuit people tried. The !Kung tried. There are a few left who still try.
They’re the Leavers. Despite having tens of thousands of years of coming up with countless different ways of life, the Leavers who remain are united in that they simply aren’t Takers. They live an entirely different story, by an entirely different set of principles. Regardless of the different lifestyles they may adhere to, they also follow the “law of life,” just as every other living thing on the planet does, outside of “civilized” influence. This is a natural law, as described by Quinn. Much like the gravity or aerodynamics, the law of life is simply how things are done, and every lifeform is subject to it. Taker culture does not follow the law, but it is still subject to it, which means it’s in violation of it. The consequence of violating the law of life is pretty obvious — death. Our species has flared out dramatically in the past 10,000 years, and we’ve grown to gargantuan sizes all over the planet. We are coming to the end of our resource capacity, and we’re going to undergo the consequences of violating the natural law of life.
So, what is the law of life, exactly? You know that by now because you’ve read Ishmael, but I could give you my thoughts on it. That’s probably something I should go into in another letter. This one has grown plenty long already. Maybe I can talk about the law, the Leaver Story, and the Genesis myth in the next one. We’ll see.
Until next time, son. I love you very much.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
