"And conversely, why should you be surprised if the founders of our culture, having obliterated a lifestyle tested over a period of three million years, were unable to instantly slap together a replacement that was just as good? Really, the task was a formidable one. Weâve been working at it for ten thousand years, and where are we? The very first thing to go was the very thing that made tribal life a success: its social, economic, and political egalitarianism. As soon as our revolution began, the process of division began, between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, masters and slaves. The suffering class had arrived, and that class (as it would always be) was the masses. I wonât repeat a tale everyone knows. Just a few thousand years separates the bare beginning of our culture in rude farming villages from the age of the god-kings, when the royal classes lived in mind-boggling splendor and all the restâthe suffering massesâlived like cattle."
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Novelists from the United StatesCritics from the United StatesCultural criticsEnvironmentalists from the United StatesPublishers from the United States
Original Language: English
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âThe Great Rememberingâ (p. 322)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Daniel_Quinn
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Daniel Quinn
Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 â February 17, 2018) was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year.
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