Cultural Critics

"I left, and because it seemed like a good time to start being a little less incredibly trusting, I didn’t turn my back on him till I was outside with the door shut between us."

"Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process."

"If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs."

"“Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?” “No.” “But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any other creature in the world. This is why I knew you could benefit from seeing those beetles yesterday. Those beetles are a manifestation of the gods’ unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who have eyes to read. I wanted you to see how the gods lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon a beetle whose supreme achievement is burying a mouse than upon the brain of Einstein, no less upon a mite whose favorite dish is a fly’s egg than upon the eye of Michelangelo.”"

"“The question is, can you do would B did?” “What exactly do you have in mind?” “You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the Scriptures, then you’re no more B than I am. You’re just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat.”"

"When all else fails, it will be objected that the people of the world will not tolerate a limit on food. That may be, but it has nothing to do with the facts presented here."

"That’s what governments are there for, to keep good things from happening."

"Six billion of you wake up every morning and start devouring the world."

"“This may be totally wrong,” I told him. “This may just be the simple truth, but this is what I hear: ‘sure, you can save the world, but you're really going to hate it. It's really going to be painful.’” “Why is it going to be painful?” “Because of all the stuff we have to give up. But as I say, this may just be the simple truth.” “No, it's not the simple truth, Julie. It's Mother Culture’s simple lie. Although Mother Culture is a metaphor, she really does behave uncannily like a real person sometimes. Why do you think she would tell this particular lie?” “She wants to discourage us from changing, I guess.” “Of course. Her whole function is to preserve the status quo. This is not a peculiarity of your Mother Culture. In every culture, it's the function of Mother Culture to preserve the status quo.”"

"No one has ever specifically asked me what I have against birth control, but I’ll answer the question anyway. I don’t have a thing against birth control as such. It just represents a very poor problem-solving strategy. The rule in crisis management is, Don’t make it your goal to control effects, make it your goal to control causes. If you control causes, then you don’t have to control effects."

"“One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’” “That of course is an inane idea,” Ishmael said. “The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.”"

"“The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. During the last century every remaining Leaver people in North America was given a choice: to be exterminated or to accept imprisonment. Many chose imprisonment, but not many were actually capable of adjusting to prison life.” “Yes, that seems to be the case.” Ishmael fixed me with a drooping, moist eye. “Naturally a well-run prison must have a prison industry. I’m sure you see why.” “Well…it helps to keep the inmates busy, I suppose. Takes their minds off the boredom and futility of their lives.” “Yes. Can you name yours?” “Our prison industry? Not offhand. I suppose it’s obvious.” “Quite obvious, I would say.” I gave it some thought. “Consuming the world.” Ishmael nodded. “Got it on the first try.”"

"It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian."

"Mother Culture’s deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact, they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can’t live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you’re seeing at work in your schools isn’t a system defect, it’s a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundred percent efficiency."

"A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system."

"What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind."

"The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that."

"The religions I just mentioned—the revealed religions—are fundamentally wed to our cultural vision, and I use the word wed advisedly. These religions are like a harem of sanctimonious wives married to a greedy, loutish sensualist of a husband."

"But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind. We don’t understand what they had in mind as they lived through tens of thousands of years without trade and commerce, without empires or kingdoms or even villages, without accomplishments of any kind."

"“Now, the way the Zeugen imagined it, the gods have a special knowledge that enables them to rule the world. The knowledge includes the knowledge of who should live and who should die, but it embraces much more than that.This is the general knowledge the gods employ in every choice they make. What the Zeugen perceived is this, that every choice the gods make is good for one creature but evil for another, and if you think about it, it really can’t be otherwise. If the quail goes out to hunt and the gods send it a grasshopper, then this is good for the quail but evil for the grasshopper. And if the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods send it a quail, then this is good for the fox but evil for the quail. And vice versa, of course.If the fox goes out to hunt, and the gods withhold the quail, then this is good for the quail but evil for the fox. Do you see what I mean?” “Of course.”"

"The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed—and therefore destined—to become us. This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. We would smile patronizingly if the Gebusi boasted that humanity was divinely destined to become Gebusi, but we are perfectly satisfied humanity was divinely destined to become us."

"The schools are there to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market."

"Pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy doesn’t eliminate you instantly, Jared, it eliminates you eventually."

"In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or race schism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense of self-eliminating. That is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight."

"“To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn’t even belong in this list, since it doesn’t link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or by rising above it.” “True.” “The adherents of these religions are mightily struck and obsessed by their differences—to the point of mayhem, murder, jihad, and genocide—but to me, as I say, you all look alike."

"Of course, there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs."

"Modern humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, but according to to our beliefs, God had not a word to say to any of them until we came along."

"“It doesn’t matter that everyone ‘knows’ the human race is three million years older than the cities of Mesopotamia. Every molecule of thought in our culture bears the impress of the idea that we needn’t look beyond the Mesopotamian horizon in order to understand our history.”"

"Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong."

"I asked, “Is it so easy to change a cultural vision.” “The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire."

"The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision."

"If I were someone else, I’d try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I’d tell you that Mommy’s going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I’ll look down and watch over you. The truth is better than this—partly because it is the truth."

"You don’t have to understand what you see but you must at least make an effort to see what you see."

"“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ’live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”"

"All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together."

"I am at what seminarians used to call “the Company Farm,” which is where you go when you “need a little rest”—or a little vacation from booze—or the whispers about you and the altar boys are beginning to get a bit noisy. All the big orders have them, of course, some of them have several, thoughtfully specialized. Naturally they are not called penitentiaries anymore; nowadays they are called retreat centers."

"What works, evidently, is cultural diversity. This should not come as a surprise. If culture is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then we should expect to see diversity favored over uniformity. A thousand designs—one for every locale and situation—always works better than one design for all locals and situations. Birds are more likely to survive in ten thousand nest patterns than in one. Mammals are more likely to survive in ten thousand social patterns that in one. And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we are in the process of proving right now. We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way. There would be no problem if only one person in ten thousand lived the way we live. The problem appears only as we approach the point where only one person in ten thousand is permitted to live any other way than the way we live. In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable."

"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs."

"I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?"

"A few years ago, when I begin speaking to audiences, I have the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to not saying it at all."

"Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others."

"Without a standing army, a king is just a windbag in fancy clothes."

"In 1950 there wasn’t the slightest whisper of a doubt about this anywhere in our culture, East or West, capitalist or communist. In 1950 this was something everyone could agree on: Exploiting the world was our God-given right. The world was created for us to exploit. Exploiting the world actually improved it! There was no limit to what we could do. Cut as much down as you like, dig up as much as you like. Scrape away the forests, fill in the wetlands, dam the rivers, dump poisons anywhere you want, as much as you want. None of this was regarded as wicked or dangerous. Good heavens, why would it be? The earth was created specifically to be used in this way. It was a limitless, indestructible playroom for humans. You simply didn’t have to consider the possibility of running out of something or of damaging something. The earth was designed to take any punishment, to absorb and sweeten any toxin, in any quantity. Explode nuclear weapons? Good heavens, yes—as many as you want! Thousands, if you like. Radioactive material generated while trying to achieve our God-given destiny can’t harm us. Wipe out whole species? Absolutely! Why ever not? If people don’t need these creatures, then obviously they’re superfluous! To exercise such control over the world is to humanize it, to take us a step closer to our destiny."

"I’ve said that this new era of the collapse of values began in 1960. Strictly speaking, it should be dated to 1962, the year of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the first substantive challenge ever issued to the motivating vision of our culture."

"“Always has been my guiding principle for forty years to say ‘Never trust a Christian.’ Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change.”"

"I closed my eyes and found the interior rooms of my head quite thoroughly deserted."

"Programs are initiated in order to counter or defeat vision."

"It can’t possibly be said too often that there is no one right way for people to live; that’s only the delusion of the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced."

"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. We’ve 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 won’t 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 rest—the suffering masses—lived like cattle."

"“I guess this is what you mean when you say that if the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds. People with unchanged minds will say, ‘Let’s minimize the effects of pushing the button.’ People with changed minds will say, ‘Let’s throw the box away!’”"