Have you ever read a book which overnight completely changed your whole view of the world?
As I write this, Americans are celebrating Independence Day, while Dutch farmers are blockading their country in protest at ‘climate’ policies which will put many of them out of business.
Dutch fishermen have also joined the fray in solidarity, blocking ports.
What would normally have raised a cheer, instead has me rocking back in my seat.
For this is what I read just the other day which completely altered my perception of reality. It’s taken from the book My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. In this scene, two people, a teacher and a student, are having a conversation about the culture that we live in—one which we share with all civilised peoples, but not with tribal peoples.
“I’m going to give you two rules of thumb by which you can identify the people of your culture. Here’s one of them. You’ll know you’re among the people of your own culture if the food is all owned, if it’s all under lock and key.”
“Hmm,” I said. “It’s hard to imaging it being any other way.”
“But of course it was once another way. It was once no more owned than the air or the sunshine are owned. I’m sure you must realize that.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“You seem unimpressed, but putting your food under lock and key was one of hte great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key — and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.”
“How’s that?” I asked. “Why is it the cornerstone?”
“Because, if the food wasn’t under lock and key, who would work?”
To expand on this point, later, the teacher and student imagine a planet named Terpsichore, named for the muse of dance…
… “where people emerged in the usual way in the community of life. For a time they lived as all other [animals] live, simply eating whatever came to hand. But after a couple of million years of living this way, they noticed it was very easy to promote the regrowth of their favourite foods. You might say they found a few easy steps that would have this result … the steps of a dance.
A few steps of the dance, performed just three or four days a month, enriched their lives greatly and took almost no effort.
[some groups decide to dance a little for a little of their favourite foods, others a little more, perhaps an hour or two a day]
“But one group […] eventually said to themselves, “Why should we live just partially on the foods we favor? Why don’t we live entirely on the foods we favor? All we have to do is devote a lot more time to dancing.” So this one particular group took to dancing several hours a day. Because they thought of themselves as taking their welfare into their own hands, we’ll call them Takers. The results were spectacular. The Takers were inundated with their favorite foods. A manager class soon emerged—something that had never been necessary when everyone was just dancing a few hours a week. The members of the manager class were far too busy to do any actual dancing themselves, and since their work was so critical, they soon came to be regarded as social and political leaders. But after a few years these leaders of the Takers began to notice that food production was dropping, and they went out to see what was going wrong. What they found was that the dancers were slacking off. They weren’t dancing several hours a day, they were dancing only an hour or two and sometimes not even that much. The leaders asked why.
“Whats the point of all this dancing?” the dancers said.
“It isn’t necessary to dance seven or eight hours a day to get the food we need. There’s plenty of food even if we just dance an hour a day. We’re never hungry. So why shouldn’t we relax and take life easy, the way we used to do?”
The leaders saw things very differently of course. If the dancers went back to living the way they used to, then the leaders would soon have to do the same, and that didn’t appeal to them at all. They considered and tried many different schemes to encourage or cajole or tempt or shame or force the dancers into dancing longer hours, but nothing worked until one of them came up with the idea of locking up the food.
“What good will that do?” he was asked.
“The reason the dancers aren’t dancing right now is that they just have to reach out and take the food they want. If we lock it away, they won’t be able to do that.”
“But if we lock the food away, the dancers will starve to death!”
“No, no, you don’t understand,” the other said with a smile. “We’ll link dancing to receiving food—so much foood for so much dancing. So if the dancers dance a little, they’ll get a little food, and if they dance a lot, they’ll get a lot. This way, slackers will always be hungry and dancers who dance for long hours will have full stomachs.”
“They’ll never put up with such an arrangement,” he was told.
“They’ll have no choice. We’ll lock the food away in storehouses, and the dancers will either dance or they’ll starve.”
“The dancers wil just break into the storehouses.”
“We’ll recruit guards from among the dancers, We’ll excuse them from dancing and have them guard the storehouses instead. We’ll pay them the same way we pay the dancers, with food—so much food for so many hours of guarding.”
“It will never work,” he was told.
But oddly enough it did work. It worked even better than before, for now, with the food under lock and key, there were always plenty of dancers willing to dance and many were glad to be allowed to dance ten hours, twelve hours, even fourteen hours in a single day.”
My Ishmael is a sequel; in the first book, Ishmael, Quinn explains that this moment in human history, commonly known as the agricultural revolution, is Adam’s fall. It is the reason for the explusion from the Garden of Eden. It was at that point in history, some 10,000 years or so ago, that mankind stopped being able to feed freely off the land, as all other animals do (and tribal people still do), and instead turned to toiling for his food.
This is an idea that I will return to in a subsequent essay, but for now, I want us only to notice one thing.
The farmers are protesting in the Netherlands—and I imagine soon everywhere—because the globalists are preventing them from growing their own food. Small farmers are being squeezed out through onerous regulations, while Bill Gates and Monsanto are sweeping in to take full control of the food supply. Soon we’ll all be eating crushed insects and lab grown meat while the globalists feast on real food.
It seems high-tech and futuristic, but—and this is crucial—while the storehouses may look a little different, the scheme is exactly the same: 10,000 years of human civilisation, the rise and fall of great empires, the building and crumbling of the ancient wonders of the world, and we are still being controlled by leaders who have only one thing over us: our food supply. And, the scheme still only works because some of us are willing to be their guardsmen.
This, then, is what it ultimately all boils down to: The imbalance of resources and food supply, poverty and wealth if you prefer, isn’t an error that has crept into an otherwise perfect system, it is the original sin.
This newsletter is called How To Survive the Apocalypse because when I set out to write it, I understood that our civilisation is at a crossroads: the globalists want to enslave all of humanity; we do not want to be enslaved. They will win or we will. We will survive this apocalypse or we won’t. Either way, civilisation as it currently stands has run it’s course. But as I started writing it I ran into a very obvious, yet very real difficulty: I had no idea how to survive this or any other apocalpse.
The problem before me was this: it was clear that some sort of reset was needed. Not the reset the globalists have in mind, of course, in which we all become mechanised bots existing in wholly managed man-made ecosystems, but a reset back to something that had been lost, a way of life that was closer to the source. But how far back to go?
Back to Jesus’ time? Surely not, as Jesus preached on the same problems we have today: disparity between rich and poor, anxiety over the cares of tomorrow, lack of faith in themselves and each other. 2,000 years woudn’t be enough.
Back further then, to Moses’ time? Surely the Israelites who escaped Pharoah would know a thing or two about freedom? But then again, people have been trying and failing to live by the rules Moses laid down for 3,000 years, and in all that time, the land of Israel has known no peace.
Yet what came before Moses? As far back as history goes there have been kings and empires, wars and famines, the push and pull of civilisation on people everywhere. There were protozoa, then fish, then reptiles, then mammals, and then there was a thing called prehistoric man, and he lived a poor, short, precarious life, and then there was the dawn of history which brought wealth and certainty, and human behaviour as we know it. And we live in history, where there has always been wealth and poverty, and food has always been under lock and key. That’s just the way it is, isn’t it?
But what if it isn’t?
What if we need to overturn everything, right back to the very beginning?
This is the question I intend to now examine in this newsletter. My aim is to strip away every preconception that we have about life, about relationships with each other, God, and nature, about the structure of our society, and ultimately, about what freedom really is.
I invite you to join me on this journey, as together we aim to make it through this apocalpyse, this end of Civilisation as we know it, and emerge on the other side as truly free people.
Excellent. It's so interesting how simply changing a single word, in this case work to dance, can reframe how you see/interpret a situation.
I'd never understood the farmer's protest from this angle before.
Thanks so much for sharing passages from My Ishmael by Daniel Quinn! Excellent choice to illustrate "the ways things are" and how we got here.
I love the "Ishmael Trilogy" too :)