Sunday, July 18, 2010

How it all happened, IMO

The one question I had after reading Ishmael wasn't "what can I do?" (which I guess from reading a bit about people's reactions to the book is the number one question) but "how did this mess get started?".

To me, figuring out how something started helps me understand where it is now and where it might go in the future. I guess that's just how my mind works. It took me a long time of pondering to come up with the answer, but I think I know how the cult of the Takers started.

They say that if a man, a woman and a child are in danger of sudden death, the man will save his woman, but the woman will save her child. Genesis has Adam blaming Eve for the Fall, and this gave me the clue.

I've read that people got the idea that if you plant seeds then things will grow, and that's how agriculture (or at least horticulture) got started. Ishmael argues that agriculture isn't the problem in and of itself; people can plant and harvest and still be a Leaver.

But something terrible happened about 10,000 years ago: a horrifically unusual flood, drought, famine, etc, and a Leaver child died who wouldn't have if there had been enough food.

And someone cracked.

The reason I say this is that Taker values are based on fear. Fear of starving makes us hoard, makes us eat all we can (usually way more than we need to) and take the rest "just in case". Fear of resource scarcity (whether it's oil, money, arable land, or whatever) makes us aggressive, taking everything for ourselves because "they" might take everything for themselves and leave us with not enough.

Our whole society, our whole civilization, is based on fear.

One woman is all it would take. I think it was a woman, or perhaps a distraught man who lost his wife, who knows. But I'm a woman, and so let's say she's a woman. I can relate to the feelings she must have had, the fear that drove her.

Others in her Leaver camp would think it odd that after surviving whatever starved her child she would start stockpiling food instead of trusting it would be there.



"As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"

Perhaps her man thought she was odd too, but he let her stash food away. But she taught her children to put food away, to plant more than they needed, to keep some animals nearby "just in case", to get more wood for the fire than they needed, to hide the rest so no one could take it. And her children picked up on her fear, and perhaps assumed her husband's acquiescence to this odd behavior meant the rest of the Leaver tribe was wrong and she was right, and when her children married, they quietly passed these habits on to their children as well.

And in the next famine, when the rest of their tribe moved on to better areas, the Taker families stayed. They couldn't very well leave all this food they had collected, their plantings, the animals they had domesticated! There might not be enough somewhere else!

So the Taker family became a Taker clan. They scoured the countryside for "enough" food, but there's never enough to take away fear. They needed more. The Leaver tribes around them were willing to trade, if they would let them alone, but the Takers needed more land to farm, more trees to cut, more food to store for their growing crowd of children.

So the Leavers turned their backs on these odd people and moved on, or when the Takers tried to take land, food, trees, or wives for their sons by force, they fought back.

And the Taker clan became a state, a nation, a civilization, a world of fearful humans, taking from everyone they could, forcing all other Leavers to comply (fear leads to the rigidity of having to have the one true way) and killing anyone who opposed them, including those few Leavers that still remain ...

... and so here we are today.

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