“I don’t know how it can be, but it is. That’s the fact. Man lived in the hands of the gods for three million years and at the end of those three million years was no better off and no farther ahead than when he started.”
“Truly, Bwana, this is strange news. What kind of gods are these?”
I snorted a laugh. “These, my friend, are incompetent gods. This is why you’ve got to take your lives out of their hands entirely. You’ve got to take your lives into your own hands.”
“And how do we do that, Bwana?”
“As I say, you’ve got to begin planting your own food.”
“But how will that change anything, Bwana? Food is food, whether we plant it or the gods plant it.”
“That’s exactly the point. The gods plant only what you need. You will plant more than you need.”
“To what end, Bwana? What’s the good of having more food than we need?”
“Damn!” I shouted. “I get it!”
Ishmael smiled and said, “So what’s the good of having more food than we need?”
“That is the whole goddamned point! When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you!”
“We can thumb our noses at them.”
“Exactly.”
“All the same, Bwana, what are we to do with this food if we don’t need it?”
“You save it! You save it to thwart the gods when they decide it’s your turn to go hungry. You save it so that when they send a drought, you can say, ‘Not me, goddamn it! I’m not going hungry, and there’s nothing you can do about it, because my life is in my own hands now!’”
5
Ishmael nodded, abandoning his hunter-gatherer role. “So your lives are now in your own hands.”
“That’s right.”
“Then what are you all so worried about?”
“What do you mean?”
“If your lives are in your own hands, then it’s entirely up to you whether you go on living or become extinct. That’s what this expression means, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But obviously there are still some things that aren’t in our hands. We wouldn’t be able to control or survive a total ecological collapse.”
“So you’re not safe yet. When will you finally be safe?”
“When we’ve taken the whole world out of the hands of the gods.”
“When the whole world is in your own, more competent, hands.”
“That’s right. Then the gods will finally have no more power over us. Then the gods will have no more power over anything, All the power will be in our hands and we’ll be free at last.”
6
“Well,” Ishmael said, “are we making progress?”
“I think so.”
“Do you think we’ve found the root of your revulsion toward the sort of life that was lived in prerevolutionary times?”