“Speak.”
“I don’t see how you can lump everyone else in the world into one category like that.”
“This is the way it’s done in your own culture, except that you use a pair of heavily loaded terms instead of these relatively neutral terms. You call yourselves civilized and all the rest primitive. You are universally agreed on these terms; I mean that the people of London and Paris and Baghdad and Seoul and Detroit and Buenos Aires and Toronto all know that—whatever else separates them—they are united in being civilized and distinct from Stone Age peoples scattered all over the world; you consider or recognize that, whatever their differences, these Stone Age peoples are likewise united in being primitive.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Would you be more comfortable if we used these terms, civilized and primitive?”
“Yes, I suppose I would be, but only because I’m used to them. Takers and Leavers is fine with me.”
4
“Second: the map. I have it. You don’t have to memorize the route. In other words, don’t worry if, at the end of any day, you suddenly realize that you can’t remember a word I’ve said. That doesn’t matter. It’s the journey itself that’s going to change you. Do you see what I mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
Ishmael thought for a moment. “I’ll give you a general idea of where we’re heading, then you’ll understand.”
“Okay.”
“Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way. You know it well; everyone in your culture knows it well. But this explanation wasn’t given to you all at once. No one ever sat you down and said, ‘Here is how things came to be this way, beginning ten or fifteen billion years ago right up to the present. Rather, you assembled this explanation like a mosaic: from a million bits of information presented to you in various ways by others who share that explanation. You assembled it from the table talk of your parents, from cartoons you watched on television, from Sunday School lessons, from your textbooks and teachers, from news broadcasts, from movies, novels, sermons, plays, newspapers, and all the rest. Are you with me so far?”
“I think so.”
“This explanation of how things came to be this way is ambient in your culture. Everyone knows it and everyone accepts it without question.”
“Okay.”
“As we make our journey here, we’re going to be reexamining key pieces of that mosaic. We’re going to be taking them out of your mosaic and fitting them into an entirely different mosaic: into an entirely different explanation of how things came to be this way”
“Okay.”
“And when we’re finished, you’ll have an entirely new perception of the world and of all that’s happened here. And it won’t matter in the least whether you remember how that perception was assembled. The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.”
“Right. I see what you mean now.”
5
“Third,” he said, “definitions. These are words that will have a special meaning in our discourse here. First definition: story. A story is a scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.”
“Okay.”
“Second definition: to enact. To enact a story is to live so as to make the story a reality. In other words, to enact a story is to strive to make it come true. You recognize that this is what the people of Germany were doing under Hitler. They were trying to make the Thousand Year Reich a reality. They were trying to make the story he was telling them come true.”
“Right.”
“Third definition: culture. A culture is a people enacting a story.”
“A people enacting a story. And a story again is …?”
“A scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods.”
“Okay. So you’re saying that the people of my culture are enacting their own story about man, the world, and the gods.”
“That’s right.”
“But I still don’t know what that story is.”