“No.”
“Then again, please explain the difference to me.”
“I don’t see that what you’re talking about is anything like a cure for cancer.”
He studied me gravely for a few moments, then said, “Maybe you should go spend an hour studying wallpaper or whatever it is you do when you need a break.”
I jumped up out of the chair and stomped to the back of the room to glare at the books in Ishmael’s sagging old book-case. I even opened a couple volumes hoping some brilliant quote would leap off the page at me, but nothing leaped. After ten minutes I went back and sat down.
“It’s some sort of goddamned pride thing,” I told him.
“Go on.”
“If we had a planet hitched up next door that was inhabited by members of an alien race—I started to say advanced alien race—that would be one thing. It would be tolerable if they knew something we don’t know. What is not tolerable is to have these goddamned savages know something we don’t know.”
“I understand, Julie. At least I think I do. But here’s what you must understand. We’re not exploring here what these people knew. You could sit down and talk to every tribal person on this planet about tribal life, and not one of them would spontaneously articulate the Erratic Retaliator strategy for you. But once you articulate it for them, they will of course recognize it immediately and will probably say something like, ‘Well, we all know that. We didn’t say it because it’s just too obvious to need saying’—and I agree. It took one of the great scientific minds of all time to articulate the fact that unsupported objects fall toward the center of the earth, something any normal five-year-old knows—or would certainly imagine he knew if you pointed it out to him.”
“I’m not quite sure what point you’re making.”
“I’m not quite sure either, Julie, to be honest. You’ll have to be patient as I grope for answers that will satisfy you.… Scientists of many different kinds are interested in bioluminescence—the production of light by living creatures—but none of them is trying to find out what these creatures know about producing light. What they know about producing light is beside the point. Not long ago we studied a behavior that enables white-footed mice to be successful. But we weren’t trying to find out what white-footed mice know about being successful. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“The same applies to our study here. We’re not interested in what Leavers know about living, any more than we’re interested in what bioluminescent creatures know about light. Their knowledge is not our study. Their success is our study.”
“Okay. I see that. What I don’t see is how their success has anything to do with us.”
Ishmael nodded. “This is precisely why it’s never been studied by you, Julie. It’s never seemed relevant to study people whose only accomplishment was to live on a planet for three million years without devouring it. But as you approach a point of no return in your plunge toward extinction, this study will soon seem very relevant indeed.”
“Yeah, I see what you mean. Sort of.”
“It’s well known that the Vikings visited the New World five hundred years before Columbus did. But the Vikings’ contemporaries weren’t electrified by their discovery, because it was irrelevant to them. You could have proclaimed it from every housetop, and people would have been puzzled to know why you bothered. But when Columbus made his discovery five hundred years later, his contemporaries were electrified. The discovery of a new continent was now very relevant indeed. Until now, Julie, I’ve been like Leif Eriksson tromping around alone on a vast, marvelous continent that absolutely no one cares about and no one wants to hear about. This continent has been open and available for study by your philosophers, your educators, your economists, your political scientists for more than a century, but not one of them has given it more than a bored look. Its existence inspires in them nothing but yawns. But I sense that things are beginning to change. Your appearance here in this room is a sign of that change—and as you recall, I nearly missed it myself. I sense that more and more of you are becoming alarmed about your headlong plunge toward catastrophe. I sense that more and more of you are casting about for new ideas.”
“Yeah. But unfortunately more and more of us are also casting about for more and more exotic forms of hoogymoogy.”
“That’s only to be expected, Julie. What you’re experiencing is tantamount to cultural collapse. For ten thousand years you’ve believed that you have the one right way for people to live. But for the last three decades or so, that belief has become more and more untenable with every passing year. You may think it odd that this is so, but it’s the men of your culture who are being hit the hardest by the failure of your cultural mythology. They have (and have always had) a much greater investment in the righteousness of your revolution. In coming years, as the signs of collapse become more and more unmistakable, you’ll see them withdraw ever more completely into the surrogate world of male success, the world of sports. And, much worse, you’ll see them taking ever more violent revenge for their disappointment on the world around them—and particularly on the women around them.”
“Why on women?”
“The Taker dream has always been a man’s dream, Julie, and the men of your culture imagine that the collapse of this dream will devastate them while leaving women relatively untouched.”
“And won’t it?”
Ishmael thought for a moment before answering. “The inmates of the Taker prison build the prison anew for themselves in every generation, Julie. Your mother and father did their part and are doing it still. You personally, as you dutifully go to school and prepare to take your place in the world of work, are even now engaged in building the prison for your own generation to occupy. When it’s all done, it’ll be the work of all of you, men and women alike. Even so, the women of your culture have never been as enthusiastic about prison life as the men—have rarely gotten as much out of it as men have.”
“Are you saying that men run the prison?”
“No. As long as the food remains under lock and key, the prison runs itself. The governing that you see is the prisoners governing themselves. They’re allowed to do that and to live as they please within the prison. For the most part, the prisoners have chosen to be governed by men—or allowed themselves to be governed by men—but these men don’t run the prison itself.”
“What’s the prison then?”
“The prison is your culture, which you sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago.”
“How do we stop that?”
“By learning something different, Julie. By refusing to teach your children how to be prisoners. By breaking the pattern. This is why, when people ask me what they should do, I tell them, ‘Teach others what you’ve learned here.’ All too often, however, they reply by saying, ‘Yes, that’s fine, but what should we do?’ When six billion of you refuse to teach your children how to be prisoners of Taker culture, this awful dream of yours will be over—in a single generation. It can only continue for as long as you perpetuate it. Your culture has no independent existence—no existence outside of you—and if you cease to perpetuate it, then it will vanish. Must vanish, like a flame with nothing to feed on.”
“Yeah, but what would happen then? You can’t just stop teaching your children anything, can you?”