“Makes sense,” I said.
“But now let’s see if you can put your finger on the basic wealth-making mechanism of the Takers.”
“It’s not the same for everybody?”
“Oh no,” Ishmael said. “The wealth-making mechanism of the Leavers is quite distinctly different.”
“You’re asking me to describe the wealth-making mechanism of the Takers?”
“That’s right. It’s not terribly obscure.”
I gave it some thought and said, “I suppose it boils down to ‘I’ve got something you want, you give me something I want.’ Or is that too simpleminded?”
“Not for me, Julie. I’d always rather start with the bone than have to carve down to it.” Ishmael said this while shuffling around his room to gather up a pad and felt-tip pen. He paged through it to a clean sheet, then spent three minutes making a diagram, which he flattened against the glass for my inspection.
“This schematic shows what your economy is all about: making products in order to get products. Obviously I’m using the word product in an extended sense, but anyone in a service industry will certainly know what I’m talking about if I refer to his or her product. And for the most part, what people get for their products is money, but money is only one step removed from the products it can buy, and it’s the products people want, not the little pieces of paper. On the basis of our previous conversations, you’ll have no difficulty identifying the event that got this product exchange rolling.”
“Yeah. Locking up the food.”
“Of course. Before that time, there was no point in making products. There was plenty of point in making a pot or a stone tool or a basket, but there was utterly no point in making a thousand of them. No one was in the pottery business or the stone-tool-making business or the basket-weaving business. But with food under lock and key, all this changed immediately. By the simple act of being locked up, food was transformed into a product—the fundamental product of your economy. All of a sudden it became true that someone with three pots could get three times as much to eat as someone with just one pot. All of a sudden someone with thirty thousand pots could live in a palace, while someone with three thousand pots could live in a nice house and someone with no pots at all could live in the gutter. Your whole economy fell into place once the food was put under lock and key.”
“So you’re saying that tribal peoples have no economy at all.”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind, Julie. Here’s the fundamental transaction of the tribal economy.” He turned to a fresh page on his pad and produced a new schematic for me:
“It isn’t products that make the tribal economy go round but rather human energy. This is the fundamental exchange, and it takes place so unobtrusively that people often mistakenly suppose that they have no economy at all, just as they often mistakenly suppose that they have no educational system at all. You make and sell hundreds of millions of products every year in order to build and equip and staff schools to educate your children. Tribal peoples accomplish the same objective through a more or less constant low-level exchange of energy between adults and youngsters that they hardly even notice. You make and sell hundreds of millions of products every year in order to be a
ble to hire police to maintain law and order. Tribal peoples accomplish the same objective by doing it themselves. Maintaining law and order is never an agreeable chore, but it’s not remotely the major concern for them that it is for you. You make and sell trillions of products every year in order to maintain governing bodies that are incredibly inefficient and corrupt—as you well know. Tribal peoples manage to govern themselves quite effectively without making or selling anything.
“A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system. This doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism specifically. Capitalism is just the most recent expression of an idea that came into being ten thousand years ago in the founding of your culture. The revolutionaries of international communism didn’t go nearly deep enough to effect the change they wanted to make. They thought they could stop the merry-go-round if they captured all the horses. But of course the horses don’t make the carousel go round. The horses are just passengers like the rest of you.”
“By horses, you mean rulers, governments.”
“That’s right.”
“How do we stop the merry-go-round, then?”
Ishmael sorted through his tree clippings for a choice item as he thought about this. Then he said, “Suppose you’d never seen a merry-go-round and you came across one that was running out of control. You might hop on and try to stop it by pulling on the reins of the horses and yelling ‘Whoa!’ ”
“I suppose I might, if I’d woken up kind of stupid that morning.”
“And when that didn’t work, what would you do?”
“I’d hop off and try to find the controls.”
“And if no controls were in sight?”
“Then I guess I’d try to figure out how the damn thing works.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because, if there’s no on-off switch, you have to know how it works in order to make it stop.”
Ishmael nodded. “Now you understand why I’m trying to show you how the Taker merry-go-round works. There is no on-off switch, so if you want to make it stop, you’ll have to know how it works.”
“A minute ago,” I told him, “you said that a system based on exchanging products always concentrates wealth in a few hands. Why is that?”
Ishmael thought for a moment, then said, “Wealth in your culture is something that can be put under lock and key. Would you agree with that statement?”