“Now the reason this doesn’t happen in a tribal situation is that they don’t start out with a store of food. They go along and go along, and for some reason the food gradually starts to get scarce. There’s a drought or a forest fire or something. On day one, everyone’s out looking for food, and it’s slim pickings for everyone. The tribal chief is as hungry as everyone else. Why wouldn’t he be, since there’s no store that he has first pick at? Everyone’s out there scoring as much food as they can, and if someone makes a good score, the best thing he can do is to share it with others, not because he’s a nice guy but because the more people who are on their feet and out there hunting for food, the better off they all are—including him.”
“That’s an excellent analysis, Julie. You have a distinct knack for this.… Of course there’s nothing uniquely human about this. Wherever you find animals joined in foraging bands, you’ll find them sharing food—not altruistically but in their own individual best interest. On the other hand, I’m sure there have been tribal societies that have departed from this way of handling hunger, societies in which the rule was ‘If food is scarce, don’t share it, hoard it.’ But none in fact are seen. I’m sure you know why.”
“Yeah. Because where a rule like that was followed, the tribe would fall apart. At least I think it would.”
“Of course it would, Julie. Tribes survive by sticking together at all costs, and when it’s every man for himself, the tribe ceases to be a tribe.”
“I began this part of the conversation by saying that the foremost wealth of tribal peoples is cradle-to-grave security for each and every member. This is precisely the wealth that tribes stick together to have. And as you can see, it’s impossible for one person to have more of this wealth than anyone else. There’s no way to accumulate it, no way to put it under lock and key.
“I don’t mean to say that this wealth is indestructible, of course. It remains intact only as long as the tribe remains intact, which is why so many Leaver tribes fought you to the death. As it looked to them, if the tribe was going to be destroyed, then they were dead anyway. I also don’t mean to say that people can’t be seduced away from this wealth. They certainly can be, and this is how it’s done when for one reason or another you can’t just send in the troops to kill them off. The young in particular are susceptible to the lure of Taker wealth, which obviously has much more glitter and flash than their own. If you can once get the young listening to you instead of to their own people, then you’re well on the way to destroying the tribe, since whatever the elders can’t pass on is lost forever when they die.
“To live and walk among your neighbors without fear is the second greatest wealth of tribal peoples. Again, this isn’t very glamorous wealth, though certainly a great many of you wish you had it. I haven’t made a study of this, but it seems to me a routine matter that every poll reveals fear of criminal attack to be either your greatest or second-greatest concern.
In Taker societies, only the rich live free of fear—or relatively free of fear. In tribal societies, everyone lives free of fear. But of course this doesn’t mean that nothing bad ever happens to anyone. What it does mean is that it’s sufficiently rare so that no one lives behind locked doors and no one carries weapons that they expect to have to use to defend themselves from their neighbors. Again, obviously, this isn’t wealth that can be concentrated in anyone’s hands. It can’t be accumulated or put under lock and key.
“Equal to any of these is a form of wealth you lack so profoundly that you’re truly pathetic. In a Leaver society, you’re never left to cope with a crushing problem all by yourself. You have an autistic child, a disabled child. This will be perceived as a tribal burden—but (as always) not for altruistic reasons. It simply makes no sense to say to the child’s mother or father, ‘This is entirely your problem. Don’t bother the rest of us with it.’ You have a parent who is becoming senile. The rest of the tribe won’t turn its back on you as you struggle with this problem. They know that a problem shared widely becomes almost no problem at all—and they know very well that each of them will someday need similar help with one problem or another. I find it truly heartrending to see the people of your world suffering without this wealth. One of a couple in late middle age contracts some horrible disease, their savings are wiped out in a matter of months, former friends shun them, there’s no more money for medication, and suddenly their situation is completely desperate. Again and again the only solution they can find is to die together—a mercy killing and a suicide. Stories like this are commonplace in your culture but are virtually unheard of in Leaver societies.
“In the Taker system, you use your carefully accumulated product wealth to buy support wealth that is free to all in the Leaver system. When a tribal people has to deal with a troublemaker in their midst, the able-bodied band together to do whatever is necessary, and this, in fact, is highly effective. You, on the other hand, in order to avoid performing such a service, turn the service into a product. You build police forces, then compete to have the best (the highest-paid, the best-equipped, and so on). This is notoriously ineffective, despite the fact that you spend more and more money on it every year, but it does result in a situation in which the rich are much better protected than the poor. In Leaver societies, all adults take part in the education of the young, which happens painlessly and without fail. You, on the other hand, in order to avoid performing such a service, turn it into a product, building schools, then competing to have the best (best-staffed, best-equipped, and so on). This too is notoriously ineffective, despite the fact that you spend more and more money on it every year, but it does result in a situation in which the children of the rich are educated less badly and usually more pleasurably. Care for the chronically ill, the aged, the disabled, the mentally ill—all these services are dispensed cooperatively in Leaver societies, and in yours all are turned into products to be competed for, the rich getting the best, the poor lucky to get any at all.”
There was one of those moments when neither one of us had anything to add. Then I said, “I need you to put this together for me, Ishmael. I’m not quite sure where we’ve been and where we are.”
He scratched the side of his jaw for a bit before answering. “If you want to survive on this planet, Julie, the people of your culture are going to have to start listening to your neighbors in the community of life. Incredible as it may seem, you don’t know it all. And, incredible as it may seem, you don’t have to invent it all. You don’t have to contrive things that work, you only have to visit the treasury around you. There’s no reason to be surprised that Leaver peoples should enjoy cradle-to-grave security. After all, among your neighbors in the community of life, the very same security is enjoyed in every species whose members form communities. Ducks, sea lions, deer, giraffes, wolves, wasps, monkeys, and gorillas (to name just a few species out of millions) enjoy such security. It has to be assumed that the members of Homo habilis enjoyed such security—or how would they have survived? Is there any reason to doubt that the members of Homo erectus enjoyed such security or that they conferred it upon their descendants, Homo sapiens? No, as a species, you came into being in communities in which cradle-to-grave security was the rule, and the same rule has been followed throughout the development of Homo sapiens right up to the present moment—in Leaver societies. It’s only in Taker societies that cradle-to-grave security has become a rarity, a special blessing of the privileged few.”
Ishmael studied the look on my face for a few seconds and apparently realized that he still wasn’t there.
“You daydreamed, Julie, of touring the universe to learn the secrets of how to live. I’m showing you where those secrets are to be found right here on your own planet, among your own neighbors in the community of life.”
“I see.… I guess. There was a girl in my class last year who had a newsletter from some organization or other. I don’t remember the name of the organization, but I remember its motto, at least approximately. It was ‘Healing ourselves, healing the world.’ Would you say that’s what you’re talking about?”
Ishmael gave that some thought and said, “I’m afraid I don’t have much sympathy for the ‘healing’ approach to your problems, Julie. You’re not ill. Six billion of you wake up every morning and start devouring the world. This isn’t a sickness that you contracted one night while sitting in a draft. Healing is always a hit-or-miss proposition, I’m sure you know that. Sometimes aspirin fixes the headache and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes chemotherapy kills the cancer and sometimes it doesn’t. You can’t afford to fool around with ‘healing’ yourselves. You’ve got to start living a different way, and you’ve got to do it very soon.”
Less Is Not Always More
You know,” I said, “there’s something you could do that would help me a lot. I don’t know if I have any business asking, but there it is.”
Ishmael frowned. “Have I given you the impression that my program here is not subject to change? Do I really seem to you so rigid that I’m unwilling to accommodate you?”
Oops, I said to myself, but after thinking about it for a bit, I decided not to be apologetic. I said to him, “It’s probably been a long time since yo
u were a twelve-year-old girl talking to a thousand-pound gorilla.”
“I don’t see what my weight has to do with it,” he snapped.
“Well, all right, a hundred-year-old gorilla.”
“I’m not a hundred years old, and I weigh less than six hundred pounds.”
“Good Lord,” I said. “This is beginning to sound like something from Alice in Wonderland.”
Ishmael chuckled and asked me what he could do that would be helpful.
“Tell me what you think the world would be like if we actually did manage to ‘start living a different way.’ ”
“This is a very legitimate request, Julie, and I can’t imagine why you hesitated to make it. I know from experience that, at this point, many people imagine that I’m thinking of a future in which technology has disappeared. It’s all too easy for you to blame all your problems on technology. But humans were born technologists as they were born linguists, and no Leaver people has ever been discovered that is devoid of it. Like so many other facets of Leaver life, however, their technology tends to be almost invisible to eyes used to technology as furiously powerful and extravagant as yours. In any case, I’m certainly not envisioning a future for you devoid of technology.
“Very often people who are used to thinking in the Taker way will say to me, ‘Well, if the Taker way isn’t the right way, what is the right way?’ But of course there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs. So I’m certainly not envisioning a future in which the Taker empire has been overthrown and replaced by another. That’s complete nonsense. What does Mother Culture say you have to do?”
“Oh my,” I said. “I guess she’d say we don’t have to do anything at all.”