“I’ve opened the tribal treasury for you, Julie. I’ve shown you the things you threw away for the sake of making yourselves rulers of the world. A system of wealth based on an exchange of energy that is inexhaustible and completely renewable. A system of laws that actually helped people live instead of just punishing them for doing things that people have always done and always will do. An educational system that cost nothing, worked perfectly, and drew people together generationally. There are many other systems worthy of your study there, but you’ll find none that encourages people to build creatively off each other’s ideas the way you’ve done during your Industrial Revolution. There was no prohibition against such creativity in the tribal life—but there was also no demand or reward for it.”
He fell silent for a moment. I opened my mouth to speak, and he held up a hand to stop me.
“I know I haven’t yet given you what you asked for. I’m getting there. You’ll just have to be patient and let me get there my own way.”
I batted my eyelashes and held my peace.
A Look Into The Future
For you, it’s just another bit of ancient history, like Reconstruction or the Korean War, but twenty-five years ago many thousands of children your age knew that the Taker way is a way of death. They didn’t really know much more than that, but they knew that they didn’t want to do what their parents had done—get married, get jobs, get old, retire, and die. They wanted to live a new way, but the only real values they had were love, good fellowship, emotional honesty, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll—not bad things by any means, but not enough to found a revolution on, and a revolution was what they wanted. Just as they had no revolutionary theory, they had no revolutionary program. What they had was a slogan—‘Tune in, turn on, drop out’—and they imagined that if everyone would just tune in, turn on, and drop out, then there’d be dancing in the streets and a new human era would begin. I tell you this because it’s as important to know why a thing fails as why a thing succeeds. The children’s revolt of the sixties and seventies failed because it had neither a theory nor a program. But they were certainly right about one thing: It’s time for something new for you people.
“You must have a revolution if you’re going to survive, Julie. If you go on the way you’re presently going, it’s hard to imagine your living through another century. But you can’t have a negative revolution. Any revolution that thinks of ‘going back’ to some good old days’ of imagined simplicity when men tipped their hats, women stayed home and cooked, and no one got divorced or questioned authority is founded on dreams. Any revolution that depends on people voluntarily giving up things they want for things they don’t want is mere utopianism and will fail. You must have a positive revolution, a revolution that brings people more of what they really want, not less of what they don’t really want. They don’t really want sixteen-bit electronic games, but if that’s the best they can get, they’ll take it. You won’t get far in your revolution by asking them to give up their sixteen-bit electronic games. If you want them to lose interest in toys, then you must give them something even better than toys.
“That must be the watchword of your revolution, Julie—not voluntary poverty, but rather voluntary wealth. But real wealth this time. Not toys, not gadgets, not ‘amenities.’ Not stuff you can put in bank vaults. Real wealth of the kind that humans were born with. Real wealth of the kind that humans enjoyed here for hundreds of thousands of years—and continue to enjoy wherever the Leaver life is still intact. And this is wealth you can enjoy without feeling guilty, Julie, because it isn’t something stolen from the world. It’s wealth that is entirely the product of your own energy. Are you with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Now let’s see if we can find a reasonably plausible way of looking at the fut
ure of your revolution. Back around 1816 the Baron Karl von Draise of Karlsruhe, Germany, thought he’d try his hand at inventing (the Industrial Revolution really has reached into every class, high and low, for its talent). What he had in mind was a self-propelled wheeled vehicle, and what he came up with was a pretty good design for a first try: a bicycle propelled by pushing on the ground with your feet. Now if he’d been able to look seventy years into the future, he could have seen a bicycle that worked really well—the one built by the Englishman James Starley, which, except for refinements, is still in use today, a century later.
“Just like the Baron, you and I can’t look into the future to see a global human social system that works really well. Such a system may well come into being—but we can no more imagine it than the Baron could imagine James Starley’s bicycle. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
“All the same, we’re better off than the Baron. The Baron not only couldn’t look into the future for guidance (because no one can), he couldn’t look into the past either, because there were no bicycles there to look at. We’re better off than he was, because, while we can’t look forward to see a global human social system that works really well, we can look back to one that worked really well. It worked so well that we can say with some confidence that it was a final, unimprovable system for tribal peoples. There was no complex organization. What you had was just independent tribes playing the Erratic Retaliator strategy: ‘Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable.’ ”
“Right.”
“Now what principle or law did the Erratic Retaliator strategy enforce or protect for tribal peoples?”
“Well … it protected tribal independence and identity.”
“Yes, that’s true, but those are things, not principles or laws.”
I worked on it some but in the end had to admit I didn’t see it.
“It doesn’t matter. The Erratic Retaliator strategy enforced this law: There is no one right way for people to live.”
“Right, I see it now.”
“This is something that is as true today as it was a million years ago. Nothing can render it obsolete. This law is something we can count on, Julie. At least you and I can, speaking as revolutionaries. Opponents of the revolution will insist that there is surely some one right way for people to live, and they’ll generally insist that they know what it is. That’s all right, so long as they don’t try to impose their one right way on us. ‘There is no one right way for people to live’ is where we begin, as ‘I think therefore I am’ was where Descartes began. Both statements must be accepted as self-evident or otherwise simply rejected. Neither is capable of proof. Both can be opposed by other axioms, but neither can be disproved. Are you following me?”
“I think so, Ishmael. At a distance.”
“So we have a motto for our banner: ‘There is no one right way for people to live.’ Shall we have a name for the revolution itself?”
After giving this some thought, I said, “Yeah. We could call it the Tribal Revolution.”
Ishmael nodded. “That’s a good name, but I think we’d better make it the New Tribal Revolution, Julie. Otherwise people will think we’re talking about bows and arrows and living in caves.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Here are some things we can expect of the New Tribal Revolution, based on the experience of the Industrial Revolution. We can call it the Seven-Point Plan.
“One: The revolution won’t take place all at once. It’s not going to be any sort of coup d’état like the French or Russian revolutions.
“Two: It will be achieved incrementally, by people working off each other’s ideas. This is the great driving innovation of the Industrial Revolution.