|
cadf388
|
Here are some things we can expect of the New Tribal revolution, based on the experience of the Industrial Revolution.[...] Three: It will be led by no one. Like the industrial revolution, it will need no shepherd, no organizer, no spearhead, no pacesetter, no mastermind at the top; it will be too much for anyone to lead. Four: It will not be the initiative of any political, governmental, or religious body.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
17f4563
|
With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
f946eb3
|
HUMANS don't generate toxic wastes--but our culture certainly does. HUMANS aren't toxic to the face of the earth--but our culture certainly is. It's vitally important for our children to know that the curse that needs to be lifted from the earth is not humanity. It's important for them to know that we may be a doomed culture, but we are not a doomed species. It's important for them to understand that it's not being HUMAN that is destroying ..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
3c00cd4
|
You die because you think the gods are looking after you. That's ok for animals, but you should know better." "We should not trust the gods with our lives?" "Definitely not. You should trust *yourselves* with your lives. That's the human way to live." Ishmael shook his head ponderously. "This is sorry news indeed. From time out of mind we've lived in the hands of the gods, and it seemed to us we lived well. We left to the gods all the labor..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
c275235
|
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."
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
3c387f3
|
This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.
|
|
philosophy
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
469ab53
|
Don't wait. Writers are the only artists I know of who expect to get somewhere by waiting. Everyone knows you have to dance to be a dancer, you have to sing to be a singer, you have to act to be an actor, but far too many people seem to believe that you. don't have to write to be a writer. So, instead of writing, they wait. Isaac Asimov said it beautifully in just six words: "It's the writing that teaches you." Writing is what teaches you. ..
|
|
writing-advice
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
e90d41a
|
The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't--and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact ..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
587d58c
|
May the forests be with you and with your children.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
d752827
|
Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we're fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we're in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
abd4dcf
|
Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a pa..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
d2364c9
|
What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn't work well for products, for motorboats and can openers and operettas. It didn't work well for the greedy, the ruthless, and the power hungry. That's what we have, a social organization that works beautifully for products -- which just keep getting better and better every year -- but very poorly for ..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
6b8bf7d
|
This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence."
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
a6641fe
|
No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be "sending a message" to miscrea..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
1a5d339
|
I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else."
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
23bbfcf
|
A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband's valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in her husband's eyes--and therefore in her own.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
be50e57
|
We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored--and
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
fac9c29
|
I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
f4885ee
|
In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins--you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
cd92c7b
|
At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the freedom of the air: freedom from restraints that bind and limit the rest of the biological community. And with that freedom came marvels--all the things you mentioned the other day: urbanization, technology, literacy, mathematics, science. "Their ..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
6484f9d
|
Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
e153503
|
Pharaohs It took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh's iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on th..
|
|
compulsive
purpose
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
0a1c309
|
No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
7dffee0
|
CONTRARY TO THE COMMON ASSUMPTION , Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn't trouble them, wasn't experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mech..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
cb2f6e0
|
All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!)
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
e614089
|
Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren't ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on. But if people are ready for it (and I think they are), then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
d2ebf32
|
No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
7fd6f91
|
We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we've got to learn--or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
a330d7e
|
For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
b4828fc
|
The tribal life doesn't turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
db39ebb
|
It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.
|
|
spirituality
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
2c10daa
|
The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds--with no programs.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
99962b0
|
And this thought is a question: Why? "Why, why, why, why, why, why?" the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, "Why what?" it would be unable to answer you."
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
6f7e1c6
|
One never thinks, "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absent-mindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it's like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day. In fact, feeding became feeding for me only at the zoo, where twice daily great masses of tasteless fodder were pitched in..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
1613b73
|
People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even "good". What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I k..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
8c72392
|
Man's place is to be the first . . . . [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
f28e7ea
|
a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
dcad692
|
For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
957141b
|
I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
9fc462c
|
Tribal people get more out of life.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
fb945ac
|
I pray about teeth-doesn't everyone? I don't have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I'll get around to it before it's too late.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
9da7a1c
|
Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with py..
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
f5c0412
|
The current controversy over God's sex doesn't strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though it presumably doesn't get much use.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |
|
3008684
|
The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn't right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.
|
|
|
Daniel Quinn |