Ishmael: A Brief Story Of Mother Culture

There is a Mother Culture in every species, every culture, convincing them that they are the reason the Gods created the world, affecting how they view it. Humans are destroying the world because they have stopped living in the hands of the gods and Mother Culture has them enacting a story that no one can address, but everyone follows. It is difficult for any species to be aware they are enacting a story because it is so deeply rooted in their minds. The human race is no exception. Mother Culture has influenced them so that they blindly accept whatever they’re told as the truth. Once the Takers decided that they should not live in the hands of the gods and became agriculturalists, they started to believe the world was created for them.

Still to come were the vertebrates and the amphibians and the reptiles and the mammals, and of course, finally, man” (56). The jellyfish thought they were the sole reason of creating the Earth, they were the end product, and creation ended after them because it reached its objective. And when the mammals evolved to humans, the humans thought as the jellyfish in the story believed: the world was made for man, and now that we have evolved to be here, evolution will be over. Another story Ishmael tells is from a Leaver perspective about how the gods forbid Adam from eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and then “ten thousand years ago, the people of your culture said, ‘We’re as wise as the gods and can rule the world as well as they.’ When they took into their own hands the power of life and death over the world, their doom was assured” (166). This story was not from a Taker perspective because if it was, the knowledge would not have been forbidden, it would have been encouraged. The Takers are not as wise as the gods-who have ruled the world for billions of years with it doing just fine-because after only a few thousand years of the Takers ruling the world, it is at

Ishmael tells the narrator that "You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live" (25). He and everyone else are living in the world, without realizing they are simultaneously destroying it. Mother Culture tells them not to question it, to just go on with their lives, but they are, and have, lived their lives in captivity. Mother Culture is also whispering in your ear, telling you the same thing everyone else hears, leaving you oblivious to what is actually happening. Takers and Leavers are different because “The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works for people” (206). The Takers are based on the one right way to live, and they invented laws, so they knew how they “ought to live”. Leavers, however, did not come up with laws or inventions, they simply figured out what worked well for people; they had a wisdom. The Takers believe that their way is the one right way to live, but in truth, there is no one right way, and every time they stamped out a Leaver culture, a wisdom tested since the birth of humanity disappears forever and the Taker culture expanded, all because Mother Culture told them they needed to. Ishmael wants the narrator to understand how things came to be this way, but to do that he needs