Imagine Nazi Germany won the war. Yeah, it's really not good. But they managed to pull it off and win the war. Hitler's 1000 year Reich wasn't a total flop after all. They conquered Europe and North America and kept on conquering until they took over the whole world. And now many generations have passed, and all memory of other peoples and other cultures have been erased. The remaining people still living look and speak and think exactly like all Nazis should.
In fact, for the children growing up in this dystopia, their school textbooks don't even bring up the peoples and other cultures that once existed. And maybe at first, the textbooks were actively whitewashing history. But eventually, these textbooks don't mention other peoples and cultures and ways of thinking because the authors don't even know they once existed. I'll read you what happens next. But one day, two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo.
One of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, What's wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this? Kurt said, I'll tell you, Hans, there is something that's troubling me and troubling me deeply. His friend asked what it was. It's like Kurt said, I can't shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about. This parable is from the novel Ishmael, an adventure of the mind and spirit.
Together, we are setting off on this adventure and this student's curiosity. The suspicion that things aren't right and don't have to be this way is the gateway to our quest. Welcome to Episode two of Human Nature Odyssey, a search for better ways to understand and more clearly experience. The incredible, terrified, lying and ridiculous world we live in. I'm Alex. Consider me your trusty sidekick. I'll be the Sam to your Frodo, the scarecrow to your Dorothy, the Chewbacca, to your Han Solo.
At the beginning of any adventure, the hero begins their journey in some kind of peaceful land. For Dorothy, that was Kansas. For Frodo Baggins, that was the Shire. Luke Skywalker, that was his tattooing moisture farm. So in our episode, I took you to the abandoned Ashbourne Country Club. That was my of mind. I wonder if you have a place, a special spot, where you started your journey from. To begin our journey means to leave those places.
But even though we leave them, a piece of them stays with us. Well, I'm excited to go on this adventure with you today. The lands will travel through what might be treacherous and full of danger. But I trust that together we'll make it out the other side in this first series of episodes, we're going to explore the ideas in the book. Ishmael by Daniel Quinn.
Ishmael is a philosophical novel about a telepathic gorillas, conversations with a human narrator, exploring ideas about humanity, civilization, and the fate of the world. For anyone who has already read Ishmael and is looking for a deeper analysis of the ideas it raises. This is for you. And if you haven't read Ishmael, don't worry. I've also made this for someone coming in entirely fresh. Ideally, you're a person who is curious about the world.
And maybe when you were a kid, you also felt things weren't quite right. It's morning. You haven't eaten yet. You're already on the Internet. You're scrolling through whatever the latest social media is. There's a post predicting the next financial crash. You scroll a bit more and find a news headline about a distant war and the resulting famine. A little further, there's a report from the U.N. about how the rate of species die off may be faster than scientists initially predicted.
And then you find this an ad that reads, Teacher seeks pupil must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person. Huh. What's your reaction? Would you be excited? Ignore it or think it was total bullshit? Well, that's the ad the narrator of Ishmael is confronted with, and it's how the book begins. We're never given our narrator's name. We just start with him in his kitchen when he finds this ad.
The book takes place in the early 1990, so instead of finding the ad growing the Internet, the narrator finds it in the newspaper. Either way, clearly this isn't a normal ad, and our narrator's reaction is complete disgust. I mean, teacher. Six, pupil. Give me a break. Oh. An earnest desire to save the world. Yeah, that's rich. Real rich. Here's how the book begins. Quote, The first time I read the ad, I choked and coerced and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
Since even this didn't seem to be quite enough, I snatched it up, marched into the kitchen and shoved it in the trash, unquote. The narrator tries to justify to us his absolute revulsion of finding the ad in the first place. He tells us he was a child in the 1960s when he had this sense that, sure, things were terrifying. There's the Vietnam War, the constant threat of nuclear annihilation, the assassinations of a president and leaders of the civil rights movement.
But it seemed like things were really changing. The whole world was changing. Things would be better. Quote, during the children's evil of the sixties and seventies. I was just old enough to understand what these kids had in mind. They meant to turn the world upside down and just young enough to believe they might actually succeed. It's true. Every morning when I open my eyes, I expected to see that the new era had begun, that the sky was brighter blue and the grass brighter green.
I expected to hear laughter in the air and see people dancing the streets. And not just kids. Everyone. I won't apologize for my naivete. You only have to listen to the songs to know I wasn't alone, unquote. It's hard for me and maybe for you, too, to imagine growing up in a time like this. I remember first reading that description of the optimistic outlook. The narrator had as a kid in the sixties and thinking to myself how Damn, that is not what the world seemed like to me as I was growing up.
Things only seemed more bleak over time. There was 911 in the war on terror, Hurricane Katrina and rising seas, a financial recession and increasing wealth inequality. Things haven't exactly gotten better since I was a kid, but growing up in the early 21st century, I didn't really expect them to. But that kind of cynical outlook wasn't the case for the narrator. To him and maybe other kids of the 1960s, the future seemed hopeful.
There was a sense in the youth counterculture that society might wake up from its bad dream. Then things changed, but not in the way the counterculture was hoping. Instead of waking up from a nightmare, the narrator tells us he then became a young adult in a time when it felt like the countercultural vision itself was the dream, just a fantasy, and nothing existed beyond the cold, hard reality of the current state of the world.
He says, quote, Then one day when I was in my mid-teens, I woke up and realized that the new era was never going to begin. The revolt hadn't been put down. It had just dwindled away into a fashion statement. Can I have been the only person in the world who was disillusioned by this? Bewildered by this, it seems so. Everyone else seemed to be able to pass it off with a cynical grin that said, Well, what did you expect? There's never been any more than this, and never will be any more than this.
Nobody's out to save the world because nobody gives a damn about the world. That was just a bunch of goofy kids talking. Get a job, make some money, work day or 60, then moved to Florida and die. Unquote. My God. As a millennial, first of all, I'm expecting to have to work way past 60, but I kind of imagine the equivalent of this moment would be like waking up one morning to find out no one cares about social justice anymore. No one cares about gender equality, ending white supremacy.
No one's anti-capitalist. That whole thing where masses of young people push for social change was just looked at as naive over idealistic history. And not that those ideals were ever actually realized, but nobody would even pretend they care about them anymore. That's the millennial version of the sixties ending. So there's the ad. Teacher seeks pupil must have an earnest desire to save the world. To save the world. Saving the world kind of sounds crunchy in my 21st century years. I got to say.
First of all, no one wants to talk to the guy who says he wants to save the world. I don't want to talk to that guy. Second, it's like saying you're going to end all war and hunger. I don't think it's going to happen. Good luck even trying to fix the electoral system. I mean, I'll give you a medal if you can get the signal to fix that pothole at the end of your street. But I guess all the ad is really saying is you need to have a desire to save the world in earnest.
Desire. And when I was 14, reading Ishmael for the first time, saving the world didn't sound corny to me at all. I remember watching this documentary on overfishing in high school environmental science class and just wanting to, like, flip the desks over and scream. The world can't be destroyed. I really felt that deeply. I definitely had an earnest desire back then, and I think since then I kind of lost that feeling or it's buried deeper down somewhere. Maybe I feel less hopeful in the world.
Or maybe I feel less hopeful in my ability to help. How about you? How do we get in touch with that again? Can we try something? An interactive activity. Okay, let's look around and notice our surroundings for a bit. Whether you're inside or outside in the car, walking down the street, lying in bed, what's the tiniest living creature you can find where you are? Is there a bird on the telephone wire? A fly buzzing around your room? Maybe a tree out your window. Or a succulent gifted by a friend.
If you're in a particularly lifeless environment, just remember the last pigeon you saw. Let's watch or imagine this other being for a bit. What's it up to? If there's a direct line going back from us all the way to the first form of life.
That creature you're seeing and you are cousins, your family and Ishmael refers to this family as the community of life, which means millions of years ago, our distant ancestors and that tiny creatures, distant ancestors were the same species, just a couple of cousins hanging out. And maybe there was some kind of family drama, and one cousin moved out of town to go do its own thing. And millions of years went by until that cousins descendants became that tiny creature.
Meanwhile, our ancestors took their own evolutionary path. Can you imagine your ancestors as they evolved from single celled organisms, fish underwater, reptiles on land, rodents hiding in holes, primates singing through trees to homo sapiens to you. It's a billions of years old legacy we've inherited. I want to tell you about three of our cousins in our family, the community of life.
There's the golden bamboo lemur in Madagascar, the yellow tipped tree snail in Hawaii, and the spics macaw in Brazil. Each of those cousins has had their own distinct journey, but there's something these three species have in common. Their stories ended in the last few years when they went extinct. Early on in Ishmail, there's this statistic that says 200 species go extinct every day. Wait, what? 200 species every day. That can't be right.
That would mean. What? So I googled it just to make sure. I found this article from CNN that references a study from the University of Mexico that found between the year 2001 to 2014, 173 species went extinct. Oh, okay. I mean, 173. It's still not good, but it's not as bad, right? Wait, so where the hell did Daniel Quinn get that number? 200 species a day. You think that would be a useful thing to say? And, well, I kept Googling.
Then I found this Guardian article detailing a 2010 report from the United Nations saying 150 to 200 species of plants, insects, birds and mammals go extinct every 24 hours. Oh, crap. Okay, wait. So why are the numbers so different? Enough Googling. I got to talk to someone. So I reached out to Gerda Keller, professor of paleontology and geology in the Geosciences Department of Princeton University. She studies the most recent mass extinction, the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
So maybe she'd have insight to ask, is it true that 200 species are going extinct every day? I think much more. If you look at the endangered the number of endangered species that are barely hanging on. They're not really viable populations. They can go in any drought or any bad year. So the first article that I sent you is when I was looking into this is there's a University of Mexico studies that CNN is talking about, saying that 173 species went extinct between 2001 2014.
I mean, that is that is an interesting article in terms of large vertebrates, mammals for the most part. It's not a very high number as far as extinctions are going. It was interesting, though, for them to concentrate on that because it's it's one of the the large ones is what is on our mind. It's more emotionally impactful, I suppose, for people to, you know, the large mammals that we identify with. Yeah. The elephants and the bison. To talk about the extinction of those. Yeah. Let me tell you.
Okay. If I write a paper and I tell you, 5000 species of insects go extinct every year and say, so what? They don't bother me. Hopefully it's the mosquitoes, so I don't have to worry about them. So what does extinction look like normally versus now? Normally, over about a million years, you may lose 3 to 5 species just three or five species total. That's not even just a lot of what is documented from the fossil record. For example, the background rate. Nothing to write home about here.
Two species that a species disappears. It's the mass extinctions that that start to bother us. The first book that we're looking at is this novel called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. And there's this line early on in the book that mentions that 200 species are going extinct today. I remember reading that when I was quite young, and as a human we could think like, okay, well, 200 species are going extinct today. That doesn't affect me. Like, you know, I'm at the top of the food chain.
I'll still be fine. And he makes the metaphor that, you know, if you live in a tower and you live at the top of the tower and every day you take out 200 bricks from the bottom of the tower, you're not going to be atop that tower very long. Yeah, mostly we think of ourselves. We are the top dogs. No question about it. Top of the food chain. So the dinosaurs being on top of the food chain is not a good place to be, not when things are getting critical.
It's already up there where it's affecting humans. It really is following the playbook of all the other mass extinctions, only much, much faster. Oh, okay. Hold up. At this point, you might be saying to yourself, oh, geez, is this going to be one of those things? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The world's going to shit. I get it. I've seen Avatar. The destruction of the world is obvious. It's cliche, the truth is, maybe it's too painful to think about. Then there's the perspective that goes, okay.
Okay. Yeah. The six mass extinction life, as we know, may come to an end, but nature will be fine. Give it a few million years and life going to bounce right back, okay? Sure. If that helps you sleep at night. But listen, we've inherited a pretty unbelievably amazing biodiversity legacy here. It's an unfathomable miracle. Think of that tiny creature you're sharing space with from earlier and all the other species that share this world with us.
The squirrels and pandas and dolphins, silverback gorillas and great white sharks, honey badgers and peacocks, clownfish kangaroos, octopi, jaguars, komodo dragons, hippos, penguins, seahorse, camels, even pigeons. These are our cousins, our literal cousins and the community of life. We evolved with them. They evolved with us. It's an indescribable, incredible legacy we've inherited and it's a legacy that we're bringing to an end.
We're here together right now on this planet, like some big family picnic. What kind of family member ruins the picnic for everybody else? When the narrator finds the head must have an earnest desire to save the world, he throws it in the trash. He doesn't want to think about that. Little does he know this is his call to adventure. There's something inside him that, despite his adult cynicism, has some taking the crumpled ad out of the trash and going to see for himself what it could be about.
And for us, just getting depressed about the world ending doesn't help anyone. When the Luke Skywalker finds his family moisture farm on tattooing burned to the ground by the evil empire. Sure, it's devastating, but it's also the beginning of his adventure. And in our real world, the stakes are incredibly high. But this is our call to adventure.
So even though there's part of me that still thinks wanting to save the world is corny, there's still part of me, like the ad says, that has an earnest desire to do so. A crime is being committed here on a planetary scale, and it's not an incoming asteroid from outer space or volcanic eruptions. It's us. What gives? Were we doomed to destroy the world? Was it inevitable? Is there something wrong with us to help us investigate these questions about this planet earth crime scene?
I've just received a tip from a compelling lead. Let's go check it out. We're going to descend deep down into a secret and sinister underground lair. I know nothing ever good happens in an underground lair, and this one is particularly seedy. Imagine as you're descending down into the dark stairs, this evil music is playing. Sitting around a long black table is the kind of mean looking henchman you'd expect to find out here.
A tough underling, a terrifying assassin, and, of course, an eyepatch wearing right hand man at the head of the table. A mean looking, hairless cat sits on the ring, bearing lap of the mastermind behind it all. Like all evil masterminds, he's bald with an ominous scar that covers half his face. He wears an evil looking gray suit and his name conveniently is Doctor Evil, and he's assembled his henchmen to reveal his new, sinister plan.
It's a maniacal contraption that can alter the climate, destroy the ozone layer, and threaten the health of all the people in the world. Unfortunately for Doctor Evil, his plan has been thwarted before it's even begun. His eyepatch, wearing right hand man informs him that Sorry to report this doc, but it's already happening. What do you mean? The evil mastermind asks. Well, the world is already being destroyed. And it's true. But in reality, this isn't the result of some evil mastermind plan.
There's no secret room where bad guys plot the world's demise. That's the joke the 1990s comedy classic Austin Powers is making. We don't need bad guys to destroy the world. So who's doing it? Well, to answer that, we can leave these evil henchmen and return to our main story from the nineties that deals with the more complicated nuance. Real life destruction of the world. It's time to meet Ishmael. All right. Let's follow the narrator and go meet this mysterious teacher.
So you arrive at the address given in the newspaper, the narrator tells us. When I got there, I was surprised to find it was a very ordinary sort of office building full of second rate flats lawyers, dentists, travel agents, a chiropractor and a private investigator, too. I'd expected something a little more atmospheric. A brownstone with paneled walls, high ceilings and shuttered windows, perhaps inkwell. The narrator finds room 105 behind the back and without there being a sign or anything.
Steps inside. Let's go inside with him. I pushed it open and stepped into a large, empty room. This uncommon space had been created by knocking down interior partitions, the marks of which could still be seen on the bare hardwood floor. That was my first impression. Emptiness. The second was olfactory. The place reeked of the circus inkwell.
So you're there with a narrator and you notice a bunch of books on the walls about history, prehistory, anthropology, and then you notice a large glass pane and behind it, some leafy stalks. But that's not all. Emerging from the shadows of this glass section is maybe the last thing you thought you'd find inside this office building. A gorilla. A large five and a half foot tall silverback gorilla. And he's looking right at you. This is Ishmael. Soon you learn that Ishmael is no ordinary gorilla.
He's a telepathic gorilla. And he shares with you his whole life story of being captured and taken from his family in the jungle and put on display at a traveling circus where he became furiously curious at his condition and that of the humans around him and dedicated his life to holding one on one conversations with curious pupils in an attempt to examine why things have to be this way. And ultimately, Ishmael proposes, they don't go on our adventure of the mind and spirit.
Ishmael will be our guide. Like Gandalf or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Or Glinda the Good Witch in Wizard of Oz. Like a good hero's journey guide. Ishmael won't always be with us, but we'll find he'll come and help us when we need him most. Ishmael asks the narrator to first ponder the question Who wants to destroy the world? Unlike the evildoers, from our field trip to the underground lair, obviously no one wants to destroy the world.
Not even the people benefiting most from the world's destruction and don't want the world to end. Because then there's no world, not even for the rich. And the rest of us certainly don't want the world to end either. Yet we still driving. Cars fly and planes heat. Our homes, core homes run, our appliances eat, packaged foods made in factories, order things online both necessary and less necessary.
As Ishmael puts it, each of us, in our own small way, quote, contributes daily to the destruction of the world, unquote. And destruction is one way to put it. Another way is the consumption of the world. We're using the world to feed us, clothes us, transport us, keep us warm and protected, make weapons to make sure others aren't warm and protected so they can't stop us from being warm and protected.
We use the world for our convenience, for our luxury, our entertainment, and if we're all helping to destroy the world. But no one actually wants to. Well, then maybe we should reframe our question. Why don't we stop destroying the world? Is it out of ignorance? I don't know how many people are truly unaware of our impact on the world. Is it greed? Is the destruction because people care more about their personal gain and the state of the world? Certainly there's those. This is true for.
But even the low income farmer in Brazil working to clear the Amazon rainforest for farmland, that destruction isn't amassing the much material wealth. They're doing it just to get by to feed their family. So many of us are just trying to get through the day. We're not plotting out the destruction of the world. We're just trying to live our lives. And that's the bizarre thing. We live in a society where our individual survival depends on our collective suicide.
What kind of advanced society would find itself in this predicament? In the first chapter, Ishmael tells us the subject he teaches is captivity. And as a gorilla growing up in cages, he's quite familiar with this topic. Ishmael suggests that we too are captive compelled to quote, to go on destroying the world in order to live. Unquote. And unlike the caged animals in the zoo, the bars of our cage harder to see.
Ishmael is not saying that we don't have personal agency or responsibility for our actions. The gorilla in the cage can still choose to climb the fake tree or bear its teeth to the gawking visitors. There are plenty of choices within our captivity and also the quality of our confinement can change drastically from person to person. I mean, some people are literally imprisoned in cages while others walk the streets wherever they want to.
A few people even have enough money to casually fly into space. Yet even for those of us who experience privileges, others don't. Is that evidence of our freedom or just evidence of being treated relatively better within the context of a greater captivity? Okay, we're captive, but captive by here. Well, I got a list of suspects here. First, there's those in power. Yeah. How about those in power? Fair culprit. After all, they are in power. They make the rules and enforce them.
How much freedom do even the leaders and rulers of countries really have? After all, if a leader goes against the grain, that person generally has a limited time being in charge. Leaders are maybe more like surfers riding the momentum of a wave. The same is true for the very wealthy. Jeff Bezos made his wealth not by going against society, but by riding the wave of crossing those in power and the very wealthy off the list of potential captors. Who else? Who? Most of my list.
And wrote down the Illuminati. Come on. Some people are convinced that there must be secret rulers who control society behind the scenes because there's got to be someone behind it. All right. Maybe that's more comforting to think than the idea that no person or group is truly in control of our captivity. But the insight, Ishmael, the gorilla has is that in our society, the zookeepers are locked inside as well. All right. All right. It's not the Illuminati at this point.
You might be thinking, well, yeah, dude, it's a systemic issue, right? Okay, you're good. We're getting closer. Let me draw a circle or put an asterisks next to this system. Suspect others throughout history have recognized the systemic nature of our captivity in some way, like the counterculture of the sixties that are narrated. Grew up in. It's the system, man. We got to stop the system.
Ishmael proposes the reason why the Sixties counterculture didn't break out of this system is because, quote, they were unable to find the bars of our cage, unquote. If we're going to escape our captivity, we need to first find the bars. So what the heck is this system we're talking about? Now, I know there's folks out here who were thinking, Alex, if you don't bring up capitalism in the next 5 seconds, I swear to the Lord, I'm giving this podcast less than one star. Okay, fair point.
Capitalism, I mean, yeah, if you're looking for a system that compels people inside it to destroy the world, just in order to get by. That is a prime example. But what if capitalism isn't the source of our captivity? But just the latest, most streamlined expression of it. Because it's not like the Soviet Union was a beacon of environmental sustainability. In fact, by the 1980s, the USSR was apparently responsible for one and a half times the amount of air pollution as the US was back then.
So there's something else underlying these industrial systems, whether they're capitalist or an authoritarian centralized economy. And Ishmael has a suspect in mind, and it's our job to investigate. Okay, cue the People's Court theme music. What's that? Oh, we don't have the money to pay for the rights. Well, should we get to our suspect? Well, guess what? It's Hitler. No, no, it's not Hitler. Not this time.
But at the beginning of the book, Ishmael explains that Hitler held the people of Germany, even those who hated him, captive. He held them captive, not with terror or charisma, but a story, a story of Aryan supremacy. Now, Ishmael says, quote, Even if you weren't personally captivated by the story, you were a captive all the same, because the people around you made you captive. You were like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede. When the story is new, ones first being told.
It's easier to see it for what it is that it's just a story. But remember the little Nazi child living in the dystopian future where the authors of textbooks don't even realize what they're writing is propaganda and myths. That's because when the story's been told for a very, very long time, it doesn't sound like a story anymore. It just sounds like the truth. In our own way, we too, are captives of a story. Ishmael thinks that this story is the bars of our cage.
And Ishmael, our friendly guerilla guide, believes that humanity isn't inherently flawed or doomed to destroy the world. We've just been held captive for far too long. Together, we're going to discover the story that holds us captive. The story is ever present constantly around us and acts as white noise. It wields incredible power over us. But as Tom Hanks playing Mister Rogers in the Mister Rogers movie, I watched them. My grandma a couple of years ago said anything mentionable is manageable.
Something can't have as much power over you when it's spoken out loud. Ishmael Says, quote, Once you know this story, you'll hear it everywhere in your culture and you'll be astonished that the people around you don't hear it as well, but merely take it in. And so we're alive at a time of great peril. None of us asked for this. But here we are. It's like when Frodo in Lord of the Rings is faced with the daunting task of carrying the ring all the way to Mount Doom.
And more or less, all middle earth is destroyed. He confides in Gandalf. I wish it need not have happened in my time. And Gandalf tells Frodo. So do I. And so do all who lived to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that has given us. What Ishmael will aid us on is reimagining the situation.
Our civilization is in this new understanding, won't alone save the world, but will hopefully provide clarity, making the steps we can take in that direction much more clear. At least that's what Ishmael did for me. Thanks for listening today. The next task on our adventure in Episode three of Human Nature Odyssey will search for the story that's the bars of our cage and embark on telling it out loud. And then we'll set out to replace it with something else.
Until next time, I hope you'll consider the question. We'll explore together next. What story could be leading to the destruction of the world? What could this story be? Talk with us in thank you to Dana, Jo and Hanin for helping give feedback for this episode and to Professor Keller for providing her expertize. The theme music you were listening to was Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch, and if you'd like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
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