So a while back before the invention of the airplane, there's this guy whose greatest wish, no desire is to fly. He served his whole life walking around on the boring ground. His feet are sore. His legs are tired. He's had enough. He knows he's destined for the freedom of the air. To be honest, he's a bit full of himself and has too much disposable income. Ishmael doesn't give him a name. Let's call him Ian. Ian Bezos. It's a terrible name, but that's never stopped him before.
So Ilan assembles what he considers to be a flying contraption. Picture a bicycle with cardboard wings duct taped to his arms. For good measure, he slaps on some fresh red paint and gives the beauty a daring name. The ticker thunderbolt and one sunny day Iran Walks is proud. Flying contraption to the edge of the highest cliff on the highest hill he could find. And he starts pedaling the bike downhill with all his money. He's going, going and wash zooms off the cliff.
It's hard to tell whether he's a visionary or a bit delusional. But now he's out there in the middle of the air. Higher up than ever before in his whole life. And the view is incredible for a moment, surrounded only by sky pedaling away. His cardboard wings are flapping. And at first he thinks to himself, I think I'm doing it. I'm actually flying high. The poor, brave Ilan isn't flying to take a thunderbolt. He's in freefall. At first, falling can feel a lot like flying.
So when Ilan looks down to the bottom of this great ravine, he thinks he's soaring over the jagged rocks and boulders below. He can see other failed flying contraptions strewn across the valley floor. Crash landed, dismembered. The discarded remains of contraptions that were not successful in their trial and error flying attempts. And he admits to himself, some of those wreckage is pretty brutal. He's sure glad he's not like the morons who met their fate in the valley below.
But at the same time, Ilan notices he's starting to descend just a little. No worries. That's what these pedals are for. So Ilan starts pedaling harder. Well, a brave hero is a persistent guy. And the father that taken Thunderbolt begins to fall. The harder you arm continues to pedal. Come on now, my friends. This is where our story gets a bit gruesome. Because you and I and any four year old knows there is no amount of harder pedaling that can save this doomed contraption.
And soon, it looks like the ground is starting to rush towards him in an ever increasing speed. What once felt like flying is very obviously solid. It's hard to know if Ilan ever realized this was what was happening before it was too late. Because very soon it becomes too late. The ground gets closer, closer, closer until each the take or thunderbolt was never fly because it was never designed to fly. In our own way, we too live in a society that wants to fly to transcend its limits.
But it's not designed to appear on our take or thunderbolt. Things can seem pretty promising. Sometimes it can feel like we're flying. It can feel like the limits that restrain the rest of the community of life don't apply to us. But as our tinker thunderbolt falls closer to the ground, the crash becomes harder to ignore. It's too late for you on Bezos now. Eyes broken and defeated at the bottom of the deep ravine. But it's not yet too late for us.
Will we figure out how to safely bail out of our falling bicycle? Or can we maybe even learn how to stay in the air? Welcome to Episode six of Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring how we might avoid complete and utter Cadastre fee and pass down a livable world to future generations. I'm Alex. The Tinker Thunderbolt story was inspired by a parable in the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Today, we continue our series on the book.
If you enjoyed that opening scene and what it means, some more stories and characters and sound effects, then this is the episode for you. It'll be kind of like a Smaug s Board of Parables. But first, let's retrace our steps and see how we got to this point.
So far, we followed the narrator into a strange office building where he met a telepathic gorilla named Ishmael, who explains The world is being destroyed not because humans are inherently evil, but because most of the world is held captive by a story called taker mythology.
Ishmael calls those who live within this global culture taker's taker civilization began with the agricultural revolution and built itself on what the author Daniel Quin, later calls totalitarian alien agriculture vast fields of single crops where all pests and weeds are removed, where total control of the environment is the goal. In the grand scheme of history, this is a relatively recent development for hundreds of thousands of years of human history.
We lived as hunter gatherers in smaller scale communities, living mostly nomadic, foraging for food. Ishmael calls these kinds of societies levers. One way to think about the difference between takers and levers might be that takers with our vast cities and exponential population growth and technological advancement are the ones metaphorically trying to fly in the process of our attempted flight.
We seem to be rapidly accelerating towards the ground and bringing down the rest of the world with us in a looming mass extinction. The levers, however, are less focused on trying to fly but have mastered how to walk on the ground. Hold on, hold on. Wait just one frickin minute here. Is this male about to tell me we've got to live in the wilderness and become hunter gatherers again? Is this going to be some primitivist, noble, savage, romantic, idealist crap?
Because good luck trying to convince my great Aunt Berkshire to stop watching. Let's make a deal and go forward for berries instead. Well, luckily for great amber truth, that's not what Ishmael is suggesting we do. When the narrator asks if he's saying that we're supposed to go back to being hunter gatherers. Ishmael, who is always just a little grumpy, responds quote, That, of course, is an inane idea.
Your problem isn't agriculture, but rather your insane notion that all the food in the world belongs to you. The lever lifestyle isn't about hunting and gathering. It's about letting the rest of the community live. And agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter gatherers. What I've been at pains to give you is a new paradigm of human history. The lever life is not an antiquated thing that is back there somewhere. Your task is not to reach back, but to reach forward.
Unquote. What Ishmael is saying is that we can't start over. Take your civilization is not going to go away overnight. In fact, it would be really catastrophic for the vast majority of people alive today, myself included. If it went away overnight. We have to start from where we are. And for better or worse, we have inherited a massively complex civilization. Where do we go from here? So let's think about Ewan Bezos riding his bicycle with cardboard wings off the cliff.
He was doomed to fail from the very start. But as we know, it's not impossible to build something that flies. You just have to understand the laws of gravity and aerodynamics. Is it possible to build a human society, so to speak, that flies without destroying the world and ourselves in the process? Ishmael finds it very curious that takers haven't figured out this by now. As he says, quote, You know how to split atoms. How to send explorers to the moon. How to splice genes, unquote.
But we haven't figured out how to live without destroying the world. How does one find out such a thing? How to live on the earth without destroying it? Well, how do we learn to do anything properly? There seems to be a few ways we usually go about this. We can consult prophets and gurus. You know these guys? Confucius, the Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, Joe Rogan. Or we can follow the laws written by elected officials and constitutions crafted by Founding Fathers.
There's a lot of fine writing in there that'll go into great detail what to do and not to do. But Ishmael is proposing to learn how to live in balance with the natural world. We need to work in the natural world. Now, this is where our good old Take a mythology had from a couple episodes ago, comes in and says, Don't even bother trying. You're not going to find anything useful out there. Stay inside. You'll get your cold. Oh, how I missed you. Take your hat.
Ishmael proposes that this supposed flaw humanity has, according to taken mythology, isn't that we don't know how to live in balance. It's that we think we can't know. Let's give a moment of silence to our long lost friend, Ilan Bezos, who tragically thought his rickety bike with wings stood a chance to lift off the ground and fly into the air. He wanted so badly to fly like the airplanes that soar over us today.
The problem was, the only way he thought to try flying was simply by trial and error. But what would have helped make his process a bit more efficient is a particular kind of knowledge. In the case of airplanes, Aeronauts finally learned how to fly by, noticing the patterns of nature around them. Specifically, the law of aerodynamics. In 1903, two brothers slash bicycle salesmen finally figured it out.
An article from Scientific American explains that the Wright brothers did so by, quote, reading wind conditions, maintaining speed and equilibrium, and using the aircraft's controls to make subtle adjustments so that it traced graceful lines during flight and landing. Essentially, they had to adjust their behavior to be in accord with noticeable natural patterns. A baby discovers these patterns when they push things off their highchair to crash to the floor.
They're doing it again and again, not because they're idiots, but because they're in part testing to see if they can count on this. And then there was another foot falls every time. The law of gravity isn't written as some divine law handed down from the gods. It's expressed in the world around us.
And just as we can observe the law of gravity by observing matter, Ishmael proposes, we can find the laws of nature that will teach us how to live without destroying the world by observing the community of life. Here's a quick flashback to Episode two. What's the tiniest living creature you can find where you are? 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. What was the little creature you found?
The billions of species that share the planet with us are part of what Ishmael refers to as the community of life. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sorry, sorry. I was on a lunch break. What do we talk about now? What about the life community or whatever? The community of life? Yeah, sure. Whatever. The community of life. Why are we talking about those imbeciles? Well, because Ishmael suggests there might be some kind of law of nature that the community follows. That taker culture doesn't.
Okay. Yeah, well, yeah, you don't follow whatever dumb wall they follow. You humans, you do whatever the hell you want. Even if there was some kind of wall. It wouldn't be relevant for you. That kind of thing might apply to ants and elephants. But come on. Have you seen your brain? Don't touch my head. Okay. Okay. Sheesh. Sensitive. Today, I'm gonna go back on my lunch break. You want me know when I'm needed? Well, do. Can't seem to lose that thing. I'm not believing to take your hat here.
It's not like we're exempt from the other laws of nature. Gravity still applies to us, just like it does everything else. Just because we did learn to fly doesn't mean we're exempt from the law of aerodynamics. Exactly the opposite. It means we had to learn to go along with it. Now, as Ishmael points out, the law of aerodynamics wasn't always relevant for humans. It only became relevant when we wanted to learn how to fly.
Ishmael says, quote, When you're on the brink of extinction and want to live for a while longer, the laws governing life might conceivably become relevant, unquote. Ishmael points out that when Sir Isaac Newton hypothesized the existence of the law of gravity, what was remarkable about that wasn't that he pointed out Things fall to the ground. Everyone knows that. Here's how Ishmael puts it. Quote, Newton's achievement was not in discovering the phenomenon of gravity.
It was in formulating the phenomenon as the law. Unquote. So the interesting thing to us about finding a hypothetical law of life isn't going to be the suggestion that, Oh, yeah, I think nature is actually organized. The trick is going to be articulating it into a cohesive theory. So what would the law of life be about? Well, the law of aerodynamics isn't about flight, really, but as the narrator puts it in his conversation with Ishmael.
The law of aerodynamics is, quote, certainly relevant to flight, unquote. It applies to birds just as it applies to airplanes. So the law of life wouldn't be about civilization, but it would be relevant to it. I'd like to share with you my version of another parable from Ishmael. The story of the three dirty tricks as told from the perspective of taken mythology and as every Taken knows, the gods made the world for us humans.
It has long been understood by many societies throughout to take a civilization that the Earth is at the very center of the universe. Humans, as any good taker could tell you, were created separately from the rest of the films and Wild Beasts that the gods made for us to do with what we please. And finally, what should be obvious to any civilized devotee of the take a tradition is that whatever silly rules the gods have for the plants and animals have absolutely nothing to do with us.
These are things take could rest a shodan for hundreds if not thousands of years. That is until relatively recently. You see, we thought that the scientific revolution would further our mastery over the environment and conquering of the planet. And in many ways it has. Science has helped us extract more oil, created deadly pesticides, and more precisely, genetically engineer our food.
But, well, it seems science has also recently uncovered some, shall we say, disturbing truths about the world that truly are quite uncomfortable. Actually, it's really quite amusing if you're inclined to have a sense of humor. It appears the gods, for some dastardly reason, have played three dirty tricks on us. For one, the world is apparently not at the center of the universe where we supposed it would be.
In fact, many of us were quite aghast to learn that the earth is a pale blue dot, one of billions among the stars. The second trick turned out to be that humanity is not the pinnacle of creation or the finishing touches of evolution. No, it appears humans evolved from the common slime like everything else, and are evolving still. The third and final trick, and this one truly pains me to even speak out loud. The third trick is that humanity is not exempt from the law of life. I know. Horrifying.
If you ask me, this is clearly the meanest trick of all. After all, if we really were made to be the rulers of the world, why would we have to follow its laws like any other creature? I can't. I just can't. It's one thing that we're not at the center of the universe. Okay, fine. Have it your way. And sure, perhaps we evolved from a common ancestor with the rest of the community of life. We can accept such bitter truths. But to the third trick, I say no acceptance is possible.
Take a civilization will never, can never believe. We must live within the law of life. It is the very rejection of this fact that is the foundation of our dear and beloved Tico mythology itself. And seeing as Ishmael says, quote, Every law has effects or it wouldn't be discoverable as a law, unquote. So what would be its effects? Well, maybe the six mass extinction is the very effect of us not living in accord with the law of life.
Maybe we could describe the law as species that live in accord with it. Continue to adapt and evolve. Species who do not go extinct. To help us imagine what it would look like to live within the law of life. Ishmael shares another parable The story of the houses of a, B and C. As always, I will be relaying the story in my own words and of course, adding my own little flares and imagine you're an anthropologist from an esteemed university, from some very sophisticated place.
You've been given an exciting assignment to go study the mysterious people referred to as the House of a. Aside from being named for just one letter, these people have another fascinating aspect, which you hope to learn more about. All right. Pretty soon I'll be there. Meet the locals and return to the university. With a paper so academically rigorous, the dean will have no choice but to beg me to accept that new faculty position.
You were determined and have traveled very far to get to the house of a. It was a long train ride through stunning mountain peaks and mist covered valleys. And it's been a long, hot, dusty walk since you got off the station. There wasn't even anyone else to carry your bags. But finally, you make it to the small encampment of the eight people. A few children are running around and giggling. Elders smile and wave to you. They are clearly an amicable and peaceful people.
A representative comes out to greet you. Hi there. She says, hi. I'm from the house of a. You are welcome here. Please feel at home wiping the sweat off your sweaty brow. You say thank you. Thank you. Really appreciate it. Do you guys have something I could drink? Like a lemonade? No, no, we don't have lemonade. You nod and apologize, recognizing it was weird. You assume they would, right? How about a snack? Yes. There's plenty of food. Here, let me show you.
You walk some more following close behind your guide. Tired from a day's travels and tired to walk further still. Soon you come to the edge of the house of a and across a meadow you see another gathering of people. Those people, she informs. You, are from the house of BE. This is where we get our snacks, meals and feasts. You decided not ask about the similarly bland naming of these other people and instead ask. Oh, perfect. That'd be great. Where do you think I'd find that snack?
The B people are our snack. They are our food. Now, hold on one minute. Your studies didn't prepare you for this. The the beep, beep, beep. People are your are your food. Yes, of course. Well, then why aren't they running and screaming in fear? They're just casually living right next to you. Why run? There's no need their own food. The people from the House of C, they live right over there. And she points to, indeed, another gathering of people at the edge of the forest.
They, too, seem to be not all that concerned that those who would devour them are right nearby. You are appalled, bewildered and confused. You say to yourself, Come on, Larry Obelisk. Oh, yeah. By the way, your name is very obvious. Keep yourself together. Think of the faculty seat. So you say to your guide, collecting yourself. The House of A consumes the House of B and the House of B consumes the house of C. You get it? So is this some kind of hierarchy thing?
Do you control the B people and do the B people control the C people? Your guide from the people looks at you a bit pitifully. Well, that wouldn't make much sense. After all, we in the house, they are the food to the house of C. Oh, God. You realize what's happening here? It's some kind of cannibalistic human centipede. You are disgusted and can't take it anymore. How can you accept this?
You blurt out, throwing away all those years of anthropologist training and exorbitant student loans out the window. How can you live in such horror and fear and lawlessness? Lawlessness? She asks, seemingly not offended, as if talking to an ignorant child. We have a law and follow it strictly. The bees follow it and so do the CS. We all follow it. Okay, stop the tape. Interesting.
We're going to say goodbye to the people from the houses of A, B, and C, along with our goofy anthropologist and return to the real world. I remember being a kid in my back yard watching this hawk swoop down and eat a mouse. My older neighbors saw it too and remarked how terrible the animal world is so cruel. And I thought to myself, Well, what the hell is the hawk supposed to do? Are you a vegetarian? I asked my neighbor. She said No.
Sometimes the natural world's food web is described as, as Ishmael puts it, quote, All this chaos and savage, relentless competition, unquote. The Christian version of Take Your Mythology Idolizes When The Lion Lays Down with the lamb. Now, that would be heaven. Not all this. I eat you, you eat me. Nonsense. However, contrary to take your belief, the natural world is not at war. Just as the A, B and C people were not at war. The Lions and the Lambs are only enemies.
And take your mythologies. Imagination. The lion doesn't massacre a flock of sheep as Ishmael explains, it kills one to satisfy its hunger, not its hatred. Because the lion, as well as the lamb, follows the law of life. But what would it look like if they broke it? Ishmael describes a hypothetical scenario out on the East African savanna, and I'll take you there now. Nature documentary style. Imagine that you were a hyena out on the savanna.
You live in parks, have a small and rather cute fur coat. Unlike a typical hyena, you possess an absolutely insatiable appetite. Now there are plenty of gazelles for you to eat, but as a hyena, you are not the only species who fancies gazelles. You must contend with the lions. But you've grown tired of sharing these tasty gazelles. And you realize there would be so many more gazelles around if there weren't all those lions gobbling them up.
So you decide to eliminate the lions that's observed the effect of this decision. Soon there aren't any more lions eating what could have been yours. You no longer have to share. But as your population increases your foods, supply decreases, which eventually decreases your population. Here we can see that the loss of life trends towards bats. But you and your hyena friends no longer want to live by this law. Why should you?
Sure. Your food supply has decreased, but there must be a fix to this problem. You've already killed off your competitors, the lions. But now you hyenas have done so well for yourselves. There's not enough gazelles to go around. Clearly, there needs to be more gazelles, though. There's another problem. The gazelles share their food with the zebras and the wildebeests. You don't eat zebra or wildebeest, so they're worthless to you. These are your foods competitors.
Therefore, you think they must be eliminated as well so there can be more gazelles. Your rule becomes if you don't eat it, you kill it to make more room for your food. Goodbye. Zebras could goodbye wildebeests. The gazelles no longer have to compete with them, which means there are now a lot more gazelles. But a new problem arises. There are so many gazelles, there's no longer enough grass for them to eat. The law of life continues to trend towards balance.
But you and the other hyenas have exempted yourself from the law of life so you don't have to stop there. You've already killed off your competitors. You've killed off your foods competitors. Now you just have to kill the food of your food's food competitors. Unfortunately for the gazelles, the savanna is covered with many types of grasses. They cannot eat, which means any plant the gazelles do not eat. Are now your competitors twice removed?
Pretty soon, you and your fellow hyenas will find themselves in a sort of constant war with the world. To maintain this behavior, you will find it necessary to labor intensely to constantly increase your food production. Innovate new ways to grow what you eat and kill what you do. Not every plant which your prey does not eat will now become a weed you must eradicate at the first sign. It will be a tiring affair, attempting to live outside the law of life.
Ambitious hyenas will insist on this grueling labor, but sooner or later they will find it an impossible task. The Law of Life Trends towards balance. Ishmael says, quote, Once you exempt yourself from the law of life, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated. Unquote. To exempt ourselves from the law of life is to declare war on the world. So like those hypothetical hyenas, takers are attempting to live outside the law of life.
This is the guiding manifesto of takers civilization. In fact, as Ishmael puts it, takers have incorporated, quote, as a fundamental policy. Every single thing that is prohibited under the law. Unquote. So remember when we talked about how Sir Isaac Newton didn't do anything new by pointing out there's gravity, but by formulating it as a law. Here's how we can attempt to put the law of life into words. There is competition in nature, but it's limited.
Ishmael says, quote, You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, destroy their food, or deny them access to food, unquote. A succinct way of putting it is, quote, You may compete, but you may not wage war. Unquote. This is as Ishmael puts it, a peacekeeping law that promotes biodiversity. And biodiversity isn't a luxury. It's a matter of survival itself.
The greater the diversity of an ecosystem, the more resilient it will be to unexpected changes. Okay, so there are three fundamental ways to take a civilized ocean goes against this law of limited competition. One taker civilization eliminates competitors simply because they are competitors. We kill wolves, lions and other predators when they aren't even attacking us just because they prey on our food. To take your civilization denies our competitors like wolves and lions, access to food.
We pen up livestock, sheep, cows, goats and fiercely defend them from being eaten by anyone but us. Three And finally, take your civilization destroys the competitors of our foods food. So if there's a plant that sheep don't eat and it takes up space from the plants and grass that sheep do eat, we consider that plant a weed and remove it regardless of who else would eat it. The benefits of breaking this law are obvious. It has given us seemingly unlimited growth. But what are the consequences?
We are finding there are limits. After all, as Ishmael summarizes, it seems there is a law of nature that informs how all species, Homo sapiens included, can live in balance with the rest of the world. This law won't inform us on every aspect of our culture like traffic violations, tax brackets, or the logistics of copyright infringement. It's not that specific, but it will inform us on how we ought to live if we hope to continue to exist.
Unfortunately for the rest of the world, one species exempting itself from the law of life is as destructive as every species. Doing so. The result is the same. Biodiversity is devastated and reduced for the sake of one species. All the destruction we see around us, it's the consequences of trying to live outside this law. Now, this doesn't mean we go out and stand in the middle of a field somewhere and shout, okay, hawks in lions, take me now. I'm ready.
Living to the best of our ability is a good thing. The point is, when our lives are set up at the expense of the rest of life on this planet, we're doing ourselves in the long run. So if we want to continue existing and not join Iran, Bezos is wreckage at the bottom of the valley floor. If we even want to learn how to fly, we have to learn how to live within the law of life. Thanks for listening. On the next episode of Human Nature Odyssey, it'll be up to us to figure out now what?
What do we do with all this? How do we help create a livable future? Until next time. What can you notice about the law of life around you? Where you see take your civilization breaking this law. And what might it mean for us to end our war with the world and to live within the law of life? Talk to you soon. If you'd like to support Human Nature Odyssey, please share it with a friend. Subscribe wherever you enjoy your podcasts and check out our Patreon.
We had our first bonus interview this month with author Jay Snodgrass about his book Genesis and the Rise of Civilization. You can listen to the full hour conversation at Patria, CNN.com. Slash Human Nature Odyssey. There you'll find a bunch of other writings, transcripts of episodes, audio extras and soon many more interviews of bonus guests. Thank you to everyone who has given their support so far. Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch.
You can find the link in our show notes and thank you to Matty and Austin for their voice. Acting contributions to the House of AC. Matty is also a very talented musician and you can find a link to her music in the show notes on.