I say- no- we should not accept this. I say that it is time to create our own space. I say it is time to push back again armageddon and give to those people who have no place a place to stand. We are not mistakes, we are not broken, we are not outcasts. We are the awakened. We are the next generation of leaders if we can only find our place.
I do not intend to find my place. I intend to create my place.
In his book, 'Ishmael', Daniel Quinn examines in depth the idea that human beings are imprisoned within a civilizational 'system', a mental and social construct that is so pervasive that they cannot even see it as separate from themselves, and so it human nature. Quinn goes on in 'Ishmael' and his later works to explain that not only are these systems and our feelings about them (such as our constant frustration about our lives) not human nature, but they are not even natural to humans in the first place. Rather, the feelings of hopelessness and stress are analogous to the danger signals that any wild animal feels when it is put into captivity. We have been in captivity for so long that we no longer realize that we are captives.
In a later work in the series "My Ishmael", Quinn looks at what keeps us imprisoned in the culture. In "Ishmael" he points out that in order to be free from this system of captivity we have to convince people to stop telling the story, stop buying into and replicating the system of imprisonment, because the system is built and maintained by us-and rebuilt with each generation.
The irony is that we are imprisoned because we have broken the prime law a culture can break. We have imprisoned ourselves because the breaking of the law actually creates the situation we now find ourselves in. To put it another way, breaking the law results in the law-breaker creating their own jail and locking themselves in it. In his book, "The Book of the Damned", Quinn refers to this as "The Law of Life", based on what the Ihalmiut Eskimos of the Great Barrens of Canada called it. He goes on to say the following about the law of life:
"It sounds almost too good to be true, but that's what they called it. It really couldn't have been called anything else, any more than the law of gravity could be called anything else.
It is the Law of Life.
Followed everywhere in the seas, on the shores, in the forests, in the ponds, on the plains, in the deserts.
Followed by everything that moves in the community of life: great and small, naked and armored, scaled and feathered, spined and spineless, brainy and brainless by paramecia and elephants and sharks and grasshoppers and frogs and wolves and ticks and deer and rabbits and turtles and owls.
It's a universal law.
Written where only the gods could have written it.
In the fabric of the living community.
And so a law was in readiness for Homo habilis.
A single law.
A biological law. But not merely a biological law.
A sublime law.
The pattern for a million cultures, no two alike.
As it is the pattern for a million species, no two alike.
A law good enough to be the basis for a billion years of cultural experimentation.
A law never to be outworn or outgrown.
Because it had been written by gods who were actually gods. And not blunderers."
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