CIVILIZATION
that is dangerous.Simple as that.
It takes everything, gobbles it up, and perverts it towards destructive ends. In an extremely short amount of time (10,000 years) in the planet's, life's, and even our specie's history, civilization has set out to CONQUER everything and churn it into a slave of itself.
All or most other ways of life, cultures, religions, peoples, races, ideas, products, species, land, air, sea, minds, spirits, hearts, and bodies have been more or less tainted and/or enslaved by our civilization.
"According to the mythology of our culture, the world was made for Man to conquer and rule--and Man was made to conquer and rule it."
- Daniel Quinn
"We're not strangers in a strange land here. This is the secret I learned. We're not aliens, not outsiders. We were born in the sea, three billion years ago. The deer and the beetle are our kin. We're not invaders from space. No one gave us this planet to take care of or to use as we please. We grew out of the community of life the same way shellfish did, the same way mosquitoes did."
- Daniel Quinn, Providence
"During our three or four million years on this planet it can hardly be doubted that thousands of cultural experiments have been made among humans. The successes have survived--and the failures have disappeared, for the simple reason that eventually there was no one around who wanted to perpetuate them. People will (ordinarily) put up with being miserable for only so long. It's not the quitters who are extraordinary and mysterious, it's we, who have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that we must persist in our misery whatever the cost and not abandon it even in the face of calamity."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"What people (aside from rulers) don't like about hierarchal societies is that they don't exist for all their members in the same way. They provide a life of unbelievable luxury and ease for the rulers and a life of poverty and toil for everyone else. The way rulers benefit from the success of the society is vastly different from the way the masses benefit, and the pyramids and the temples testify to the importance of the rulers, not to the masses who build them. And so it goes, through every phase of life in a hierarchal society."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"Saving the world can only mean one thing: saving the world as a human habitat. Accomplishing this will mean (must mean) saving the world as a habitat for as many other species as possible. We can only save the world as a human habitat if we stop our catastrophic onslaught on the community of life, for we depend on that community for our very lives."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
"The people of your culture imagine that the treasury was completely empty when you came along and began to build civilization ten thousand years ago. You imagine that the first three million years of human life brought nothing of value to the store of human knowledge but fire and stone tools. In fact, however, you began by emptying the treasury of its most precious elements. You wanted to start with nothing and invent it all, and you did. Unfortunately, aside from the products (which work very well), you've been able to invent very little that works well--for people."
- Daniel Quinn, My Ishmael
"What I've endeavored to say in all my books is that the flaw in our civilization isn't in the people, it's in the system. It's true that the system has been clanking along for ten thousand years, which is a long time in the time-scale of an individual life, but when viewed in the time-scale of human history, this episode isn't remarkable for its epic length but for its tragic brevity."
- Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization
