Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 2. Your Call To Adventure

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 1,000 year Reich wasn’t a total flop after all. They conquered Europe, then 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, this suspicion that things aren’t right and don’t have to be this way — is the gateway to our quest. 

Welcome to Episode 2 of Human Nature Odyssey: a search for better ways to understand and more clearly experience the incredible, terrifying, and ridiculous world we live in.

I’m Alex Leff.

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. For Luke Skywalker that was his Tatooine moisture farm. In our last episode I took you to the abandoned Ashbourne country club. I wonder if you have a peaceful land, 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 we’ll travel through 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, meaning it uses this story about a telepathic gorilla’s conversations with the human narrator, to explore 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. 

[beat] 3:30

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 UN 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 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 1990s, so instead of finding the ad scrolling the internet, the narrator finds it in a newspaper. Either way, clearly, this isn’t a normal ad.

And our narrator’s reaction is complete disgust. I mean Teacher seeks PupiI? Give me a break. Oh, an earnest desire to save the world, yeah that’s rich, real rich. 

Here’s how the book begins: “The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed 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 into the trash.”

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, 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.

“During the children’s revolt 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 opened my eyes, I expected to see that the new era had begun, that the sky was brighter blue and the grass a brighter green. I expected to hear laughter in the air and to 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 that I wasn’t alone.”

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 60s and thinking to myself, hot 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 9/11 and 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 this 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, “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 seemed so. Everyone else seemed to be able to pass it off with a cynical grin that said, ‘Well, what did you really 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 till you’re sixty, then move to Florida and die.”

My god. As a millennial - first of all I’m expecting to have to work way past sixty - 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, trans rights, ending white supremacy. No one’s anti-capitalist. There are no more Black Lives Matter signs, no rainbow flags, no blue flags with the image of the earth on them. That whole thing where masses of young people pushed 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 60s ending. 

So there’s the ad.

“Teacher Seeks Pupil: Must Have an Earnest Desire to Save the World” “...to Save the World.” 

Ehhh… “Saving the world” kinda sounds cringy to my 21st century ears, I gotta say. 

First of all, no one wants to talk with the guy who says he wants to save the world. I don’t want to talk with 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. Or stop facebook. I mean I’ll give you a medal if you can even get the city 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, an 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 a high school Environmental Science class and just wanting to flip over the desks 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 kinda 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 ‘bout 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, outside, in the car, walking down the street, laying in bed. 

What’s the tiniest living creature you can find where you are? Is there a bird on a 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 us are cousins. We’re family.

And Daniel Quinn in Ishmael refers to this family as the community of life. 

Which means millions of years ago our distant ancestors and that tiny creature's distant ancestors were the same species. Just a couple of cousins hanging out, and then maybe there was some kind of family drama and one cousin moved out of town to go do its own thing, and million of years went by until that cousin’s descendants became that tiny creature. 
 
Meanwhile, our ancestors took their own path.

Can you imagine your ancestors as they evolved from single cell organisms, fish underwater, reptiles on land, rodents hiding in holes, primates swinging through the trees, to homo sapiens, to you?

One person’s birth may be the beginning of their own personal journeys, but it’s also a continuation of a much longer journey that every creature and species is a part of. It’s a billions of years old story we’ve inherited. 

I wanna tell you about three different plotlines in this saga. They belong to three distinct species in our family, the community of life:

There’s the Golden Bamboo Lemur in Madagascar
The Yellow-Tipped Tree Snail in Hawaii
And The Spix’s Macaw in Brazil

Each is our distant cousin. Each species has had their own different 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 Ishmael there’s this statistic that 200 species go extinct every day.

Wait, what? 200 species? Every day? That can’t be right. That would mean, that’s like, wait, what? 

So I googled it just to make sure. Hmmm, I found this article from CNN that references a study from the University of Mexico that found between the year 2000 to 2014 173 species went extinct. Oh, okay. 173. I mean that’s still not good, but I mean, that’s not as bad. Wait so where the hell did Daniel Quinn get that number? You’d think that’d be a useful thing to cite. I kept googling. Then I found this Guardian article detailing a 2010 report from the United Nations saying ”150-200 species of plants, insects, birds, and mammals go extinct every 24 hours.” Ah crap, okay. Wait so why are the numbers so different? Enough googling. I gotta talk to someone. So I reached out to Gerta 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 ours. 

AL: Is it true that 200 species are going extinct every day?

GK: I think much more. Probably 200 species is probably what almost anyone can come up with. If you look at the endangered, the number of endangered species. That, uh, barely hanging on. They're not really viable populations. They can go in any drought or any bad year.

So it's, it's not, it's not exceedingly high. 

AL: So the first article that I sent you is when I was looking into this is there's, um, a university of Mexico study that CNN is talking about saying that.

173 species went extinct between 2001, 2014.

GK: I mean, that's, is, that is an interesting article in terms of large vertebrates mammals for the most part. And, uh, it's not a very high, a 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, what is on our mind

AL: Right. And it's, it's more, um, emotionally impactful. I, I suppose for people to, you know, the large mammals that we identify with the elephants and the bison to talk about the extinction of those. Yeah. 

GK: Let me tell you, okay. If I write a paper and I tell you 5,000 species of insects going extinct every year. Let's say so a lot. They don't bother me. Hopefully it's the mosquitoes, so I don't have to worry about them

AL: So what, what's the, what is extinction look like normally versus. 

GK: normally over about a million years, you may lose three to five species, 

AL: three to five species total. That's not even…

GK: the background rates and nothing to write home about, you know, here to species, they're a species disappears. It's the mass extinctions that, that start to bother us. 

AL: we're looking at is this novel called. Um, by Daniel Quinn and there's this line early on in the book that mentions that, uh, 200 species are going extinct today. And I mentioned that to, um, I remember reading that when I was quite young. Um, and he makes the metaphor that, you know, you could, as a, as a human, we can think like, okay, well, 200 species are going extinct today.

Like that doesn't affect me. You know, I'm at the top of the food chain. Um, 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 everyday you take out 200 bricks from the bottom of the tower, you're not going to be a top that tower very long.

GK: Yeah, mostly we think about ourselves. We are the top dogs. No question about it. Top of the food chain, but so was the dinosaur. Being on top of the food chain is not a good place to be, not when things are getting critical.

It really is following the playbook of all the other mass extinctions, only much much faster.

Wooooo… ok, hold up! At this point you might be saying to yourself, “oh geez, is this gonna 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 it.

What maybe is most heartbreaking, is knowing we could be doing so much better. 

Then there’s the perspective that goes: okay, okay, yep, the sixth mass extinction, life as we know it may come to an end, but nature will be fine. Give it a few million years and life is 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, seahorses, camels, even pigeons. These are our cousins. Our literal cousins in the community of life. We evolved with them, they evolved with us. It’s an indescribably 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 everyone else?

When the narrator finds the ad “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 him taking the crumpled up 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 Luke Skywalker finds his family’s moisture farm on Tatooine 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. 

There’s one more thing from talking with Professor Keller that’s… haunting me.

GK: you need to realize. We are really the next dinosaurs. we think we are much smarter and we're really dumb as hell the way we run the world, uh, because we actually have engineered, our own extinction and that's at least the dinosaur didn't. 

Yeah what the heck? We do look kinda dumb as hell, don’t we? 

But, what’s always puzzled me is, I mean, humans are amazing, we can recall the past, peer into possible futures, we can cooperate on a mass scale, we cross the seas on ships we’ve built, fly through the sky on airplanes, we created the internet. But for all those it seems we can’t quite stop our destruction of the world. 

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 gonna descend deep down into a secret and sinister underground layer.

I know, nothing ever good happens in an underground layer. And this one is particularly seedy. Sitting around a long black table is the kind of mean looking henchmen you’d expect to find down 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 Dr. 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 Dr. Evil, his plan has been thwarted before he’s even begun. His eyepatch wearing right hand man informs him that… “sorry to report this Doc but… it’s already happening…” “  you mean?” “Well… the world is already being destroyed.” And it’s true. But in our 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 ‘90s that deals with the more complicated, nuanced, real life destruction of the world. It’s time to meet Ishmael.

Alright, 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 flacks, lawyers, dentists, travel agents, a chiropractor, and a private investigator or two. I’d expected something a little more atmospheric--a brownstone with paneled walls, high ceilings, and shuttered windows, perhaps.”

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.” 

There’s a bunch of books on the walls about history, prehistory, anthropology. 

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, 5 and a half ft 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, he learned how to communicate with people, 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.

On our adventure of the mind and spirit, Ishmael will be our guide, like Gandolf or Obi-Wan Kenobi or Glinda the good witch. Ishmael won’t always be with us but will find he’ll come and help us and we need him most.

Ishmael asks the narrator to first ponder the question: who wants to destroy the world? 

Unlike the evil doers from our field trip to the underground layer, obviously no one wants to destroy the world. 

Not even the people benefiting most from the world’s destruction, the world’s wealthiest people, like Jeff Besos, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk, 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 drive in cars, fly in planes, heat our homes, cool our homes, run our appliances, eat packaged food made in factories, order things online both necessary and less necessary. 

Yet, as Ishmael puts it, each of us, in our own small way, each “contributes daily to the destruction of the world.”

Destruction is one way to put it. Another way is the consumption of the world. We are using the world to feed us, clothe 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. 

But if we’re all helping 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? Eh, I don’t know how many people are truly unaware of our impact on the world. 
 
Is it greed? Are we destroying the world because people care more about their personal gain than the state of the world? Certainly there’s those that 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 them 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 that kind of predicament? 

In the first chapter Ishmael tells us the subject he teaches is “captivity” - and as a gorilla grown up in cages he’s quite familiar with this subject.

Ishmael suggests that we too are captive, compelled to “to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

And unlike the caged animals in the zoo, the bars of our cage are harder to see. 

Ishmael’s not saying that we don’t have personal agency or responsibility for our actions. The gorilla in the cage can 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, okay, okay, we’re captive – but captive by who?

I got a list of suspects here. 

Those in power. Yeah how about those in power? They’re a fair culprit. After all, they are in power. They make the rules and enforce them. 

But 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 more like surfers riding the momentum of a wave. 

The same is true for the very wealthy. Jeff Besos made his wealth not by going against the system but by riding the wave.

Okay, crossing those in power and the very wealthy off the list of potential captors. Who else? 

Man, who messed with my list and wrote down the Illuminati? Come on. 

Some people are convinced that there must be secret rulers who control the system behind the scenes. Cuz there’s gotta 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. 

Alright, alright, 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 asterisk next to this “system” suspect. 

Others throughout history have recognized the systemic nature of our captivity in some way. LIke the counterculture of the 1960s that our narrator grew up in. ‘It’s the system, man. We gotta stop the system.’ 

Ishmael proposes the reason why the 60’s counterculture didn’t break out of this system is because “they were unable to find the bars of the cage.” 

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 there thinking, Alex, if you don’t bring up “capitalism” in the next five seconds I swear to the lord I’m giving this podcast less than one star.

Ok, you’re right. 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 streamline 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 at that time.

So there’s something else underlying these industrial systems, whether they are capitalist or an authoritarian centralized economy. 

Well, Ishmael has a suspect in mind. Now it’s our job to investigate. 

Cue the People’s Court Theme Music. 

We didn’t have money to pay for the rights?

Well, okay, shall 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 : “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.” End quote. 

When the story is new, when it’s 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 feel like a story anymore. It just becomes 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 gorilla 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.

And guess what? You already know this story very well, even if you don’t think you do.

No, it’s not Austin Powers. 

This story is ever-present, constantly around us, and acts as white noise. It wields incredible power over us.

But as Tom Hanks playing Mr. Rodgers in the Mr. Rodgers movie I watched with my grandma a couple years ago said “Anything mentionable is manageable.” Something can’t have as much power over you when it’s spoken out loud.

Ishmael says, “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.”

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 in Mordor lest all of Middle Earth is destroyed. He confides in Gandolf, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” And Gandalf tells Frodo, “So do I, and so do all who live 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 is 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 it 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 3 of Human Nature Odyssey, we’ll search for the story that’s the bars of our cage, we’ll 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 to you soon.

Thank you to Dana, Joe, and Honan for helping give feedback for this episode. And Professor Keller for providing her expertise. 

Our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our show notes.

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