Rob Kall: You wrote: "The success of our civilization is prodigious, and it's success has never been more spectacular than it is right now. It has plunged us into a sixth extinction that, unless checked, will bring an end to humanity as surely as the fifth extinction brought an end to the great dinosaurs. But it must continue at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance, even if it kills us.
Our civilization is a cloud that darkens the entire living community of out planet; but by God it stays up in the sky, and it doesn't fall to earth. This is it's success, and we know in our bones that it must continue at any cost and never be abandoned under any circumstance, even if it kills us and all life on this planet."
Whew!
Daniel Quinn: (laughs) Something to think about.
Rob Kall: Well you know, I call my show the Bottom Up Radio Show. I believe we're transitioning from a top down world to a more bottom up world. The top down world was catalyzed by agriculture, and the creation of cities and civilization, and slavery and domination, and hierarchy and centralization - and that it's the internet, this huge new communication method that is changing the way our brains work, particularly among the young, that's shifting us a to a bottom up mode. And it's really got me thinking about civilization, and if it has been a mistake: a detour on the human path on the biological path of Gaia, the Earth.
Daniel Quinn: Yes. Well, all of them began as experiments; and people, humans are prone to experiments, so the tendency is admirable -- sure, try something out! But then our civilization became obsessed with the idea that there was no other way to live, and everybody had to live this way. The other civilizations that I've talked about, they didn't have that idea. They didn't conquer the people around them and make them live the way they lived. They didn't spread out all over North America and South America. We are unique in that, and that uniqueness is terrible! And it's something that we have to think about. I think everybody should be aware of it.
Rob Kall: What about religion? It seems to me that one of the factors that moves civilization to evangelize and convert is religion.
Daniel Quinn: Yes. Well, I have this theory that there have been hundreds of more religions than the ones we know about, and the ones that survived are the ones that fit in with our cultural mythology: that fit in with the vision of humanity as the most important thing in the universe, that endorses the idea that humans are here to rule the rest of the living community. The ones that didn't, for example, Animism, which was the practically the universal religion of Leaver Peoples, and still is, wherever they are still found, does not support it [our cultural mythology], and so it is not one of our religions. It's hardly known, but it doesn't say anything about that. Animism is a religious world view rather than a religion, a world view that sees the world as a sacred place, and humans as belonging in a sacred place. This is not an idea that fits with our civilization's, our culture's vision of the world and humanity, and so it doesn't appear as a religion to us.
Rob Kall: So, we've got this idea, "The Invisibility of Success," and it's really describing a problem. It's describing the inability, because of the meme about the inevitability, of people to say, "No. This is not working."
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