by Daniel Quinn
“I didn’t suppose you did, Julie. Think of a system you have that doesn’t work well for people in general, though of course it may work well for some of you. Think of a system you’ve been tinkering with and fighting over right from the beginning. Think of another wheel you’re sure you have to invent from scratch. Think of a problem you’re sure you’ll solve someday.”
“Is this a particular system you have in mind, Ishmael?”
“No, I’m not trying to draw you into a guessing game. These are the characteristics of all the systems you’ve concocted to replace the systems discarded at the beginning of your revolution.”
“Okay. There’s one system I can think of that’s like all those things, but I’m not sure there’s a bag in the Leaver treasury that corresponds to it. In fact, I rather doubt it.”
“Why is that, Julie?”
“Because this is the system we use to lock up the food.”
“I see what you mean. Since Leaver peoples don’t lock up their food, they wouldn’t have a system for doing that.”
“That’s right.”
“All the same, let’s keep going in this direction for a bit. I’m not actually sure I know what system you’re talking about.”
“I guess I’m talking about the economic system.”
“I see. So you don’t think the Taker economic system works well for people in general.”
“Well, it works terrifically for a few people, obviously. This is a cliché. There’s a handful at the top who make out like bandits, then there’s a lot in the middle who do pretty well, then there’s a lot at the bottom who live in the toilet.”
“It was or is the socialist dream to even this all out. To redistribute the wealth more equitably so that enormous amounts weren’t concentrated in the hands of a few while the masses went hungry.”
“I guess that’s right. But I have to tell you that I know more about rocket science than I know about this stuff.”
“You know enough, Julie. Don’t worry about that.… When did you start having problems distributing the wealth? Let me ask that another way. When did disproportionate amounts of wealth begin to be concentrated in the hands of a few people at the top of the heap?”
“God, I don’t know. I have images of the very first potentates living in magnificent palaces while their subjects lived like pack animals.”
“There’s no doubt that this was indeed the case, Julie. The earliest Taker civilizations come to us fully formed in this mold. No developmental hesitancy to be seen here. As soon as there’s visible wealth—as opposed to just food on the table, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head—it’s easy to predict how it will be distributed. There will be a few ultrarich at the top, a more numerous wealthy class below them, and a vastly more numerous class of tradesmen, merchants, soldiers, artisans, workers, servants, slaves, and paupers at the bottom. In other words, royalty, nobility, and commoners. The size and membership of the classes has changed over the centuries, but the way the available wealth is distributed among them has not. Typically (and understandably) the top two classes feel the system is working admirably well, and of course it is—for them. The system is stable as long as the top two classes are fairly large, as they are, say, in the United States. But in France in 1789 and in Russia in 1917, the wealth was concentrated in just too few hands. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so. You’re not going to have a revolution if most people feel they’re making out pretty well.”
“That’s right. At this point in time the disparity between the richest and the poorest of your culture is wider than any Egyptian pharaoh could have imagined. The pharaohs could own nothing remotely like the extravagances that are available to your billionaires. This is arguably one reason why they built pyramids. What else were they going to do with their money? They couldn’t buy island paradises and travel to them on private jets and three hundred-foot yachts.”
“Very true.”
“Among the wealthy of your culture, the collapse of the Soviet empire is being perceived as a clear vindication of capitalist greed. It’s being taken as a statement from the poor that they’d much rather live in a world where they can at least dream of being rich than in a world where everyone is poor but more or less equally poor. The ancient order has been affirmed, and you can look forward to an unending future of economic contentment, provided, as always, that you’re among the well-off. And if you aren’t, the argument goes, you’ve no one to blame but yourself, because after all, under capitalism, anyone can be rich.”
“Very persuasive,” I said.
“The wealthy are always perfectly willing to leave things alone and not be troublemakers, and they don’t see why others can’t be as considerate as they are in this regard.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“But now let’s see if you can put your finger on the basic wealth-making mechanism of the Takers.”
“It’s not the same for everybody?”
“Oh no,” Ishmael said. “The wealth-making mechanism of the Leavers is quite distinctly different.”
“You’re asking me to describe the wealth-making mechanism of the Takers?”
“That’s right. It’s not terribly obscure.”
I gave it some thought and said, “I suppose it boils down to ‘I’ve got something you want, you give me something I want.’ Or is that too simpleminded?”
“Not for me, Julie. I’d always rather start with the bone than have to carve down to it.” Ishmael said this while shuffling around his room to gather up a pad and felt-tip pen. He paged through it to a clean sheet, then spent three minutes making a diagram, which he flattened against the glass for my inspection.
“This schematic shows what your economy is all about: making products in order to get products. Obviously I’m using the word product in an extended sense, but anyone in a service industry will certainly know what I’m talking about if I refer to his or her product. And for the most part, what people get for their products is money, but money is only one step removed from the products it can buy, and it’s the products people want, not the little pieces of paper. On the basis of our previous conversations, you’ll have no difficulty identifying the event that got this product exchange rolling.”
“Yeah. Locking up the food.”
“Of course. Before that time, there was no point in making products. There was plenty of point in making a pot or a stone tool or a basket, but there was utterly no point in making a thousand of them. No one was in the pottery business or the stone-tool-making business or the basket-weaving business. But with food under lock and key, all this changed immediately. By the simple act of being locked up, food was transformed into a product—the fundamental product of your economy. All of a sudden it became true that someone with three pots could get three times as much to eat as someone with just one pot. All of a sudden someone with thirty thousand pots could live in a palace, while someone with three thousand pots could live in a nice house and someone with no pots at all could live in the gutter. Your whole economy fell into place once the food was put under lock and key.”
“So you’re saying that tribal peoples have no economy at all.”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind, Julie. Here’s the fundamental transaction of the tribal economy.” He turned to a fresh page on his pad and produced a new schematic for me:
“It isn’t products that make the tribal economy go round but rather human energy. This is the fundamental exchange, and it takes place so unobtrusively that people often mistakenly suppose that they have no economy at all, just as they often mistakenly suppose that they have no educational system at all. You make and sell hundreds of millions of products every year in order to build and equip and staff schools to educate your children. Tribal peoples accomplish the same objective through a more or less constant low-level exchange of energy between adults and youngsters that they hardly even notice. You make and sell hundreds of millions of products every year in order to be a
ble to hire police to maintain law and order. Tribal peoples accomplish the same objective by doing it themselves. Maintaining law and order is never an agreeable chore, but it’s not remotely the major concern for them that it is for you. You make and sell trillions of products every year in order to maintain governing bodies that are incredibly inefficient and corrupt—as you well know. Tribal peoples manage to govern themselves quite effectively without making or selling anything.
“A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the system. This doesn’t have anything to do with capitalism specifically. Capitalism is just the most recent expression of an idea that came into being ten thousand years ago in the founding of your culture. The revolutionaries of international communism didn’t go nearly deep enough to effect the change they wanted to make. They thought they could stop the merry-go-round if they captured all the horses. But of course the horses don’t make the carousel go round. The horses are just passengers like the rest of you.”
“By horses, you mean rulers, governments.”
“That’s right.”
“How do we stop the merry-go-round, then?”
Ishmael sorted through his tree clippings for a choice item as he thought about this. Then he said, “Suppose you’d never seen a merry-go-round and you came across one that was running out of control. You might hop on and try to stop it by pulling on the reins of the horses and yelling ‘Whoa!’ ”
“I suppose I might, if I’d woken up kind of stupid that morning.”
“And when that didn’t work, what would you do?”
“I’d hop off and try to find the controls.”
“And if no controls were in sight?”
“Then I guess I’d try to figure out how the damn thing works.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because, if there’s no on-off switch, you have to know how it works in order to make it stop.”
Ishmael nodded. “Now you understand why I’m trying to show you how the Taker merry-go-round works. There is no on-off switch, so if you want to make it stop, you’ll have to know how it works.”
“A minute ago,” I told him, “you said that a system based on exchanging products always concentrates wealth in a few hands. Why is that?”
Ishmael thought for a moment, then said, “Wealth in your culture is something that can be put under lock and key. Would you agree with that statement?”
“I think so. Except for maybe something like a piece of land.”
’I’ll bet the deed to the piece of land is under lock and key,” Ishmael said.
“True.”
“The owner of the land may never even set foot on it. If he has the deed, he can sell it to someone else who may never set foot on it.”
“True.”
“Because your wealth can be put under lock and key, it is put under lock and key, and this means that it accumulates. Specifically, it accumulates among the people who have the locks and the keys. Perhaps this will help.… If you imagine the wealth of ancient Egypt as a visible substance being drawn up atom by atom out of the land by farmers, miners, builders, artisans, and so on, you’ll see it as a wide fog that spreads over the whole country at first. But this fog of wealth is in motion. It’s being drawn steadily upward into a narrower and denser stream of wealth that flows directly into the storerooms of the royal family. If you imagine the wealth of a medieval English county as a visible substance in the same way, you’ll see it being drawn steadily upward toward the local duke or earl. If you imagine the wealth of nineteenth century America in the same way, you’ll see it being drawn steadily upward into the hands of railroad magnates, industrialists, and financiers. Each transaction at a lower level pushes a bit of wealth upward toward a Rockefeller or a Morgan. The miner who buys a pair of shoes enriches Rockefeller minutely, because part of his money finds its way to Standard Oil. Another minute part of it finds its way to Morgan through one of his railroads. In present-day America, the wealth streams upward toward the same sort of people, though now they’re called Boesky and Trump instead of Rockefeller and Morgan. Obviously a great deal more could be said about this, but does this answer your question?”
“Yes. Maybe what I don’t get is this. If there’s going to be wealth, where could it go except to individuals?”
“I see where you’re confused,” he said with a nod. “Wealth must of course go to individuals, but that isn’t my point. My point is not that product-generated wealth always goes to individuals but rather that it always goes to a few individuals. When wealth is generated by products, eighty percent of it will always end up being held by twenty percent of the population. This isn’t peculiar to capitalism. In any economy based on products, wealth will tend to be concentrated in the hands of a few.”
“I understand now. But I have a question.”
“Proceed.”
“What about people like the Aztecs and the Incas? From the little I know, I’d sure guess that they had the food under lock and key.”
“You’re absolutely correct, Julie. The idea of locking up the food was invented independently in the New World. And among peoples like the Aztecs and the Incas, wealth flowed inexorably into the hands of a wealthy few.”
“Then were these people Leavers or Takers?”
“I’d say they were in between, Julie. They were no longer Leavers but not yet Takers, because they lacked one essential element: They didn’t seem to think that everyone in the world should be made to live the way they lived. The Aztecs, for example, had territorial ambitions, but once they conquered you, they didn’t care how you lived.”
Wealth, Leaver Style
Wealth generated in the tribal economy has no tendency to flow into the hands of a few,” Ishmael said. “This is not at all because Leavers are nicer people than you are, but rather because they have a fundamentally different kind of wealth. There’s no way to accumulate their wealth—no way to put it under lock and key—so there’s no way for it to be concentrated in anyone’s hands.”
“I have no idea what their wealth is.”
“I realize that, Julie, and I certainly intend to repair this deficiency. In fact, the easiest way to understand their economy is to start by looking at the wealth it generates. Of course when the people of your culture look at tribal peoples, they don’t see wealth of any kind, they see poverty. This is understandable, since the only kind of wealth they recognize is the kind that can be locked up, and tribal peoples are not much interested in that kind.
“The foremost wealth of tribal peoples is cradle-to-grave security for each and every member. I can see that you’re not exactly stunned by the magnificence of this wealth. It’s certainly not impressive or thrilling, especially (forgive me for saying so) for someone your age. There are hundreds of millions of you, however, who live in stark terror of the future because they see no security in it for themselves anywhere. To be made obsolete by some new technology, to be laid off as redundant, to lose jobs or whole careers through treachery, favoritism, or bias—these are just a few of the nightmares that haunt your workers’ sleep. I’m sure you’ve heard stories of dismissed workers returning to gun down former bosses and coworkers.”
“Sure. One a week at least.”
“They’re not crazy, Julie. Losing their job looks like the very end of the world to them. They feel they’ve been dealt a mortal blow. Life is over, and nothing’s left for them but revenge.”
“I believe it.”
“This is unthinkable in the tribal life, Julie—and not just because tribal peoples don’t have jobs. As surely as any of you, each member of the tribe has a living to make. The wherewithal to live doesn’t just fall out of the sky into their hands. But there is no way to deprive any member of the means to live. He or she has those means, and that’s it. Of course this doesn’t mean that no one ever goes hungry. But the only time anyone goes hungry is when everyone is
going hungry. Again, this isn’t because tribal people are more selfless and generous and caring—nothing of the sort. Do you think you can work this out?”
“You mean why no one goes hungry unless everyone is going hungry? I don’t know. I can give it a shot.”
“Please do.”
“Okay. Well, it isn’t like they have a store where they get the food. I’m not quite sure what I’m saying yet.”
“Take your time.”
“In the movies it happens this way. Let’s say you’ve got explorers on an expedition to the North Pole or something. Their ship gets iced in and they can’t get back on schedule. So the problem is how to survive. They’ve got to dole out the food very carefully and very fairly. But when they’re on their last legs and ready to expire, guess what? The bad guy has a secret cache of food that he’s been careful not to share with anyone.”
Ishmael nodded.
“Now the reason this doesn’t happen in a tribal situation is that they don’t start out with a store of food. They go along and go along, and for some reason the food gradually starts to get scarce. There’s a drought or a forest fire or something. On day one, everyone’s out looking for food, and it’s slim pickings for everyone. The tribal chief is as hungry as everyone else. Why wouldn’t he be, since there’s no store that he has first pick at? Everyone’s out there scoring as much food as they can, and if someone makes a good score, the best thing he can do is to share it with others, not because he’s a nice guy but because the more people who are on their feet and out there hunting for food, the better off they all are—including him.”
“That’s an excellent analysis, Julie. You have a distinct knack for this.… Of course there’s nothing uniquely human about this. Wherever you find animals joined in foraging bands, you’ll find them sharing food—not altruistically but in their own individual best interest. On the other hand, I’m sure there have been tribal societies that have departed from this way of handling hunger, societies in which the rule was ‘If food is scarce, don’t share it, hoard it.’ But none in fact are seen. I’m sure you know why.”