The story that we live by gives rise to our culture. A culture is not our language, clothes, food, or even our religion, it is the story we live by. See if you can guess what the story of our culture is—its not hard. Here is what makes us “Takers”.

Our Taker cultural story states, “The world belongs to humanity.”* As our capabilities grew, man began to believe that his destiny was to conquer and rule the world. We have almost done it, and this may be our undoing. Our culture also believes that we are separate from the earth and that we must forever increase our mastery of the world.

Our cultural story violates the peace keeping law of nature. In a nutshell, this law to limit competition says, “you may not deny your competitors access to food or exterminate your competitors. You may compete to full extent of your capabilities, but you may not wage war, or destroy their food or deny them access to food through totalitarian agriculture.” The peace keeping law ensures a resilient planet through biodiversity instead of survival of just the fittest at each competition level

Another of our cultural stories is, “There is only one right way to live.” Since the agricultural revolution, our culture has been exterminating all competing native Leaver cultures. We all know that North America was not empty when Columbus ran into it. Look what we have done to the native people who new how to live here truly sustainably for generation after generation.

The third part of our cultural story is, “Civilization must continue.” Humanity lived successfully in a social organization called tribes for millions of years. However, 10,000 years ago one tribe decided to experiment with a new hierarchal social organization called civilization.

Within civilization a few live in great luxury to the top, more live very well in the middle and have nothing to complain about, but the masses live at the bottom like pack animals. When the masses say, “This is not working, the tribal way was better.” The ruler of the hierarchy tells them, “We can’t go back, nothing will ever surpass civilization.” But we know that no invention is ever unsurpassable.

There are some other minor components of our cultural story or our vision including “man is flawed, something will save us, and get yours while you can.” These should sound familiar to you.

This collection of beliefs is called our cultural story or vision. A culture’s story is what perpetuates the culture. Look at all of the logical extensions that come from the above such as locking up the food so everyone has to work in the system to survive, making all property private to control the land, and our population can growth without limit because the world belongs to humanity.

No matter what your cause the environment, social justice, equal rights, globalization, population control, poverty, its a lost cause until a new more compelling story is realized for humanity. It does not have to be one story either. In fact, it would be better if we had a great diversity of new resilient cultures that combined what we have today with the Leaver wealth of the past.

For more on Takers and Leavers, see chapter two in Culturequake and also see Daniel Quinn’s book Ishmael. Quinn created this vocabulary for people of our culture being Takers and people of all other cultures being Leavers. Leaver in Quinn’s books tends to mean native or indigenous peoples who live in harmony with the earth. However, I believe a future interpretation of Leaver may be expanded to include modern people who leave their hierarchy Taker culture—they literally walk away to a live new and better story. More about the Leaver treasury next time.

You can imagine how this story also gives rise to most of our deepest problems such as overpopulation, social injustice, peak oil, climate change, stress, crime,  pollution, and so on. Because the world belongs to man, we can do what every we want.

Humanity is also not the problem either. Humanity has lived fine on the plant for three or four million years depending how you define humanity. Our greatest problems started when one tribe started living a new story 10,000 at the start of the agricultural revolution. We will talk much more about this and about finding a better story to live.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2008 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

1. *The first use of the Taker and Leaver stories that I know of maybe Daniel Quinn’s use in his 1992 Ishmael book series that states the Leaver story as, “Man belongs to the world” and the Taker story as, “The world was made for man.” Another widely known version was an adaptation by Texas professor Ted Perry as part of a 1994 film script of Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech at a tribal gathering in response to US government’s decision to buy or take his people’s land. The makers of the film took a little literary license, further changing the speech and making it into a letter to President Franklin Pierce, which has been frequently reprinted. No such letter was actually written by or for Chief Seattle. The National Archives has a fractionating history of Chief Seattle’s speech. See the four following references.
   

Daniel Quinn
Ishmael, p. 239

Nancy Zussy
Chief Seattle Speech: Washington State Library, Version 3

Jerry L. Clark
Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech

Wes Felty
Chief Seattle's reply to a Government offer to purchase the remaining Salish lands