My Ishmael

Adults get real cranky if you quiz them about the scams they're running on you.

No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nusery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems.

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain.

Are there really people in the world who don't think they're miserable, destructive, greedy lot?

People seldom look very hard for things they don't want to find.

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot - a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.

The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.

I'm trying to get you used to the fact that things that look strange to you are not in fact stranger than things that look ordinary.

It's important to be predictable to a certain extent, but it's also important not to be predictable.

A system that works for tens of thousands of years is going to be a system that works for people who are always capable of being troublesome, disruptive, selfish, greedy, cruel and violent.

For ten thousand years you've been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken. Do you personally know a single person who isn't a lawbreaker?

The prison is your culture, which you sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile Cresent ten thousand years ago.

If fourteen-year-olds had to support themselves, they wouldn't be spending their money on Nike shoes, arcade games, and CDs.

In actual fact, people seldom remember things they have no use for.

Since they don't have any survival value, they're forced to enter the Taker economy. Even if they'd rather opt out of that economy, they can't.

Mother Culture's deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can't live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you're seeing at work in your schools isn't a system defect, it's a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundread percent efficiency.

I endorse the teaching of everything, because everything is what children want to know. What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way - but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that.