After completing this book, things are much clearer now. What became very clear is that without knowing it, isara.org fits the criteria for an experiment to gradually change the world. This made the book even more relevant.
At first My Ishmael goes into why the world is headed for disaster. Not very cheerful reading, but knowing that there is a solution further in the book was helpful.
Keeping food under lock and key was the start of the economy of every nation we have today. People all over the world are are not happy with the prospect of spending a large portion of their life working for food. People who benefit from this economy do not want it to change. The remaining 80% use religions, good parental upbringing, drugs, alcohol, meditation and other numerous ways to deal with the notion of being a prisoner of a system based on food being kept under lock and key.
Our education system is too much based on a series of skills which must be achieved by everyone at specific ages. He claims that everything a person needs to know by third grade is good enough to get productive enough to learn things on the job. Of course some careers require more training than others, but the normal 16 years is way too much and is merely a cultural thing which has developed to keep young children out of the working place as long as possible. Also, a good bit of our economy lies in the teenager market which is filled with the most hype.
A third concept, which I still think is the reason communism failed, is how we punish criminals. This is his weakest argument. He says that tribes on earth before 10000 years ago, didn't have rules to break, they just had ways of dealing with things when someone did break them. Going more into my own theory of why I think Daniel Quinn is wrong in this respect is that he makes no reference to the effect of the advent of consciousness on the changing culture.
No worries about this one flaw in a book filled with new ways of looking at our world and lots of ideas on how to make it better. Daniel Quinn does an excellent job of showing us the road ahead, and this is where isara comes into the picture.
He talks of a revolution by people who want a change. A way to break the mold but not to be too extreme or annihilating. He claims these things can be used to characterize the revolution:
- It wont take place all at once.
- It will be achieved incrementally by people working off other's ideas.
- It will be led by no one.
- It will not be the initiative of any political, governmental, or religious body.
- It has no targeted end point.
- It will proceed according to no plan.
- It will reward those who further the revolution with the coin of the revolution.
All of these are attributes of evolution, and that is his basis for why it will work. Things that fail die off, things the succeed, reproduce, or live on to be built upon more. He suggests people try different things which appeal to need for support from others, rather than products or material things. The wealth of our culture should be based on the support we get from other people in our culture, not the materialistic economy we have evolved to. A materialistic culture is not evolutionarily stable.
I believe Isara is one of those 'experiments' he calls out for. He points to a free hospital set up in the US, and various initiatives in places like Seattle where the tribe of 'The Crow' appeal to restaurants to hand over excess food to homeless people. 'The Crow' is a creative way of gradually making the Takers tolerant of the Leavers (people who don't want to be a part of the culture we have). Isara fits into Quinn's dream because it is a creative way to take advantage of the waste of advertising on the internet (product $), and turn that into support $. Support $ being the 'coin of the revolution'.
Overall I found the book very uplifting and full of promise. I genuinely feel like I have seen how a culture based on support rather than product can exist. I also see how we can get there. You don't need to read Ishmael before reading My Ishmael to get everything out of it.
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