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By Daniel Quinn

One of the most striking features of the Taker culture is its passionate and unwavering dependence on prophets.

Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: That he doesn’t know how he ought to live.

There are 4 things the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community, and these are fundamental to their civilizational system.

1. They exterminate their competitors
2. They systematically destroy their competitors food to make room for their own
3. They deny their competitors access to food
4. ???

Human settlement isn’t against the laws of competition, it’s subject to them.

Famine isn’t unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world.

It’s hard to sit by and let people starve? This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the worlds divinely appointed ruler. I will not let them starve. I will not let the drought come. It is the gods who let these things, not you.

The noble savage theory. The idea of people living close to nature tend to be noble. The story the Takers have been enacting here for the past ten thousand years isn’t only disastrous for mankind and the world, it’s fundamentally unhealthy and unsatisfying. It’s a megalomaniac’s fantasy, and enacting it has given the Taker’s a culture riddled with greed, cruelty, mental illness, crime, and drug addiction. The story the Leavers have been enacting here for the past 3 million years isn’t a story of conquest and rule. Enacting it doesn’t give them power. Enacting it gives them lives that are satisfying and meaningful to them.

The Takers are those who know good and evil and the Leavers are those who live in the hands of the gods.

Amazingly enough, mans destiny is plain. He’s the trailblazer, the pathfinder. His destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: they can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt, or they can stand aside and make some room for the rest. But it’s more than that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent – By giving all the rest their chance – the whales, dolphins, chimps, raccoons – he becomes in a sense their progenitor…Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. It should be noted that what is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.