Chapter 10: Takers Ego

In chapter Ten Ishmael teaches his student about culture and how takers live and portray it so differently than leavers. What really impacts me in this chapter is the ego of man kind and how they think the sun revolves around them; they ignore their past and their ancestors what they now call primitive people in a primitive time. What they don’t notice is that thanks to them we have all the things we consider modern. “Mother Culture says that this is as it should be there’s nothing in the past for us. The past is dreck. The past is something to be put behind us, something to be escaped from.” Pg 201
The Takers thought that the Leavers were the peculiar ones, the ones that had no real purpose they had lost the gift of agriculture they had been born with. Agriculture was a natural instinct for Takers; they never realized that they were exactly like the Leavers thousands of years ago. “When the people of your culture encountered the huntergathers of Africa and America, it was thought that these were people who had degenerated from the natural, agricultural state, people who had lost the arts they’d been born with. The Takers had no idea that they became agriculturalists. As far as the takers knew, there was no ‘before.’ Creation had occurred just a few thousand years ago, and Man the agriculturalist had immediately set about the task of building civilization.” Pg 201
“The Leavers are still passing that accumulation along in whatever form it came to them… Of course the leavers save information about production too, though production for its own sake is rarely a feature of their live. Among the leavers, people don’t have weekly quotas of post to make arrowheads to turn out. They’re not preoccupied with stepping up their production of hand-axes.” Pg 200, 203 Leavers live simple life’s they have accumulated information about their ancestors’ teachings; although they don’t have to make an empire of merchandise from their ancestors teachings. Obviously Takers and Leavers are enacting different story’s you may say the opposite story’s.