Ishmael: HorribleAmong the people of your culture, who wants to destroy the world? Who wants to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world. Yet you destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world. This truth was stated by a gorilla named Ishmael who, through his experience of being taken from the jungle, placed in a zoo in the 1930s, placed in a menagerie, and purchased by a private owner named Mr. Sokolow, had it all time in a world to think about the world around it. Daniel Quinn writes about the terrifying realities of our culture in a book called Ishmael, stepping outside the world as we know it and describing what he sees through a talking gorilla. Behind the bars of his cage, he was able to take an outsider's look at our culture, to see things we could never see. This sagacious, passive and extremely patient primate wanted to share this knowledge with others to prevent man from destroying the world. So, he placed an ad in the newspaper and caught the attention of an enthusiastic student, the narrator, who was willing to save the world. Desperately confused, this everyday writer tries to break out of his culture and experience a whole new world. Day after day, this half-ton gorilla, Ishmael, opens the narrator's eyes and teaches him "how things happened." He begins by dividing man into two different cultures. Call the people of our culture who take and the people of all other cultures who leave. Every culture has a history. In Ishmael's teachings, a story is a scenario that relates man, the world, and the gods. This history is represented by the people in a culture. In other words, people in a culture live to make history a reality. The first story Ishmael tells is that of the kidnappers. Every story is based on a premise. The buyer's premise is that the world was created for man. If the world is made for man, then it belongs to him, and man can do what he wants with it. It is our environment, our seas, our solar system, etc. The world is a support system for man. It is just a machine designed to produce and sustain human life.