books/story_of_b/remembering

The Great Remembering

from: "The Story of B" by Daniel Quinn

There’s a drug known as angel dust or PCP that has the effect of blinding people to their physical limitations and vulnerability. Under its influence, people will manically plunge into feats that are beyond the design limitations of the human body, so that they heedlessly break bones, rip flesh, and tear ligaments, imagining themselves to be indestructible, only becoming aware of the damage they’ve done to themselves when the drug wears off.

Our culture has its own form of angel dust, which blinds us to our biological limitations and vulnerability. Under its influence, we have manically plunged into feats that are beyond the design limitations not only of our species but of any species on earth, so that we have heedlessly broken bones, ripped flesh, and torn ligaments, imagining ourselves to be indestructible. Only now, like the addict when his drug begins to wear off, are we beginning to count the wounds we have inflicted on ourselves during our maddened riot. But even as we make that count, we keep taking the drug, because we haven’t yet identified it as the source of our mania.

The drug I’m talking about is the Great Forgetting. Just as angel dust blinds its users to the fact that they’re flesh and bone, the Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that we are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet. The Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that what cannot work for any species will not work for us either. As angel dust tempts people to do things that would be mortally hazardous for any human, the Great Forgetting tempts us to do things that would be mortally hazardous for any species.

There are many who think it’s too late for humankind to save itself. I hear from them daily, and my heart goes out to them. Their hopelessness is understandable, because they mistake the workings of the drug for human nature itself. There is time for us to stop taking the drug and to stop feeding it to our children. There is time for us to begin the Great Remembering.

The obliteration of tribalism

I explained a little while ago that the Great Forgetting fostered the delusion that the world was empty of humans until the people of our culture made their appearance just a few thousand years ago. As a corollary of this delusion, it was understood that our culture was not only the first and original human culture but the single culture that God intended for all humankind. These delusions remain in place today globally—East and West, twins of a common birth—even though the true (and well-known) story of human origins obviously gives them no support at all. As the foundation thinkers of our culture reconstructed the story, humans appeared in the world with an instinct for civilization but of course no experience. They soon discovered the obvious benefits of communal life, and from there the course of civilization was clear. Farming villages grew into towns, towns grew into cities, cities grew into kingdoms, and so on. All was clear, but all was not smooth, because a key social instrument had yet to be invented, that instrument being law. Ignorant even of the concept of law, the citizens of these early cities and kingdoms were compelled to suffer crime, turmoil, oppression, and injustice. Law was a vitally important enabling invention, on which orderly social development had to wait, much as oceanic navigation had to wait on the invention of the astrolabe.

One would expect to find that laws existed long before literacy, but this appears not to have been the case. If laws had been formulated orally in preliterate times, then the earliest writings would surely have been transcriptions of these laws—but no such laws are found in these writings. In fact, the earliest written code of law, the Code of Hammurabi, dates to only about 2100 B.C.E. Roughly speaking, this is what the foundation thinkers imagined, and this is what became the received wisdom of our culture, embedded in all social thought—and in the textbooks used by schoolchildren around the globe, even to the present moment. Needless to say, it’s about as close to the truth as the fairy tale that babies are delivered by storks.

Now let’s take off the obscuring lenses of the Great Forgetting and have a look at what was really happening in the world ten thousand years ago. Members of Homo sapiens had been moving outward from their African birthplace for more than a hundred thousand years and had literally reached every corner of the world—and I don’t mean recently. By the time I’m talking about, ten thousand years ago, the Near East, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the New World had all been occupied by modern humans for at least twenty thousand years. And far from being empty, the Near East was among the most densely populated areas of the world—densely populated, that is, by tribal peoples, such as were found everywhere in the world at that time and such as are found still today where they’ve been allowed to survive.

So we’ve made two steps beyond the fairy tale: The founders of our culture didn’t live in an empty world, they were a tribal people surrounded by many other tribal peoples—and none of them were newcomers to the business of culture. These were old, old, old, old, old, old hands at culture, which means that not a single one of them was a stranger to the concept of law. Never once in the whole history of anthropology has a tribal people been found unequipped with a complete set of laws—complete, that is, for the lifestyle of that particular tribe.

The names of the tribes inhabiting the relevant area at this time will never be known to us. The name of the tribe in which our own quirky approach to life was born is similarly unknown. Since their descendants have come to be called Takers, I’ll give them a name that echoes this a bit. I’ll call them the Tak. With this as a beginning, I’ll tell you a story of my own—obviously not intended to be taken as literal history, to be sure, but also not a ridiculous fairy tale, like the one we hear from those who are still blinded by the Great Forgetting. There certainly was such a people as the Tak (there had to be or we wouldn’t be here!), and they were certainly a tribal people surrounded by other tribal people, whom I’ve shown here as the Ak, the Bak, the Cak, and so on up through the Kak.

This drawing reflects two vitally important realities of tribal life. First, the dark background of each tribal area is what makes the tribal name stand out. What this is meant to show is that each tribe is defined by the solidity and density of its own laws and customs. There is literally no other way to tell them apart. The laws and customs of the Ak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Bak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. The laws and customs of the Cak are what make them distinguishable as a tribe. And so on. Second, the solid border around each tribe makes it clear that the cultural boundaries between tribes are impenetrable. A member of the Bak can’t just decide one day to become a member of the Hak; such a thing is quite unthinkable among tribal peoples anywhere in the world.

Probably at this time some of these tribal peoples were agriculturalists and some were hunter-gatherers. There’s nothing at all unusual about finding the two living side by side. In any case, we know that the Tak (the tribal founders of the lifestyle we’re used to calling the Taker lifestyle) were agriculturalists—though there’s no reason to suppose that they invented agriculture. Their invention was a new style of agriculture—the totalitarian style.

But the stupendous innovation of the Tak was not just a new style of agriculture. The Tak had the remarkable and unprecedented idea that everyone should live the way they lived. It’s impossible to exaggerate how unusual this made them. I can’t name a single other people in history who made it a goal to proselytize their neighbors. Certainly no tribal people in history has evinced any interest in converting neighbors to their way of life—and I know of no civilized people who evinced such an interest either. For example, the Maya, the Natchez, and the Aztecs had no interest in spreading their lifestyle to the peoples around them, including those they conquered. The Tak were definitely revolutionaries in this regard. By inspiration, persuasion, or aggression, the Tak revolution began to engulf its neighbors.

By adopting a common culture, the Tak, Dak, and Fak have necessarily lost some of the solidity that once defined them. This is why they’re depicted as somewhat grayed out. The laws and customs of the Tak mean little to the Dak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Dak mean little to the Tak or the Fak. The laws and customs of the Fak mean little to the Tak or the Dak. Because they now share a common lifestyle, the cultural borders between them grow faint. It’s not as easy to tell one from another now. Being a Dak or a Fak isn’t as important as it once was. Now what’s important is that they’re allied with the Tak. It should be kept in mind that in this alliance the original laws and customs of the Tak are no more relevant than anyone else’s. The Dak and the Fak have not become Tak. They’ve just largely ceased to be Dak and Fak.

The process continues. The laws and customs of individual tribes continue to fade into irrelevance. By now the Dak and the Fak have virtually lost their tribal identities, and the Hak and the Kak soon will join them.

At last the original dozen have been assimilated into a single vast farming collective. Because tribal laws and customs have been reduced to nothing, tribal identities are all but unreadable. It’s as easy for one of the Ak to live among the Hak as it is for a Belgian to live in France or for a New Yorker to live in San Francisco.

Now we’re ready to depict the state of law in this farming collective.

The foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that our culture was born in a world empty of law. As this series of drawings shows, our culture was born in a world absolutely full of law, and then proceeded to obliterate it— quite inadvertently, I’m sure (at least in the beginning). Even the law of the original Tak tribe disappeared, rendered by this process as irrelevant as all the rest.

I want you to notice that this reconstruction is not entirely a work of imagination. Study the spread of our culture into the Americas, into Australia, into Africa and elsewhere, and you can hardly fail to see the steady obliteration of tribal law in the path of its advance—and with the obliteration of tribal law, the obliteration of tribal identity.

On the nature of received laws

As time went on, and the vacuum increased in size, it became obvious that some new form of law was needed. Since tribal law had been rendered obsolete, nothing remained now but to begin to invent laws. . . .

I think anyone who does a lot of public speaking eventually learns to sense when a chord has been struck and the audience is ringing with it. That’s what I just sensed after saying that nothing remained but to begin to invent laws.

This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented—but that’s exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they’re always received laws. They’re never the work of committees of living individuals, they’re always the work of social evolution. They’re shaped the way a bird’s beak is shaped, or a mole’s claw—by what works. They never reflect a tribe’s concern for what’s “right” or “good” or “fair,” they simply work—for that particular tribe. An example will show you—

I see this woman here has an urgent question. Please go ahead. . . .

Yes. I’ll repeat the question for those of you who were unable to hear it. It’s about the genital mutilation of women among tribal peoples, specifically the excision of the clitoris disguised as a form of female circumcision. I’ve looked into this and haven’t found any untouched tribal people who follow this abominable practice. It’s found only among peoples who have been all but completely absorbed into Taker culture—and specifically Taker culture in the Islamic sphere. Clitoral excision isn’t advocated in the Koran, but its practitioners clearly have the impression that it’s Islam-approved and a very Muslim thing to do, and the practice isn’t found outside areas under Muslim influence. A strong confirmation of the fact that this is not a “tribal” practice is that it’s not found among peoples who are still living tribally, like say, the Pagibeti or the Yaka. It’s found only among people who have abandoned tribal identity, laws, and customs, and now belong to the wider Taker community of some recognized political entity like Senegal or Mali.

Okay?

I was saying that an example will show you the difference between received tribal laws and laws invented by committees. Here’s how the Alawa of Australia handle adultery.

Let’s suppose that you’re a young unmarried man of the Alawa.

You find yourself in the unhappy circumstance of being attracted to your second cousin’s wife, Gurtina—and of knowing that she is attracted to you. Now, your second cousin is a fine fellow, and you wouldn’t intentionally hurt him, but these things happen: You and his wife are possessed by the love madness.

It’s really very touching and pathetic. Living in the same camp, you can’t help but see each other daily. You circle each other like binary stars, drawn together by one force, thrust apart by another. What you read in each other’s eyes is plain but untested. You yearn to test it, but . . . you know what the testing will inevitably cost.

No matter. Soon you can endure it no longer. The fire of love is burning you alive. One day in passing at the outskirts of camp, you confront her. She lowers her eyes modestly, as always, but your determination is fixed. “Tonight,” you whisper, “past the saltbush on the other side of the stream.”

She hesitates a moment to consult her own heart, but she too knows that the time has come. “At the setting of the moon?” she asks. “At the setting of the moon.” She nods and hurries away, her heart bursting with joy and dread.

That night you’re there a little beforehand, of course, to prepare your bower of love, your nest of passion. Gurtina comes to you at last. Your hands touch. You embrace. Ah!

A few hours later, exhausted with delight, you sit by a tiny fire and watch it grow pale in the burgeoning dawn. You exchange a glance, and more is written in that glance than in all your night’s endearments and caresses. You have tested your passion. Now, this glance says, it’s time to test your love.

With a sigh, you smother the fire and head back to camp, trying not to let your feet drag. Your faces are a careful display. Exultation would be childish and insolent. Shame would be a denial of your love. Instead, what’s seen there is something like repose, acceptance, fortitude. You both know what you’re going to see, and without fail you see it. At one side of the camp the men are arrayed, already hopping with fury. At the other side wait the women, smoldering.

You and Gurtina exchange another glance—this one briefer than the beat of a gnat’s wing—and then you’re engulfed in a wave of wrath. The men descend on you, the women on her. Rocks and spears and boomerangs are flying through the air, clubs and digging sticks are being wielded with abandon. But you don’t just stand there and take it—far from it. You both battle back in defense of your love, answering screams with screams, rocks with rocks, spears with spears, blows with blows, until all weapons and combatants are finally exhausted.

Gurtina, bleeding and battered, is returned to her husband, and you’re told to roll your swag and get the hell out if you know what’s good for you. For a while the men’s bodies are exhausted, their fury isn’t, and when they revive, you’ll be fair game again. So you roll your swag, thinking. Thinking very hard. The test of your love isn’t over, it’s just begun. The next few hours will be the true test, and this test will be in your head and heart alone. You leave camp, knowing that as yet you have a choice. . . . The question is: Do you really want this woman? Do you want her more than anything you hold dear in the world? If you don’t, if there’s the slightest doubt . . . you will just keep going—go on walkabout for a few weeks. When you come back, the men’s fury will have abated. They’ll jeer at you for a few weeks and then forget all about it. Gurtina . . . ah, Gurtina will know you for what you are, a craven seducer, a hollow man, and she’ll never forget. And of course there’ll be a price to be paid to your cousin. But all these are bearable. The alternative, on the other hand . . . You circle the camp all day, staying out of sight and out of reach, thinking. But by dusk you know that your doubts have vanished. In the gathering darkness, you approach camp stealthily, to the spot where your loved one is being guarded. Lightly guarded.

Lightly guarded—to keep her from running away with you. Ah, the exquisiteness of that guard! Do you see its effect?

Gurtina has her own choice to make, you see—the same terrible choice as yours. And the restraint provided by those guards defines and delimits her choice. For she’s guarded. You’re not. You have to prove your courage by coming for her. She doesn’t need to prove her courage by coming for you. And in fact, she can’t. She’s guarded, you see. So that, should you not come for her, she will not be shamed. Rather it will be you who is shamed.

But this is only half of it. The guards are there to protect you as well, because Gurtina too has her choice to make. Does she really want you? Does she want you more than anything she holds dear in the world? If not—if there’s the slightest doubt—when your signal comes at dusk, she need only shrug helplessly, as if to say, “See? I can’t get away, my love. I’m being too well guarded.” Thus the presence of the guards enables her to express her choice in a way that does not crush your self-esteem. The presence of the guards makes it possible for her to end the whole episode in a moment, without a single word, as painlessly as possible.

Now note very well that none of this is or was worked our rationally or consciously, of course. Nevertheless, the guard on Gurtina is in fact curiously inefficient. Efficient enough to serve all the purposes I’ve just mentioned— but inefficient enough to allow her to escape at your signal, if that is her will. Because of course the Alawa are sensible enough to know that if she wants you this much, it would be foolish to make escape impossible.

The testing is over now. You and she have made your decision. Now the price must be paid. The price for disrupting the life of the tribe, for cheapening marriage in the eyes of the children. And that price is, next to death itself, the heaviest that can be paid: detribalization, lifelong exile.

At your signal, Gurtina slips away from her guard and, together at last and forever, the two of you hurry away into the night, never to return. You are journeying into the land of the dead now. Detribalized, you are dead to all you left behind and to all you shall ever meet for the rest of your lives. Now you are truly homeless, by your own choice, alone and adrift in a vast, empty world. Your home is now each other, which you chose above the tribe. There will be no comradeship for you forever except what you find in each other: no friends, no father and mother, no aunts and uncles, no cousins, no nieces and nephews. You have thrown it all away—to have each other.

And you know that this is truly a price you’ve paid of your own choice, not a punishment. To have each other and go on living with the tribe would be unthinkable, disgraceful, even worse than exile. It would in fact destroy the tribe, because once the children saw that there was no price to be paid for adultery, marriage would become a laughingstock, and the basis of the family and of the tribe itself would disintegrate.

What you see at work here in this example is the stupendous efficacy of tribal law. Nothing like invented law, which just spells out crimes and punishments, tribal law is something that works. It works well for all concerned. A man and woman whose love is as great as this must of course have each other. But for the sake of the tribe, they must be gone—out of sight, out of mind forever. The children of the tribe have seen with their own eyes that marriage and love are not the trifling matters they have become among “advanced” peoples like us. The husband’s dishonor has been avenged—and there will be no snickering among his comrades about it, for they stood side by side with him to lambaste the adulterer.

But perhaps you had a question at this point in the story: Why would the lovers return to the camp at all?

Oh, that’s exactly the crux of the law. It wouldn’t work at all without that.

Suppose, after your night of lovemaking, you were to suggest to Gurtina: “Oh, why should we wait another day to be together? Let’s run away now!” What would she think? She would think, “Uh-oh, what have I gotten myself into here? What kind of a man is this? A coward, obviously, who would have us slink off into the night rather than go back to face the others and say, ‘Well, here we are! Do your worst!’ ”

And if she made the suggestion instead of you, you’d think the same of her. So the two of you must go back. . . .

Every part of this process is the law, and every actor in it is a participant in the law. The law for these people isn’t a separate statute written in a book. It’s the very fabric of their lives—it’s what makes the Alawa the Alawa and what distinguishes them from the Mara and the Malanugga-nugga—who have their own ways of handling adultery, which are the best for them. It can’t possibly be said too often that there is no one right way for people to live; that’s only the delusion of the most murderous and destructive culture that history has ever produced.

I’m sure it’s all but self-evident to you that this law of adultery could not have been the invention of any committee whatever. It’s not an improvisation or a contrivance, and because it’s not an improvisation or a contrivance, it has weight with the Alawa. It might not occur to any of them to analyze it as I’ve done here tonight, but that doesn’t matter in the least. They don’t obey the law of the Alawa because it checks out under analysis. They obey the law of the Alawa because they’re the Alawa, and to give up the law would be to give up their identity—would be to become detribalized.

The world of the detribalized

Now I hope I’ve given you a handle on the price to be paid for becoming part of the Taker revolution: detribalization—the loss of tribal laws, customs, and identity. Since the detribalization of the Old World (by which I mean the Near East, the Far East, and Europe) occurred thousands of years before the earliest historical records, it became part of the Great Forgetting, and as such it was invisible to the foundation thinkers of our culture. As they reconstructed it in imagination, the first humans were just proto-urbanites— farmers without farms, villagers without villages, city dwellers without cities. They couldn’t possibly have imagined a whole world of tribal peoples becoming detribalized—or more importantly, what it meant to become detribalized. When they looked into the past, they saw people setting out to build civilization, being already innately inclined toward civilization. When we look into the past no longer under the influence of the Great Forgetting, we see something very different: people inadvertently (but systematically) obliterating a highly successful lifestyle—then scurrying like mad to knock together something to replace it with. We’ve been scurrying ever since, and every year our legislators and political thinkers go back to work at the ceaseless task of trying to knock together something as workable as what we destroyed.

People will sometimes charge me with just being in love with tribalism. They say to me in effect, “If you love it so much, why don’t you just go do it and leave the rest of us alone?” Those who understand me in this way totally misunderstand what I’m saying. The tribal lifestyle isn’t precious because it’s beautiful or lovable or because it’s “close to nature.” It isn’t even precious because it’s “the natural way for people to live.” To me, this is gibberish. This is like saying that bird migration is good because it’s the natural way for birds to live, or like saying that bear hibernation is good because it’s the natural way for bears to live. The tribal life is precious because it tested out. For three million years it worked for people. It worked for people the way nests work for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles, the way hibernation works for bears. That doesn’t make it lovable, that makes it viable.

People will also say to me, “Well, if it was so wonderful, why didn’t it last?” The answer is that it did last—it has lasted right up to the present moment. It continues to work, but the fact that something works doesn’t make it invulnerable. Burrows and nests and webs can all be destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that they work. Tribalism can be destroyed and indeed has largely been destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that it worked for three million years and still works today as well as it ever did.

And the fact that tribalism works doesn’t mean that something else can’t work. The trouble is that our particular something else isn’t working— doesn’t work and can’t work. It bears with it its own seeds of destruction. It’s fundamentally unstable. And unfortunately it had to reach global proportions before the nature of its instability could be recognized.

It’s important to realize that ours wasn’t the only lifestyle experiment going on at this time. Birds experiment with nests—that’s how nests evolved in the first place and how they continue to evolve. Moles experiment with burrows—that’s how burrows evolved in the first place and how they continue to evolve. Spiders experiment with webs—that’s how webs evolved in the first place and how they continue to evolve. We can’t know what experiments in human culture were made in the Old World—they were all obliterated by the Taker experiment—but we know a lot about experiments that were made elsewhere. What’s fascinating about them is that these cultural variants were being tested just the way variants within a species are tested. What worked survived, what didn’t work perished, leaving behind its fossilized remains—irrigation ditches, roads, cities, temples, pyramids.

People everywhere were looking for alternatives to the traditional tribal way of making a living—hunting and gathering. They were looking at full-time agriculture and settlement, but if their particular experiment didn’t work, they were prepared to let it go—and they did so again and again. It used to be considered a great mystery. What became of these ancient builders who carved strange cities out of the jungles and the deserts? Were they whisked away into another dimension? No, they just quit. They just went back to something they could count on to work.

What made the Taker experiment different from all of these was its very quirky belief that the Taker way was the way people were meant to live— people everywhere, forever, no matter what. To the Takers, it didn’t matter whether it worked. It didn’t matter if people liked it. It didn’t matter if people suffered the torments of hell. This was the one right way for people to live.

This bizarre notion made it impossible for people to give it up, no matter how badly it worked. If it doesn’t work, then you’ll just have to suffer.

If it doesn’t work, suffer

And suffer they did.

It’s not hard to figure out what made people cling to the tribal life—and makes them cling to it wherever it’s still found today. Tribal peoples have their full share of suffering to do, but in the tribal life, no one suffers unless everyone suffers. There’s no class or group of people who are expected to do the suffering—and no class or group of people who are exempt from suffering. If you think this sounds entirely too good to be true, check it out. In the tribal life there are no rulers to speak of; elders or chiefs—almost always part-time—exert influence rather than power. There’s nothing equivalent to a ruling class—or to a rich or privileged class. There’s nothing equivalent to a working class—or to a poor or underprivileged class. If this sounds ideal, well, why shouldn’t it be, after three million years of evolutionary shaping? You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized geese in a way that works well for geese. You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized elephants in a way that works well for elephants. You’re not surprised that natural selection has organized dolphins in a way that works well for dolphins. Why should you be surprised that natural selection organized people in a way that worked well for people?

And conversely, why should you be surprised that the founders of our culture, having obliterated a lifestyle tested over a period of three million years, were unable to instantly slap together a replacement that was just as good? Really, the task was a formidable one. We’ve been working at it for ten thousand years, and where are we?

The very first thing to go was the very thing that made tribal life a success: its social, economic, and political egalitarianism. As soon as our revolution began, the process of division began, between rulers and ruled, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, masters and slaves. The suffering class had arrived, and that class (as it would always be) was the masses. I won’t repeat a tale everyone knows. Just a few thousand years separates the bare beginning of our culture in rude farming villages from the age of the god-kings, when the royal classes lived in mind-boggling splendor and all the rest—the suffering masses—lived like cattle.

At last we’ve entered the historical era. The Great Forgetting was complete. The tribal life had been gone for thousands of years. No one in the entire civilized world, East or West, remembered a time when perfectly ordinary people—the kind of people who now made up the suffering masses—lived well, and human society was not divided into those who are expected to suffer and those who are exempt from suffering.

Everyone thought it had been this way from the beginning. Everyone thought this was the nature of the world—and the nature of Man. They began to think that the world is an evil place. They began to think that existence itself is evil. They began to think (and who can blame them!) that there was something fundamentally wrong with humans. They began to think that humankind was doomed.

They began to think that humankind was damned.

They began to think that someone needed to save us.

It’s important for you to see that none of these ideas sprang from the tribal life—or could imaginably have sprung from the tribal life. These are ideas you expect to find welling up among people leading anguished lives, empty lives. You can make people live like cattle, but you can’t make them think they’re living well. You can render them powerless, but you can’t render them dreamless. The suffering masses knew they were suffering—knew something was desperately wrong—knew they needed something. And what they needed was salvation.

The origin and cause of human suffering—and the means of ending it— became the first great intellectual and spiritual preoccupation of our culture, beginning about four thousand years ago. The next three millennia would see the development of all those religions that were destined to become the major religions of our culture—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and each had its own theory about the origin and cause of human suffering and its own approach to ending it, transcending it, or putting up with it. But all were united in a single, central vision: Whether it’s release from the endless round of death and rebirth or blissful union with God in heaven, salvation is the highest goal of human life, unimaginably beyond any other, such as wealth, happiness, honor, or fame—and each of us is utterly alone in the universe with it. There is no marketplace in which nirvana or merit or grace or the forgiveness of sins can be purchased. No parent or spouse or friend can obtain salvation for you by any means whatever. And because nothing remotely compares with it in value, salvation is the one thing about which you may be totally and blamelessly selfish. Your salvation need not take second place to anything—friendship, loyalty, gratitude, honor, king, country, family. In the entire universe of possibilities, not a single one of them takes precedence over your salvation, and anyone who asks you to put something ahead of it is asking too much—no matter what it is—and may be refused without the slightest hesitation, reservation, or apology.

Is B the Antichrist?

Now at last we’re ready to tackle this most difficult problem that so many of you have brought to me for solution. Again and again you say to me, “Tell me how to face those who accuse. Tell me how to explain that you are not the Antichrist!”

You have to begin by understanding what the Antichrist stands for. All serious commentators on the subject agree that Antichrist is just the latest name for an ancient figure in the religious legends of our culture—far more ancient than the Christ to which this name makes him opposed. In other words, he doesn’t just represent the antithesis of Jesus. All our salvationist religions have feared the appearance of one who would lead the righteous from the paths of salvation. The Antichrist isn’t just the antithesis of Jesus, he’s equally the antithesis of Buddha, of Elijah, of Moses, of Muhammad, of Nanak, of Joseph Smith, of Maharaj Ji—of all saviors and purveyors of salvation in the world. He is in fact the Antisavior.

Accompanying the legend of the Antichrist has been the bizarre and almost laughable notion that his massive global appeal will be his unbridled wickedness. This shows what a low opinion our salvationist religions have of their members. This is how they despise us that they think we yearn for evil and vileness and corruption and will slavishly follow anyone who promises these things. So now I’m ready at last to tell you how to face the accusers of B. When they say to you, “B is the Antichrist,” don’t think you’re doing something admirable if you say, “Oh no, no, no, you don’t understand.” These accusers do understand.

When they say to you, “B is the Antichrist,” here’s what you should say to them. Say to them, “Yes, you’re right—absolutely right. B means to steal the hearts of the people away from you so that the world may live. B means to gather the voices of humans all over the planet into one voice singing, ‘The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. The age of the Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled. Now we remember who we are. Our kin are not cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, and powers. Our kin are mayflies, lemurs, snakes, eagles, and badgers. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has abated, so we no longer imagine that Man was ill- made. We no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. We no longer think they know how to make every single thing in the whole vast universe except a human being. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has passed, so we can no longer live as though nothing matters but us. We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods had in mind for us. We can no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny. We no longer yearn for the nothingness of nirvana. We no longer dream of wearing crowns of gold in the royal court of heaven.’ ”

Say to them, “You’re right to see that we’re straying from the path of salvation. We’re straying from that path exactly as you always feared we might. But listen, we’re not straying from the path of salvation for the sake of sin and corruption, as you always imagined we might. We’re straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging. We’re straying from the path of salvation—but not for love of vice and wickedness as you contemptuously imagined we might. We’re straying from the path of salvation for love of the world, as you never once dreamed in a thousand years of dreaming.”

The evangelist John wrote, “You must not love the world or the things of the world, for those who love the world are stranger’s to the love of the Father.” Then, just two sentences later, he wrote: “Children, the final hour is at hand! You’ve heard that the Antichrist is coming. He’s not one but many, and when the many of him are among us, you’ll know the final hour has come.”

John knew what he was talking about. He was right to warn his followers against those who love the world. We are the ones he was talking about, and this is the final hour—but it’s their final hour, not ours. They’ve had their day, and this is indeed the final hour of that day.

Now our day begins.