Ishmael: Altering our Habitual Culture for Sense of Value

In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn suggests that we alter our fixed idea for our (Takers') sense of value in order to save the world of Takers. In my statement, the sense of value means what we make important for us when we desire to live comfortably in this world. At first sight, whenever Ishmael mentions the view of Takers (us) and implies a comment that we should improve our behavior with consciousness of saving the world, we would encounter difficulties with actually making this happen. For instance, in part 8, Ishmael explains about storing food that "In the wild, the lion kills a gazelle to save for tomorrow. The deer eats the grass that's there. It doesn't cut the grass down and save it for the winter. But these are things the Takers do" (p. 128). In these statements, I believe there is the implied message by Ishmael that if we (Takers) ingest our minimum sources that we need to live, we never compete with others. If we never had the idea that we are forced to ingest extra sources, then we could reject the idea that it must be better for us that we always have advantage to others by extra sources.

In the above opinion, we are captives in terms of the fixed idea that is habitual culture. As Dr. Graban said in today's class, the following of Ishmael's statements explains our state so well that "There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as your does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now" (p. 84). That is, because we believe that our fixed images and the status quo are our right way, we would not be able to see a matter from different point of view.

In fact, when we consider Ishmael's lesson regardless of the reality, all of his suggestions seem to be realized easily by our own hands because most of the suggestions are based on our way to think, consider, and believe. Because we believe that the right way is always one in spite of the fact that the way is just habitual culture from the past, we tend to reject different opinions and tend to consider that different opinions are strange. Therefore, we would still be captives by the only one way of sense of values.