Quinn likens the agricultural revolution to humans' first attempts at flight. Unlike 'Leaver' societies, which sustained themselves and the natural world for thousands of years, our 'Taker' society will run out of things to kill and will die. There's no way out of it except through death.' This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself.

'Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. 'Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be,' Ishmael tells the narrator. 'Takers' are us - the people who killed or annexed those cultures and continue to do so logging and farming in the Amazon threatens some of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth. Those cultures lived lightly and took only what they needed. Ishmael separates humans into two groups - 'Leavers' and 'Takers.' 'Leavers' formed cultures that thrived for thousands of years before the agricultural revolution - hunters and gatherers, herders, indigenous societies. Using the Socratic method, Ishmael implores the narrator to think for himself on 'how things came to be this way' and to come to the understanding that our culture has been enacting a story from the book of Genesis: that Man is here to conquer the earth. The narrator meets the teacher - Ishmael, a thousand-pound gorilla who communicates telepathically. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Early in the book, a man, the narrator, answers a newspaper ad that says:

The chalice and the blade synopsis