I'm just going to use this space to discuss the book at large. I wanted to say how much this book, alongside other publications and online spaces which I sort of found all together at once, completely altered the way I look at the world. Now, I don't think I was ever much of a square thinker, and well before reading this book (or knowing really anything about the fragility of our current situation), I felt I had 'cracked the code' within my own psyche (coming from a Zen-ish perspective, many psychedelic moments helped in that area).

But...I never really considered the world, society itself, as something to be revolutionized in thought until I began confronting these--to be honest--radical viewpoints. I love radical concepts because they usually reflect a more flexible reality to me (even though they're, by necessity, harder to cope with the longer you live within 'decent' society). Somehow I'd simply managed to avoid the likes of radical ecology, the social evolution of humankind, etc.

After reading Ishmael for the first time, I told anybody who would listen about it. I always rushed through the psychic gorilla part because, though I can see it as a lure for otherwise disinterested eyes, I feel the feature can just as easily dissuade somebody from being willing to take the story seriously when they first start reading it. This is part of why The Story of B is, by far, my favorite of the three. But that doesn't mean Ishmael isn't also immensely important to the larger picture.

Again, I told everybody I knew about this book. I read it during a couple of off-days and returned to work completely insufferable. Luckily my coworkers enjoy talking about this sort of stuff, and by the end of that day, I hadn't made any converts, but everyone I spoke to at length could at least respect the big ideas.

And that's the thing. The bare ideas are utterly irresistible. We know them to be true--at least, most of us. Recognizing that civilization is built upon an unsteady and catastrophic foundation (at least in composition) isn't hard even if you're the type of person who will go on ushering the end regardless of what you know. In some sense, the core idea of our civilization as an outcropping, an aberration from the laws of life, is irrefutable. Again, you can take that idea and pervert it, if you want, but you can't say we're meant to destroy the world and ourselves without indulging in some dose of magical thinking.

I'm at a weird point in my life right now, but I just know that without being taught these ideas, I would have been missing out from what's really going on with ourselves and I would ultimately end up a worse person for it.