Man was not meant to be bound by this law,' and they began to live in a way that flouts the law at every point.' 'Ten thousand years ago, this one people said, 'No more. 'And only once in all the history of this planet has any species tried to live in defiance of this law - and it wasn't an entire species, it was only one people, those I've named the Takers,' Ishmael tells the narrator. You also may not commit genocide against your competition. Under this peace-keeping law, he says, you may not hunt down competitors or deny them food or access to it. Quinn emphasizes that the natural world, which includes 'Leaver' cultures, sustains itself through what he calls the law of limited competition. Through 'Ishmael,' Quinn argues that no law or theory underpins 'Taker' culture - and that's why it has been in free fall since its adoption. Only when we discovered the law of aerodynamics did we learn to fly. Those attempts failed because we tried to mimic a bird. 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:

Ishmael by daniel quinn