The Story of B

The "Great Forgetting" is the term B uses to describe an occurrence during the formative millennia of our civilization. What was forgotten is that there was a time when people lived without civilization and were sustained primarily by hunting and gathering rather than by large-scale animal husbandry and agriculture. By the time history began to be written down, thousands of years had passed since abandoning the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and it had been assumed that people had come into existence farming. B argues that our knowledge and worldview today would be greatly altered had the foundation thinkers of our culture known there was history beyond the beginning of civilization.

When paleontology uncovered three million years' worth of human generations, making it untenable that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time, our worldview was still not affected. Instead, humanity used terms like “pre-history” and “Agricultural Revolution” to label these events, rather than grafting their ramifications into our societal fabric.

A continual theme through B’s teachings is that population growth is dependent upon food production, with increases in food production leading to increases in population.

B's (i.e. Quinn's) thinking here should not be confused with the ideas of Thomas Malthus, who made the prediction that population would outrun food supply. In B's own words, "Malthus's warning was about the inevitable failure of totalitarian agriculture. My warning is about its continued success."[1] Quinn characterizes the Malthusian problem as "How are we going to FEED all these people?" and contrasts this with his own: "How are we going to stop PRODUCING all these people?"[2]

To better exemplify his ideas of food production and population control, B introduces the ABCs of Ecology.

• Part A: The first part of ecology consists purely of food. Food is best described as all life forms.
• Part B: The second part of ecology consists of how populations are affected by the food supply. B explains that population and food supply are in a delicate balance: "As food populations increase, feeder populations increase. As feeder populations increase, food populations decrease. As food populations decrease, feeder populations decrease. As feeder populations decrease, food populations increase."

The people of our culture established a style of agriculture that B labels "totalitarian agriculture." "Prehistoric" hunters and gatherers operated according to a worldview that promoted coexistence and limited competition between predator and prey. However, the totalitarian agriculturist operates with the worldview that the world is theirs to control and all the food in the world is theirs to produce and eat.

Totalitarian agriculturists, while originally representing a single society, eventually began to overrun other societies as their food supply and populations grew. (B sometimes calls the totalitarian agriculturists "Takers," a term first used by Ishmael in his eponymous novel). B notes that even tribal societies who battle with and claim victory over other ones do not normally force their defeated enemies to assimilate as do the members of our own world-dominating Taker culture. B comments, "The Tak [that is, B's name the earliest members of the Taker culture] 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 [tribalistic] people in history who made it a goal to proselytize their neighbors."

Under proliferation of totalitarian agriculture, the world population began to double, first taking 2000 years; then taking 1600 years; and eventually only taking 200 years between 1700 and 1900 AD; then again between 1900 and 1960 AD; and yet again between 1960 and 1996 AD. Over the last 10,000 years, this single society has expanded to include 99.8% of the world’s population.

B argues that this exponential growth of the human population is not sustainable. He points to several major problems in our society that he claims arose from over-produced food and an over-crowded population. He states that war, crime, famine, plague, an exploited labor force, drug abuse, slavery, rebellion, and genocide have resulted from Totalitarian Agriculturists' continual expansion. B emphasizes that to reverse the damage we have caused, humankind does not inherently need to change, but rather a single culture has to be changed.

B uses the phrase “cultural collapse” to describe the point of history that we are living through today. He believes that circumstances have rendered the cultural mythology of the Takers meaningless to its people. When this happens to a culture, B states, things fall apart. "Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment. People lose the will to live, become listless, become violent, become suicidal, and take to drink, drugs, and crime... laws, customs and institutions fall into disuse and disrespect, especially among the young, who see that even their elders can no longer make sense of them."

During his lectures, B introduces the Great Remembering as this generation’s most needed response to the Great Forgetting. He comments that, because we have already experienced a collapse of culture, our society is ready to abandon our totalitarian agriculture and industrial trends. B uses the examples of tribal cultures as the basis for this new society.

He claims that the "Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that we are biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet." He declares that what was forgotten in the Great Forgetting must be remembered in order for us to recognize "that what cannot work for any species will not work for us either."

B looks to tribal societies as models for future societies because they exhibited 3 million years of societal evolution before being overtaken by the totalitarian agriculturalist.

B specifically looks at tribal law as a basis for law in the future. In hunter/gatherer tribes, there are no formal laws, only inherent practices that determine the identity of the tribe. Tribes do not write or invent their laws, but honor codes of conduct that arise from years of social evolution. B rejects the modern idea that there is one set moral standard for people to live by. Instead, he argues that the laws and customs that arise from each tribe are sustainable and “right” in their own way because they work for the tribe. Tribal societies offer a tested-true way for people to live and work today as well as they ever did.

B acknowledges that tribes make war on one another, but for a different reason than Taker countries. Taker countries make war to gain resources or expand territory, but a tribe attacks another tribe to remind themselves that they have a tribal identity and that they are different from the other tribe. Again, this is a sustainable model, because little harm is done to either side in the war, tribal boundaries are maintained, and after the brief war, normal relations between tribes are restored.

B finally discusses the idea of salvation and the organized institutions in the Taker society that he calls "salvationist religions." He states that humans only began to think that they needed saving from humanity (i.e. themselves) because of the historical evolution of war, famine, etc., that resulted from totalitarian agriculture. The need for salvation by a Savior, he argues, like civilization and war, is not inherent to humanity but is a condition created by any human society, such as our own global one, that violates the Law of Life i.e. by practicing totalitarian agriculture. B asserts that humanity and the world do not need spiritual salvation, but, rather, that members of our one particular type of culture need to change their minds and actions if the human species is to survive in the world.

B's final comment is that he is indeed, as accusers have said, the Antichrist, or more appropriately: the Antisavior. B calls for followers to abandon the idea that humanity needs to be saved from itself and to tell accusers that "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."