The people of your culture are captives of a story….All of you know it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. You hear it incessantly. Every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly….Once you know this story, you’ll hear it everywhere, and you’ll be astonished that the people around you don’t hear it as well but merely take it in….Mother Culture, whose voice has been in your ear since the day of your birth, has given you an explanation of how things came to be this way….Two different stories have been enacted here during the lifetime of man. One has been enacted from the very beginning of human life millions of years ago and is still being enacted here today, as successfully as ever by peoples that you (in your superior wisdom) deem to be primitive. The other story began to be enacted here some ten thousand years ago by the founders of your culture and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.

— Daniel Quinn, foreword to Ishmael, 2017