Notes from Sublime - Perspectives gained

The book - "Story of B", stuck some chords in me. 

I wanted to share my notes / quotes from the book. 

Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong. Confined to the few hundred square miles in which it was born our own culture would have been quaint and bizarre. Blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong, it is a horrifying obscenity.

Gun powder is a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal and sulfur. If one of the ingredients is missing , then the mixture is not explosive. Our culture consists of three essential ingredients and if any one of them had been missing, no explosion would have taken place in this planet.

Totalitarian Agriculture

Belief that ours is the right way

Great forgetting.

Man was not born a totalitarian agriculturalist and city builder. What was forgotten was the fact that our way is not ordained from the beginning of time. The great forgetting was the key ingredient in our cultural explosion.

Combine one never before seen cultural element with a second never before seen element and a third one just as odd, and you come up with a cultural monster that is literally devouring the world – and will end by devouring itself if it isn’t stopped.

Why did they become Agriculturalists? 

What did totalitarian agriculture give them that foraging didn’t give their neighbors and ancestors? 

Totalitarian agriculture gave them power. The revolution wasn’t about food, it was about power. 

That’s still what it is about.