Reflection On Ishmael

After reading the book Ishmael, my mind has been expanding on the main topic of the book which is evolution, and why we can’t change society because whatever we try to advance change just adds onto the destruction we are causing to our world. While I was reading this book, I began to learn more about how we are destroying our world even more. When humans lived in a simple manner, believing that they lived in the “hands of the gods,” evolution was destined to happen because humans had to adapt to their environment. This evolution sparked the problems that would come later in history, like deforestation, social inequality and pollution.
What is leading to us destroying the world is our human nature. We humans have greed running through our blood. “We’ve poured our
We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out-and we go on gobbling them up.” (Quinn 80) This quote is a representation of what greed is doing to the world, it is making us consume our resources very quickly to fulfil our selfish needs. We always want more because we are never satisfied with what we have. Ishmael says, “It’s because there’s something fundamentally wrong with humans. Something that definitely works against paradise. Something that makes people stupid and destructive and greedy and shortsighted.” (Quinn. 83) This quote tells us, the readers, that there is something that works against our success, greed, and we can’t control it no matter how much we try. He also says, “they were bound to screw it up.”