Mother Culture - in Ishmael

In Ishmael

In his 1992 philosophical novel, Ishmael, Daniel Quinn uses Mother Culture as a personification of the not-consciously-recognized yet foundational aspects of any culture, always existing as largely unnoticed motivators that determine how we behave both as individuals and as a society. According to Quinn, Mother Culture feeds us a particular, culturally-biased mythology that greatly influences how we perceive the world. Mother Culture tells us that everything is as it should be, working to pacify dissent against the culture and its myths. Quinn warns that in a self-destructive culture like our own globalized civilization, this amounts to captivity, in which we are blind to any alternative lifestyles other than the one Mother Culture tells us to live out. Unfortunately, we, as a culture, are destroying the Earth, and while many would gladly free it, we cannot seem to find the "bars" of the cage because Mother Culture has given us certain premises which we take for granted, without recognizing them as false from the start.