There was a very famous book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn which I read a couple of years back. Something I read about something reminded me of that book and the idea behind it.

If you have seen that Anthony Hopkin's movie Instinct then you probably know what am I talking about.

Here are a few things to read:

"As long as the people of your culture are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are of course going to go on acting the way they've been acting for the past ten thousand years. They're going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property and they're going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary. You can't change these things with laws. You must change people's minds. And you can't just root out a harmful complex of ides and leave a void behind: you have to give people something that is as meaningful as what they've lost-something that makes better sense then the old horror of Man supreme, wiping out everything on this planet that doesn't server his needs directly or indirectly." [pg. 249]


"You've been in love with someone for a decade-someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open up the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has place an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by..." [pg. 6]


"By contrast, this life was agonizingly boring and never pleasant. Thus in asking why, I was trying to puzzle out why life should be divided in this way, half of it interesting and pleasant and half of it boring and unpleasant. I had no concept of myself as a captive; it didn't occur to me that anyone was preventing me from having an interesting and pleasant life. When no answer to my question was forthcoming, I began to consider the differences between the two life-styles. The most fundamental difference was that in Africa I was a member of a family-of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas-but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
I considered the matter of feeding. Human children dream of a land where the mountains are ice cream and the trees are gingerbread and the stones are bonbons. For a gorilla, Africa is such a land. Wherever one turns, there is something wonderful to eat. One never thinks, "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absentmindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all." [pg. 12]