The schools are there to regulate the flow of young competitors into the job market. - Daniel Quinn

The tribal life is precious because it tested out. For three million years it worked for people. It worked for people the way nests work for birds, the way webs work for spiders, the way burrows work for moles, the way hibernation works for bears. It doesn’t make it lovable, that makes it viable.
People will also say to me, “Well, if it was so wonderful, why didn’t it last?” The answer is that it did last—it has lasted right up to the present moment. It continues to work, but the fact that something works doesn’t make it invulnerable. Burrows and nests and webs can all be destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that they work. Tribalism can be destroyed and indeed has largely been destroyed, but that doesn’t change the fact that it worked for three million years and still works today as well as it ever did.
And the fact that tribalism works doesn’t mean that something else can’t work. The trouble is that our particular something else isn’t working—doesn’t work and can’t work. It bears with it its own seeds of destruction. It’s fundamentally unstable. And unfortunately it had to reach global proportions before the nature of its instability could be recognized.

If the will is there, the method will be found.

It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.