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Sam Keen
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Telling Your Story with Sam Keen

We are pleased to bring you this trascription from best selling author Sam Keen.  You can also listen to a free audio of this transcription below.

It used to be that we said the thing that separated. Remember "2001" and the monkey comes in, you know, and you realize that you're witnessing the birth of humanity. And the birth of humanity comes the monkey grabs the, whatever it is, bone, you know, and you realize. . . He looks like this, and you realize, "Oh this is it," you know, "This is the birthplace of humanity." The oppositional thumb, and now we have tools. The second step is tool becomes weapon, and now we've really got a human being, somebody who can use a tool and can turn it into a weapon and kill somebody else, and the whole history. That's the way we, in the 20th century, have told the story of what it means to be human.

The reason that we are more human than those other people who don't wear deodorant and don't have lights is because we have better technology. Essentially, our thumbs work better. Then Jane Goodall came and found out that it's too bad because apes use tools too. They put a little straw and stuck it down in ants and they used that as a tool, hmm, sort of barbequed ants.

So it turns out that it isn't making tools that separates us from other animals. What really separates us from other animals is that we tell stories. We tell stories about who we are. Not only do we tell stories about who we are, we cannot not tell stories about who we are.

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