A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [122]
While psychology explains the failure of many revolutions, it doesn't suffice for all. Even taking into consideration the danger to one's soul of embarking on the path of violent revolution, and considering also that those who preach or foment peaceful or violent overthrow of the established order may not be the best qualified, temperamentally or otherwise, to sustain a new nonhierarchical social order—Jesus was great at railing against the powerful, but had he not been killed, could he have enacted and maintained his egalitarian vision?—I realized there had to be more. People are varied enough in their skills and morals that, given the thousands of historical revolutions, large and small, someone (or more likely some group) somewhere along the line would have been able to pull off a solidly egalitarian revolution. Having been set on this nonhierarchical path, at least some groups would have been able to maintain it. Obviously, many indigenous cultures have been able to construct and maintain relatively egalitarian societies, as have some religious groups, but especially within the mainstream of Western Civilization these groups are despairingly rare.
My second thought was that any group that through revolution (armed or unarmed) succeeded in establishing a peaceful, nonhierarchical community would not be allowed to survive, for reasons already elucidated. This is especially true if that community contains anything, such as resources, useful to those in power. Voluminous evidence supports this thesis. Still, this answer didn't seem to suffice, because nearly always, even in those communities and especially states or nations, where the egalitarian power structures have been stressed but not demolished by outside forces, the governmental and economic forms have sooner or later reverted once again to the same old patterns of domination. Why is this?
Perhaps it has to do with the incapacity to attend to our own feelings omnipresent in a severely traumatized people. Perhaps our marvelous capacity to adapt to even the most atrocious situations is the major reason revolutions fail. We're so good at getting along that we do so at the expense of actions that would in a meaningful sense bring a change in those original circumstances that cause our suffering. We shuffle and bow before the established order, knowing that it's better to be alive and humbled— even if we must sell our hours for another's profit—than it is to be dead. Then when some new despot comes along mouthing new slogans of egalitarianism, instead of opposing both the old and new tyrannies, we adapt yet again, perhaps even believing for a time the new slogans. And when the new slogans prove false? Amnesia, that most adaptable of all forms of adaptation.
There is an image that has stuck in my mind since I first encountered it in a book many years ago. Thousands of Jews, fresh from the Warsaw Ghetto, all stand or sit in a large arena, like a courtyard or stadium. They are led off in groups of five or so. The movement of each group down a corridor leads quickly to a new round of rifle fire from the direction of their disappearance. Why don't the remaining people flee? To try to understand, I've turned the question back on myself: staring straight into the maw of global ecological collapse, why do we follow along, equally trusting, equally complacent, down a corridor we know has only one exit, an exit we anticipate all too well? In a less dramatic though no less inevitable manner, why do we walk down paths of wage labor, toiling away our lives for some chimerical goal of fiscal sufficiency? I remember speaking with my students about the doomed Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, and asking why they thought these people acted, or failed to act, as they did. One of my students gave an insightful answer: "Undoubtedly some were