Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [130]
Given all this, how real is the “pleasantness” of an abuser? Only very stupid or very desperate abusers—and this is as true on the larger social scale as it is on the familial—are always oppressive. Unrelenting oppression is not nearly so effective at control as is intermittent oppression mixed with rewards. If the oppressor were only oppressive, victims would realize they have nothing left to lose. Those who believe they have something left to lose are ever-so-much-more manipulable. Those who realize they have nothing left to lose have nothing left to fear, and they can be extremely dangerous to their victimizers.
I go back and forth on this question—is an abuser’s volatility real?—on the cultural level, too, and for the same reasons. Certainly those in power have always hated the indigenous and have always reacted with rage toward those who threaten their perceived entitlement (as I put it in The Culture of Make Believe, “[I]f the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force and hatred wait in the wings, ready to explode”239).
In addition to this hatred and rage that undergirds so many of the actions of those in power and the culture in general, I strongly suspect that much of the moral outrage and righteous indignation expressed by those in power before they invade yet another (probably defenseless) country containing resources they want or need, or before they punish those who try to stop their depredations, is so much playacting. I know, you’re shocked—shocked!—at the implication that those in power may be sometimes less than honest about their true motivations and feelings. But it’s pretty clearly true.
The question remains: are they then volatile, or do they just pretend to be volatile. Or both?
Not that any of this necessarily makes a difference in the real world. Whether those in power blow you up because they hate you for wanting to defend your landbase or because they want your resources doesn’t much matter. You’re just as dead.
But there still remains the second part of this question: is this culture’s niceness real?
Here’s why I’m belaboring this point: people who haven’t thought about these issues at all—especially those who are aware of neither history nor current events, which means a hell of a lot of people—sometimes ask, if industrial civilization (or occasionally more specifically the U.S.) is so awful, why does everyone want to be “like us”? Well, the truth is, they generally don’t, at least not until their landbase, and thus culture, has been destroyed. As J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur commented in his Letters from an American Farmer, “There must be in the Indians’ social bond something singularly captivating, and far superior to be boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans! There must be something very bewitching in their manners, something very indelible and marked by the very hands of Nature. For, take a young Indian lad, give him the best education you possibly can, load him with your bounty, with presents, nay with riches, yet he would secretly long for his native woods, which you would imagine he must have long since forgot; and on the first opportunity he can possibly find, you will see him voluntarily leave behind all you have given him and return with inexpressible joy to lie on the mats of his fathers.”240 Here’s how Benjamin Franklin put it: “No European who has tasted Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”241 He also wrote, “When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural [to them] merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while