Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [132]
The elimination of the possibility of escape has, of course, been from the beginning one of the central motivators for nearly all actions perpetrated by civilization.
So, given the choice between Christianity or death, capitalism or death, slavery or death, civilization or death, is it any wonder that at least some do not choose to die? I recently watched some old movie about Alcatraz, and Art Carney, playing the Birdman of Alcatraz, says something that goes to the heart of this: “The only thing worse than life in prison is no life at all.”252 We may as well face up—and fess up—to the prevailing logic: if we’re stuck with a system that is based on rigid hierarchies, where those at the top systematically exploit those below—and this is as true on the personal and familial levels (wanna talk about rates of rape and child abuse?) as it is on the grand social level—a system that is killing the planet, that is toxifying our bodies, that is making us stupid and insane, that is eliminating all alternatives, we may as well have a nice car. If I can’t live in a world with wild salmon and egalitarian social relations, and in a body free from civilization-induced diseases (choose your poison: mine is Crohn’s disease), I may as well belly up to the bank and surround myself with as many luxuries as possible. If I’m going to be encased in an 880-by-90-foot steel-walled luxury prison called the Titanic, and that prison will soon become my icy tomb, it’s better, I suppose, in the meantime to be riding first class than to be scrubbing the toilets of “my betters.”
My point, however, is that these goodies that make up the bulk of the system’s “pleasantness” are entirely conditional on your subservience to those above you on the hierarchy. What happens to you if you act on a disbelief in the property rights of the rich? What happens if you act on a belief that police (and more broadly the state, and more broadly still those at the top of the hierarchy) do not have a monopoly on violence, and that violence perpetrated by those in power may (and sometimes will) be met by violence perpetrated by those considered to have no power at all? What happens if you act on a disbelief that those in power have the right to toxify the planet? What happens when you become convinced that violence from the powerless cannot be disallowed given the magnitude and relentlessness of the violence of the powerful?
You are, in a word, dead.
BRINGING DOWN CIVILIZATION, PART I
It IS possible to get out of a trap. However, in order to break out of a prison, one first must confess to being in a prison. The trap is man’s emotional structure, his character structure. There is little use in devising systems of thought about the nature of the trap if the only thing to do in order to get out of the trap is to know the trap and to find the exit. Everything else is utterly useless: Singing hymns about the suffering in the trap, as the enslaved Negro does; or making poems about the beauty of freedom outside of the trap, dreamed of within the trap; or promising a life outside the trap after death, as Catholicism promises its congregations; or confessing a semper ignorabimus as do the resigned philosophers; or building a philosophic system around the despair of life within the trap, as did Schopenhauer; or dreaming up a superman who would be so much different from the man in the trap, as Nietzsche did, until, trapped in a lunatic asylum, he wrote, finally, the full truth about himself—too late. . . .
The first thing to do is to find the exit out of the trap.
The nature of the trap has no interest whatsoever beyond this one crucial point: WHERE IS THE EXIT OUT OF THE TRAP?
One can decorate a trap to make life more comfortable in it. This is done by the Michelangelos and the Shakespeares and the Goethes. One can invent makeshift contraptions to secure longer life in the trap. This is done by the great scientists and physicians,