Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [133]
The crucial point still is and remains: to find the exit out of the trap. WHERE IS THE EXIT INTO THE ENDLESS OPEN SPACE?
The exit remains hidden. It is the greatest riddle of all. The most ridiculous as well as tragic thing is this:
THE EXIT IS CLEARLY VISIBLE TO ALL TRAPPED IN THE HOLE. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO SEE IT. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHERE THE EXIT IS. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO MAKE A MOVE TOWARD IT. MORE: WHOEVER MOVES TOWARD THE EXIT, OR WHOEVER POINTS TOWARD IT IS DECLARED CRAZY OR A CRIMINAL OR A SINNER TO BURN IN HELL.
It turns out that the trouble is not with the trap or even with finding the exit. The trouble is WITHIN THE TRAPPED ONES.
All this is, seen from outside the trap, incomprehensible to a simple mind. It is even somehow insane. Why don’t they see and move toward the clearly visible exit? As soon as they get close to the exit they start screaming and run away from it. As soon as anyone among them tries to get out, they kill him. Only a very few slip out of the trap in the dark night when everybody is asleep.
Wilhelm Reich253
OFTEN WHEN I MENTION AT TALKS THAT I’M WRITING A BOOK ABOUT bringing down civilization, people interrupt me with cheers. They shout, “Hurry up and finish,” or “Sign me up” (the exception to this, for reasons that escape me, is New England, where people are more likely to stroke their chins, furrow their brows, and murmur, “What a strange and interesting idea”). Indeed, at one talk in Kansas someone introduced me by saying, “We brought Derrick here because he’s got the balls to say we need to take down civilization.” Presumably were I a woman he would have said ovaries. Hundreds of people show up, and we talk into the wee hours about the whys and hows of bringing it down.
Yet not everyone is happy. Recently, for example, an attorney volunteered to be on my legal team when I get arrested under the Patriot Act.
“That’s nice,” my mom said when I told her, “But the Feds have bigger things to worry about.”
“Like what?” I responded, somewhat hurt.
“Like making up excuses to lock up poor brown people.”
“Good point.”
I got compared to Hitler once simply because I suggested that someday the population will be smaller than it is now. I told the woman—who also said, “You seemed like such a nice man until you opened your mouth”—that I failed to see how bringing together a very simple ecological understanding with an intense opposition to genocide and the centralization of power could put me in the same camp as one of civilization’s sterling examples.
Then a few days ago I hit the trifecta. Someone—a dogmatic pacifist, not that you asked—compared me in one breath to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. She was a bit fuzzy on the first two—especially considering each killed tens of millions of people to industrialize their economies—but her reasoning on Pol Pot was that he wanted to deindustrialize, and so do I, ipso facto, I must be for genocide, mass murder, and the killing of anyone who wears eyeglasses. I didn’t say much in response, in great measure because she had the bit between her teeth, and nothing I could have said would have made the slightest difference. Had she stopped to take a breath, however, here is what I would have said to her, “All morality is particular. Everything is particular. Taking down civilization is not a monolithic act, as if I could snap my fingers and suddenly the lazy-boy recliners and ergonomic computer chairs would disappear, leaving so many millions of people hanging surprised in the air for one long instant before they fall to the soil that still lives beneath their recycled carpet, floorboards, and the concrete of their suddenly disappeared foundations.”
Bringing down civilization first and foremost consists of liberating ourselves by driving the colonizers out of our own hearts and minds: seeing civilization for what it is, seeing those in power for who and what they are, and seeing power for what it is. Bringing down civilization then consists