Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [14]
The second way she was correct is that it’s clearly possible to construct stories teaching us that rape is acceptable. The Bible certainly stands out as an example of this. Further, given that 25 percent of women in this culture are raped during their lifetimes, and another 19 percent have to fend off rape attempts,30 it seems pretty obvious that a lot of men have learned well the lessons that women are objects to be used, and that men have the right to do whatever violence they would like to women. These stories are told to us by people like, to choose just one egregious example among an entire culture’s worth, Brian De Palma, director of such films as Dressed to Kill, Carrie, and The Untouchables, who said, “I’m always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach—chopping up women, putting women in peril. I’m making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?”31 Even more to the point, he also said that “using women in situations where they are killed or sexually attacked” is simply a “genre convention . . . like using violins when people look at each other.”32
Similarly, we can create a series of stories that cause us to believe it makes sense to deforest the planet, vacuum the oceans, impoverish the majority of humans. If the stories are good enough—effective enough at convincing us the stories are more important than physical reality—it will not only make sense to destroy the world, but we will feel good about it, and we will feel good about killing anyone who tries to stop us.
One of the problems with all of this is that not all narratives are equal. Imagine, to take a silly example, that someone told you story after story extolling the virtues of eating dog shit. You’ve been told these stories since you were a child. You believe them. You eat dog-shit hot dogs, dog-shit ice cream, General Tso’s dog shit. Sooner or later, if you are exposed to some other foods, you might figure out that dog shit really doesn’t taste that good.33 Or if you cling too tightly to these stories you’ve been told about eating dog shit (or if your enculturation is so strong that dog shit actually does taste good to you), the diet might make you sick or kill you. To make the example a little less silly, substitute the word pesticides for dog shit. (Who was the genius who decided [for us] that it was a good idea to put poisons on our own food?). Or, for that matter, substitute Big Mac™, Whopper™, or Coca Cola™. Physical reality eventually trumps narrative. It has to. It just can take a long time. In the case of civilization, it has so far taken some six thousand years (considerably less, of course, for its victims).
It took me a couple of years to articulate a response to my friend. One afternoon I called her up. We went to dinner.
She said, “Well?”
“Water,” I said.
“Water?”
“Water.”
“That’s it?” she asked.
“It’s everything,” I responded.
She didn’t understand.
“Your basic point was that nothing is inherently good or bad . . .”
“Right.” She nodded.
“And that the stories we tell ourselves determine not only whether we perceive something as good or bad, but whether it in fact is . . .”
“Yes,” she said. “Because humans are the sole definers of value . . .”
We’d been through this before, and I’d been through this with so many other people, too. Once I had an office at a university next to that of a philosophy professor. I wandered in sometimes to chat, but was always quickly repulsed by his relentless strangeness and illogic. “Because humans are the sole definers of value, nothing in the world has any value unless we decide it does,” he said time and again, as though by repeating his starting assumption enough times he would force me to accept it, just as the possibility of failing his class forced his students to do the same. I fled the room each time in disarray, but I’ve always wished I would have returned