Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [156]
She said, “I would bear witness to the child’s suffering.”
“You wouldn’t intervene?”
“While using violence to stop the perpetrator might seem helpful in the short term, it would simply throw more violence into the universe—make the universe a more violent place—and in the long run would lead to more violence. I would not intervene.”
I responded, “That’s all theoretical. If after the show I happen to be walking by an alley, and happen to see that someone is beating you to death with a two-by-four, I strongly suspect all your fancy spirituality will rightly fall by the way-side as you beg me to not simply stand by and bear silent witness to your suffering and to your murder.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She talked over me, “And it’s the same with salmon. In the long run they’ll go extinct anyway, and in the end the sun will burn up the earth, so it doesn’t really matter . . .”
“Just because everyone in this room will someday die,” I responded, “doesn’t mean it’s okay to torture them to death now. That’s absurd. If this is where your spirituality leads you, I want no part of it.”
Still other Buddhists tell me I must never act from anger, and must act only from a place of compassion and lovingkindness™ toward oppressors and abusers. I get this shit all the time. Just a couple of days ago I received an email from a stranger attempting to point out errors in my thinking. “As a writer there is only so far you can go with hostility and still be effective. In your upcoming radio interview, why don’t you talk about you, how are you dealing with your health problems, what did you see or feel recently that inspired you (rather than what made you angry)?” This was a woman, which was sort of odd: usually intrusive men try to tell me what’s wrong with my work while intrusive women try to fix my life. But this woman also wrote, “How is your sexuality /sensuality being affected by your increasing mental aggression against forces over which you have little control [sic]. How does the anger affect personal relationships. Are you still hugging trees or do you now have a human in bed with you?”
My first thought was to respond that whether my anger at the dominant culture’s destruction of the planet affects my sex life is a question to which she will never know the answer.
One of the main problems with her questions (apart from the fact that my personal life is none of her goddamn business) is the premise that because I’m angry at the culture I’m angry at my friends. That’s just plain silly. My anger is not a shotgun. I’m angry at the things that make me angry, and I’m not angry at the things that do not. What a concept.
But, and this is very important, from her perspective it’s probably not silly at all. And that’s the problem. The central point of R. D. Laing’s great book The Politics of Experience was, so far as I’m concerned, that people act according to the way they experience the world. If you can understand their experience, you can understand their behavior. This is as true for the criminally insane as it is for capitalists. But once again I repeat myself.
He cites a description of a pathetic lunatic, given by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin: “Gentlemen, the cases that I have to place before you today are peculiar. First of all, you see a servant girl, aged twenty-four, upon whose features and frame traces of great emaciation can be plainly seen. In spite of this, the patient is in continual movement, going a few steps forward, then back again; she plaits her hair, only to unloose it the next minute. On attempting to stop her movement, we meet with unexpectedly strong resistance; if I place myself in front of her with my arms spread out in order to stop her, if she cannot push me on one side, she suddenly turns and slips through under my arms, so as to continue her way. If one takes firm hold of her, she distorts her usually rigid, expressionless features with deplorable weeping, that only ceases so soon as one lets her have her own way. We notice besides that she holds