Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [159]
“The Great Mother will heal Her body, if she has to do it with cockroaches and finches (look at Galapagos). It is only human survival we are talking about here. We are doomed if we don’t change, yes, but the earth will surely endure. So we must first put this argument in the proper Selfish context—i.e., saving our own asses. It is presumptuous and sacrilegious [sic] to speak of saving the earth.
“You must not suggest to these damaged and wounded humans, searching so desperately for meaning and peace, that they start breaking things. The ones that [sic] come to your talks are harmed and frightened. You have some power—there is a dark side and a light side—we all know this in our hearts. Please stay on the side of the light.”
I’m sure by now you can parse out the unfounded and unstated premises in this note. The first premise is that morality is abstracted from circumstance, meaning in this case that (direct) violence is always—under each and every circumstance— wrong, even when it might be necessary to stop even more violence, implying as well that one has no moral responsibility to halt monstrous acts that happen even on one’s own doorstep if stopping those acts would require muddying one’s spiritual hands. This is the way of the Good German.
It is the way of the Good American. It’s certainly the way of the good dogmatic pacifist.
Next, any attempts to even discuss these possibilities must be dismissed as “word games,” “cheap,” an example of the culture’s “harmful philosophy coming in by the back door,” and a need to control. This is all exactly what I meant early on in this book by the “Gandhi shield” pacifists often use to not only keep evil thoughts at bay but to make sure no one else thinks them either.
I don’t want to go to the same well too many times, but a discussion by R. D. Laing applies. He wrote: “If Jack succeeds in forgetting something [such as the fact that we have the responsibility—the obligation—to stop the horrors of civilization, and the ability to do so, if we choose to], this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.
“Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on ‘bringing it up.’ He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: ‘It’s all in your imagination. ’ Further still, he can invalidate the content: ‘It never happened that way.’ Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so in the bargain.291
“This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions of ‘How can you think such a thing?’ ‘You must be paranoid.’ And so on.”292
The next unstated premise—and I’m going into such great detail because this woman’s letter and the perspective it represents is not unusual, but instead is insanely common—is that a desire to stop atrocities such as the extirpation of species is a manifestation of a “need to control.”
I used to have this fear, too, that to affect another’s behavior—even when that other is hurting me directly—is to be “controlling.