Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [164]
The question becomes, how much violence did it take to force these people off their land? It is violence or the threat of violence that keeps them working for these low wages.
Cheap consumer goods are not the only place the threat of violence controls our lives. I asked the man if he pays rent.
“Yes.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because I don’t own my home.”
“What would happen if you didn’t pay rent?”
“I would be evicted.”
“By whom?”
“The sheriff.”
“And what if you refused to leave? What if you invited the sheriff in for dinner? And then after dinner you said, ‘I’ve enjoyed your company, but I haven’t enjoyed it all that much, and this is my home, so I would like you to leave now.’ What would happen then?”
“If I refused to leave, the sheriff would evict me.”
“How?”
“By force, if necessary.”
I nodded. So did he.
Then I said, “And what if you were really hungry, and so you went to the grocery store. They’ve got a lot of food there, you know. And if you just started eating food there, and you didn’t pay anything, what would happen?”
“They’d call the sheriff.”
“It would probably be the same guy. He’s a real asshole, isn’t he? He’d come with a gun and take you away. Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don’t, people with guns come and force us to pay. That’s violent.”
The reason (part two of Abby’s warning) that batterers may attempt to convince victims that all men threaten partners of course is that if you can get victims to disbelieve in the possibility of alternatives—if you can make your violence seem natural and inevitable—there will be no real reason for them to resist. You will, like the owners of sweatshops, have them exactly where you want them: under your control, with no need to even bother beating them anymore. The larger social equivalent is our culture’s frantic insistence that all cultures are based on violence, that all cultures destroy their landbase, that men of all cultures rape women, that children of all cultures are beaten, that the poor of all cultures are forced to pay rent to the rich (or even that all cultures have rich and poor!). Perhaps the best example of this culture trying to naturalize its violence is the belief that natural selection is based on competition, that all survival is a violent struggle where only the meanest, most exploitative survive. The fact that this belief is nearly ubiquitous in this culture despite it being demonstrably untrue, logically untenable (recall the one-sentence disproof from early in this book: those creatures who have survived in the long run have survived in the long run, and if you hyperexploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take), and a complete distortion of Darwin’s elegant ideas, to which it is wrongly attributed, reveals the degree to which we have internalized the perspective of the abusers, and done so against the combined weight of history and common sense.
The third part of Abby’s warning was that abusers attempt to convince their victims that the victims are responsible for the abusers’ threats: the abuser wouldn’t threaten you if you didn’t make him do it. This has huge implications for activists. I cannot tell you how many activists have insisted to me that we must never use sabotage, violent rhetoric, and certainly never violence, because to do so will call up a strong backlash by those in power.
This insistence reveals an absolute lack of understanding of how repression works. Abusers will use any excuse to ratchet up repression, and if no excuses are forthcoming, excuses will be fabricated. Recall my discussion