Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [180]
Sure, most people would rather that they themselves be treated with at least the pretense of justice, fairness, and so on, but so long as those in power aren’t aiming their Peacekeepers™ at me, why should I care if brown people living on a sea of oil a half a world away get blown to bits? Likewise, so long as the price of my prescription anti-depressants stays reasonably low and the number of TV channels on my satellite dish stays high, why should I care that some stupid fish can’t survive in a dammed river? It’s survival of the fittest, damn it all, and I’m one of the fit, so I get to survive.
Another way to talk about people not caring what happens to the world is to talk about rape and child abuse. Most rapes are committed not by burly strangers breaking into women’s homes, nor by pasty-faced perverts lurking outside schools and in internet chat rooms, but instead by fathers, brothers, uncles, husbands, lovers, friends, counselors, pastors: those who purport to love the women (or men) they hurt. Similarly, most children are not abused by thugs who kidnap them and force them to act in porn films, but by their caretakers, those, once again, who purport to love them, who are supposed to help them learn how to be human beings. And of course these caretakers are taking care to teach these children how to be civilized human beings: teaching them that the physically powerful exploit and do violence against the less physically powerful; teaching them that exploiters routinely label themselves—and probably believe themselves—caretakers as they destroy those under their care; teaching them that under this awful system that’s the job of caretakers; teaching them that life has no value (for of course we are all born with the knowledge that life has value, a knowledge that must be beaten, raped, and schooled out of us).
Those doing the raping, beating, schooling, are not only some group of strange “others”: “trailer trash,” “foreigners,” “the poor.” They include respected members of this society. Within this culture, they’re normal people. Their behavior has been normalized.
If normal people within this culture are raping and beating even those they purport to love, what chance is there that they will not destroy the salmon, the forests, the oceans, the earth?
A few years ago I had an agent at a prestigious literary agency. The agency’s address, if this gives an indication of how fancy schmancy the organization is, was One Madison Avenue (an entire floor, even!). I sent my agent the first seventy pages of the manuscript for A Language Older Than Words. She read them, then told me that if I cut the family stuff and the social criticism, she thought I’d have a book. She also told me that I was too angry. If I would only tone down the book and not frighten fence-sitters, she said, I’d have myself a bestseller.
I was shocked. I was of course familiar with the old artistic/literary line, “The devil comes promising a larger audience,” but it never occurred to me I’d have the chance to sell out this early in my career.
I responded that there was an old blues DJ I liked to listen to who often said after spinning a song, “If you’re not moving after that one, you’re dead from the butt