Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [184]
“Now pretend that someone from the outside begins to tell you that what you are doing is wrong. This outsider knows nothing of the life you live and that your father and his father lived. To your knowledge this outsider has never walked the fields and actually watched the slaves work, has never gone over the figures to see that your farm wouldn’t be viable without these slaves, and doesn’t know the slaves well enough to know that they, too, could not survive without the things you provide for them. Pretend that your slaves listen to this outsider, and because of this, your relationship with them begins to deteriorate, even to the point that you begin to lose money.
“If it were me—had I been raised under these circumstances and with those beliefs—I think it possible that once I got over my initial shock at the temerity of this outsider meddling in something that is none of his or her business, I would have become angry, and perhaps felt eventually outrage towards this interloper who was threatening to ruin my way of life. Raised in those circumstances, it would have taken more courage than most of us have, I think, to admit that one’s way of life is based on exploitation, and to gracefully begin to live a different way.
“It’s easy enough at this remove to simply say that slaveholders were immoral, and that members of the KKK and other hate groups were a bunch of stupid bigots with whom we have nothing in common.
“But are you sure?
“Try this. What if instead of owning people, we’re talking about owning land. Someone tells you that no matter how much you paid to purchase title to some piece of land, the land itself does not belong to you. No longer may you do whatever you wish with it. You may not cut the trees on it. You may not build on it. You may not run a bulldozer over it to put in a driveway. All of those activities are immoral, because they’re based on your exploitation of a living thing: in this case the land. Did you ask the land if it wants you to build on it? Do you care what the land thinks? But the land can’t think, you say. Ah, but that’s just what you think. It is how you were taught to think. Let’s say further that your livelihood and your way of life are based on working this land—the outsiders call it exploiting—and that if the outsiders have their way you’ll be out of business. Again and again they tell you that you are a bad person, a stupid bigot, because you refuse to see that your way of life is based on the exploitation of something you don’t perceive as having any rights—or sentience—to begin with.
“Angry yet?
“Then how about this? Outsiders take away your computer because the process of manufacturing the hard drive killed women in Thailand. They take your clothes because they were made in sweatshops, your meat because it was factory farmed, your cheap vegetables because the agricorporations that provided them drove family farmers out of business (or maybe because lettuce doesn’t like to be factory farmed: ‘lettuce prefers diversity,’ say the outsiders), and your coffee because its production destroys rainforests, decimates migratory songbird populations, and drives African, Asian, and South and Central American subsistence farmers off their land. They take your car because of global warming, and your wedding ring because mining exploits workers and destroys landscapes and communities. They take your TV, microwave, and refrigerator because, hell, they take the whole damn electrical grid because the generation of electricity is, they say, so environmentally expensive (dams kill salmon, coal plants strip the tops off mountains and generate acid rain, wind generators kill birds, and let’s not even talk about nukes). Imagine if outsiders wanted to take away all these things—without your consent—because they had determined, without your input, that all of these things