• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2479 0

behavior. The only relief from this pain of being who they’ve been made into—and the only relief for those who then have the misfortune to come in contact with these insane monkeys, or to be more precise, insane apes—will be through their own eventual deaths. In many ways this is merely a psychological restating of Planck’s observation on scientific revolution: “[A] new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”338 Only this time we’re not talking about something so superficial as scientific beliefs, but the emotional, perceptual, psychological, spiritual foundations of people’s (and society’s) personalities and worldview. It’s as a friend wrote me recently: “Un-metabolized childhood patterns almost always trump adult-onset intellectualizations. Sure, one of the reasons we don’t resist more effectively than we do—or less ineffectively—is because the cops will kill us if we do. But I think even more important are the internalized forms of oppression, the transparent mental shackles that continue to curtail our movement without us even being aware of them.”

The same person wrote: “It feels right to say one of the fundamental reasons people don’t resist even when it’s obvious that those in charge are destroying us is that so many of us just never psychologically grew up.”339

So we understand each other: We need a healthy landbase. That is the most important thing in the world.340 While a healthy landbase is not the only thing that matters, it is undeniably true that without a healthy landbase, nothing else matters.

It should be obvious that what is true on the personal level is even more true on the social level. One reason I have recovered from my childhood to the degree that I have is that I have worked very hard at it, and have had the loving support of my friends, my mother, and my sisters. If I’ve had to work this hard to make a life after only a formative decade of violence when I was young (as well as coercive schooling, ubiquitous advertising, and the other ways our psyches are routinely—almost mechanically—hammered into, or rather, out of, shape); and when there are so many people who have for whatever reasons not had the opportunity or ability to work toward a recovery, and so who are passing on their pain to those others who have the misfortune of coming into contact with them (and we should acknowledge that those suffering this misfortune include at this point more or less every human and nonhuman on the planet); and when this culture rewards anti-social behavior (meaning behavior that destroys human and non-human communities); how much more difficult it is and must be for an entire culture to change.

More clarity: When I say that most people don’t care, I mean this in the most popular sense of the word care, as in, “If people just cared enough about the salmon, they would act to protect them from those who are killing them.” Obviously they don’t care, or they would do what it takes to save them: We’re not that stupid, and these tasks are not cognitively challenging, once you drop the impossible framing conditions of civilization’s perpetual growth and perceived divorce from the natural world (and its perceived divorce from consequence).

There is a deeper sense, however, in which having been inculcated into this death cult(ure), we do care about salmon and rivers and the earth (and our own bodies): we hate them all and want to destroy them. Otherwise why else would we do it, or at least allow it to happen?

Fortunately, there is an even deeper sense in which we do care. Our bodies know what is right, if only we listen to them. Beneath the enculturation, beneath the addiction, beneath the psychopathology, our bodies remember that we are meant for something better than this, that we are not apart from our human and nonhuman communities, but a part of them, that what we allow to be done to our landbase (or our body) we allow to be done to ourselves. Our