Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [189]
There are many who will never be able to reach these memories, to accept them in a way that leads them away from their addiction to slavery, their addiction to civilization. That is a tragedy: personal, communal, biological, geological.
But there are others—many of them—who can and do remember the knowledge of bodies, and who are willing to do what is necessary to protect their bodies, their landbases, to stand in solidarity with salmon, grizzlies, redwoods, voles, owls, to work with these others—as humans have done forever outside the iron shackles of civilization—for the benefit of the larger community. And that is a beautiful and powerful and moral thing.
It’s also really fun.
You should try it sometime.
If those in power really aren’t reachable, and if the majority of people probably will never act to defend their—and our—landbases and bodies, and if the culture is in fact enacting a death urge that will lead to planetary annihilation unless it is stopped, and if you care about your body, your landbase, what are you going to do? What are the right actions to take?
ROMANTIC NIHILISM
One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one’s life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.
Hannah Senesh 341
DURING THE CONVERSATION IN WHICH MY FORMER AGENT TOLD ME that if I ever wanted to reach an audience, I’d have to tone down my work, she also told me that I was a nihilist.
I felt vaguely insulted. I didn’t know what a nihilist was, but I knew from her tone that it must be a bad thing. I pictured an angry teenager leaning against a building, wearing black slacks, turtleneck, and beret, scowling and chain-smoking.
But that’s not me, so I looked up nihilist in the dictionary.
The first definition—that life is meaningless and that there are no grounds for any moral truths—clearly doesn’t fit me. Nor is it true that I do not believe in truth, beauty, or love.342 The second definition—that the current social order is so destructive and irredeemable that it needs to be taken down to its core, and to have its core removed—fits me like a glove, I suppose the kind you’d put on to not leave fingerprints.
I’ve had a lot of conversations with Casey about nihilism, and about how the whole black turtleneck thing really doesn’t work for me. And how I rarely scowl. Emma Goldman is famously (and incorrectly) quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”343 Well, I don’t like to dance, but if I can’t laugh, then you can start the revolution without me.
One day Casey said, “I’ve got you figured out.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You,” he said, “are a romantic nihilist.” And then he laughed.
So did I. I laughed and laughed. Yes, I thought, a revolution of romantic nihilists. I would be down for that. Count me in.
I did a talk in Portland the other day. I heard that afterwards something of a firestorm erupted on a local discussion website, as some pacifists attacked me for not adhering to the One True Way of Social Change™, and then non-pacifists responded, pacifists re-responded, and so on. A friend told me not to bother going to read the whole thing (“There’s nothing useful. Lots of heads in the sand.”) but did send me one post that seems to me to capture the essence of what I’m trying to get at (in four short paragraphs instead of hundreds of pages). Here it is:
“Himalayan blackberries are not native to Oregon. Their hideous thorny