Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [214]
There can be no compromise with these serial killers of life on earth because they are so sick they can’t stop themselves. They would like the rest of us to embrace death as they have, to say, “Well, all this is dead already, what will it matter if they are permitted to kill a little more?” Even among the conserva- tion groups there is an unfortunate value system in place that writes off or sacrifices some locations because they are no longer ‘”virgin.” Those who claim to love and protect the Mother Earth have to love all of her, even the places that are no longer pristine. Ma ah shra true ee, the giant serpent messenger, chose the edge of the uranium mining tailings at Jackpile Mine for his reappearance; he was making this point when he chose that unlikely location. The land has not been desecrated; human beings desecrate only themselves.
Leslie Marmon Silko410
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE TWENTY. In the Q & A after a recent talk, a woman said that part of the problem is that most of the people she knows who care about the health and well-being of oppressed humans and salmon and trees and rivers and the earth—life—do so because, by definition, they care about others. They empathize. They feel connections with these others. They identify with these others.411 Those who don’t care about the health and well-being of oppressed humans and salmon and trees and rivers and the earth—life—don’t care because, also by definition, they don’t care. They don’t empathize.412 They don’t feel connections with these others. That’s a problem, she said.
She’s right. That’s a big problem. Those of us who value life over things and control value life over things and control. Those who value things and control over life value things and control over life. Sure, many environmentalists are jerks, and I’m sure some CEOs are very nice people. Robert Jay Lifton made the point that many of the Nazi guards at concentration camps and even many of the upper level SS officers were good family men,413 and many people have pointed out that there are many torturers who “do it for a living,” and who when they go home are not horrid people. Lifton called this split in one’s psyche doubling , which he defines as the formation of a second self-structure morally at odds with one’s prior self-structure.414 It’s a defense mechanism that allows people to continue to perpetrate violent behavior, he says, whether that behavior is more direct, as in murdering Jews face to face, or less direct, as in designing or building nuclear bombs or running a corporation. I have tremendous respect for Lifton, and have been deeply influenced by his important work, but within this extremely violent culture I’m not sure doubling is quite so prominent as we would normally think.
I would instead see this as a manifestation of typical abusive behavior. Abusers, as is true for most all of us who live in this abusive society, are exquisitely sensitive to power structures, knowing on whom they can project their unmetabolized rage and to whom they must bend their knee. In other words, they are intimately acquainted with Premise Four of this book, and know the precise circumstances under which it will not only be acceptable but fully expected for them to perpetrate violence on those beneath them and suck up to those above: Unfortunately, too few SS guards fragged their officers. Further, Susan Griffin has written extensively about what constituted “normal” family structures within that particular German culture, and the relationship between familial abuse and the larger violence of the Nazis.415 We could make the same argument today: a normal family within this larger culture is pretty damn violent. This doubling then is not quite so dramatic as it may have seemed.
I’d see the problem instead as the numbing that is a normalized and necessarily chronic state within this