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By Root 2463 0

culture, an inculcation into the rigid world of Premise Four, where people’s empathies are numbed by the routine violence done to them, then trumped by ideology and what Lifton calls “claims to virtue”—Lifton makes clear that before people can commit any mass atrocity they must have a “claim to virtue,” that is, they must consider what they’re doing not in fact an atrocity but something good416—such that they can feel good about themselves (or rather seem to feel good about themselves) as they oppress others to maintain their lifestyle, then go home and dandle their babies on their knees. This is how many Nazis could maintain semblances of lives as they did not kill Jews but rather purified the Aryan race. This is how Americans could maintain façades of happiness as they didn’t kill Indians but fulfilled their Manifest Destiny. This is how the civilized can pretend to be emotionally healthy as they do not commit genocide and destroy landbases, but instead take what they need to develop their “advanced state of human society.” This is how we can all pretend we are sane as no one kills the planet, but as people maximize profits and develop natural resources.

As well as asking myself each day whether I want to write or blow up a dam, each day I ask myself whether all my talk of saving salmon or old growth or migratory songbirds is just another claim to virtue. I mean, don’t those at the center of empire always say they’re only perpetrating (defensive) violence against those who want to destroy their 417 lifestyle? And aren’t I saying that I’m considering (defensive) violence to maintain a lifestyle that I want? One wants consumer goods, the other wants wild salmon. What’s the difference? Maybe my desire to liberate rivers is just a mask to cover an urge to destroy dams, or more broadly just an urge to destroy. I don’t feel I have a generic urge to destroy but presumably neither do CEOs. That’s the wonderful thing about denial: you generally don’t know you’re in it. But that’s one reason I’m trying to lay out my premises so explicitly. I don’t want to lie to myself, and I don’t want to lie to you.

Each day when I ask whether my work is just an elaborate claim to virtue, I keep coming back to the same answer: clean water. We need clean water to survive. We need a living landbase to survive. We do not need cheap consumables. We do not need a “purified Aryan race.” We do not need to fulfill a Manifest Destiny to overflow the continent or world. We do not need an “advanced state of human society” (even if that were an accurate definition of civilization). We do not need to maximize profits or “develop natural resources.” We do not need oil, computers, cell phone towers, dams, automobiles, pavement, industrial farming, industrial education, industrial medicine, industrial production, industry. We do not need civilization. We—human beings, human animals living in healthy, functioning communities—existed perfectly fine without civilization for the overwhelming majority of our existence. However, we do need a living landbase. This is not a claim to virtue. This is just true.

Each day I remember that I am not wrong because I come back to understanding that every stream in the United States is now contaminated with carcinogens. I come back to the fact that wild salmon, who survived tens of millions of years of ice ages, volcanoes, the Missoula Flood, for crying out loud,418 are not surviving one hundred years of this culture. I come back to knowing there is now dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. I come back to the knowledge that tigers, great apes, and amphibians are being exterminated. Now. This is all real. This is the real world.

Each day I understand anew the simplemindedness that would cause someone to think that just because claims to virtue are sometimes used to justify violence that all reasons for violence are artificial justifications. I fall into this trap myself all too often. Too many people within this culture do that. But this trap is just that, a trap: the mother mouse made this clear to me, as have all those mothers