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This entire culture is so violent, so traumatic, I argued in Language, as to render most all of us to one degree or another shell shocked, and therefore incapable of realizing or even imagining what it would be like to live a life not based on fear. This fear, in fact, runs so deep that it has become normalized in this culture, codified, made the basis of the entire society.

I am sure you can see these symptoms not only among those of your friends who may have been grotesquely and obviously traumatized, but in the culture at large: the culture is certainly disconnected from the present, else we could not possibly kill the planet (and each other) for the sake of production; it certainly sees danger everywhere, even when there is none (the culture’s politics, science, technology, religion, and much of its philosophy are all founded on the notion that the world is a vale of tears and danger); it just as certainly manifests in an otherwise incomprehensible rage at (and fear of) the indigenous everywhere, as well as the natural world; and of course those of us who hate the destruction consistently fail to resist in anything approaching a meaningful fashion.86

But there’s more to it than this. Judith Herman defined a new type of PTSD. She asked, what happens to people who have been traumatized not in one discreet incident—for example, an earthquake or a rape—but instead have suffered “subjection to totalitarian control over a prolonged period (months to years)”?87 Or, I would add, for the six thousand years of civilization. She includes not only hostages, prisoners of war, and the like, but also those who have survived the captivity of long-term domestic violence. Concerning this latter, she asks what happens to those whose personalities are not only deformed by extended violence, having suffered it as adults, but to those whose personalities are formed as children in such a crucible of totalitarian violence. The answer is that they may suffer amnesia, forgetting the violence of their childhood (or, I would once again add in our larger case, the violence on which, to choose just one example, white title to land in North America is based). They may suffer a sense of helplessness. They may identify with their abuser. They may come to perceive mutually beneficial relationships as impossible, and to believe instead that all relationships are based on force, on power. They may come to believe that the strong dominate the weak, the weak dominate the weaker, and the weakest survive as they can.

The understanding that the entire culture could reasonably be said to be suffering from complex PTSD helps to make sense of many of the culture’s otherwise absurd actions and philosophies. Our hatred of the body. The certainty that nature is red in tooth and claw. The long-standing movement toward centralized control. The neurotic insistence on repeatability (and control) in science, and the insane exclusion of emotion—which means the exclusion of life—from both science and economics. Using the lens of domestic violence to look at civilization’s unwavering violence helps to make sense of all of these symptoms, but the important thing about using this lens as it pertains to the sixth premise of this book, that of civilization’s unredeemability, is that perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000, the United Kingdom removed all funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Sandra Horley, chief executive of Refuge, that country’s largest single provider of support to abused women and children, said: “I am not a hard-line feminist and I am not against men receiving help, but in many years of experience I have known only one man who has changed his behaviour.” The Guardian put it simply: “There is no cure for men who beat their wives or partners, according to new Home Office research.”88

If perpetrators