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By Root 2300 0

of domestic violence cannot be cured, they must simply be stopped. If you believe, as I think I sufficiently showed in A Language Older Than Words, that familial violence within this culture is in many ways a microcosm of the violence the culture tricks out on the larger stages of history and the landscape, the implications for the culture—and its human and nonhuman victims—are, I think, sobering. As well as exploring the psychological irredeemability of this culture I discussed in that book many of the reasons for the culture’s death urge—its urge to destroy all life, including our own—and the reasons for this urge’s intractability.

In The Culture of Make Believe, I approached the question of the culture’s essential destructiveness, and its death urge, from an entirely different direction, exploring the mutually reinforcing interplay of an economic and social system based on competition; the belief that humans are the apex of creation and our culture is the apex of this apex (it’s always been pretty clear to me that all of evolution has taken place simply to bring me into existence, so that I can watch television); the valuing of material production over all else, including (most especially) life; the consistent preference for abstraction over the particular (manifesting, to provide three quick examples among many, as the promulgation of moral systems based on abstract principles rather than circumstances; as the flood of pornography (abstract images of naked women on the internet account for $90 billion in revenue per year, making porn the number one cash generator online, accounting for 13 percent of all revenue); and as the ability, and proclivity, to kill at ever-greater psychic and physical distances); and the increasing bureaucratization of this society. I showed how all of these vectors come together to lead ineluctably to the attempted elimination of all diversity, to the attempted killing of the planet, and to the increasingly routine mass murder of fellow humans (and of course nonhumans).

I’m taking a more fundamental approach here to understanding the reasons for the implacability of this culture’s violence, and I’m discovering that just as all roads lead, as the saying goes, to Rome, all pathways here lead to the perception and articulation of civilization’s basis in exploitation. In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about the psychological, social/economic, or physical/resource levels (none of which are separable anyway), we come to the same conclusion. To put this yet another way, the micro manifests the macro, which mirrors back the micro. Or to change terms once again, we’re in trouble, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it.

Because every city-state (and now the entire globally interconnected industrial economy) relies on imported resources, our entire culture’s basis in exploitation must remain in place no matter how spiritual, enlightened, or peaceful we may seem to ourselves, may claim to be, or may in fact personally become. This basis in violence is in place whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. It is in place whether or not we call ourselves peaceloving, and whether or not we tell ourselves (each time) that we are fighting to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to people who, unaccountably, often do not seem to want what we have to offer. Stripped of all lies, we are fighting, or rather killing (remember premise four), to take their resources. More precisely, those in power are doing so. More precisely yet, those in power are ordering their servants to do so, servants who have bought into the belief that those in power are entitled to take these resources.89

This culture has killed a lot of people, and will continue to do so until it collapses, and probably long after. It must, because these killings inhere in the structure and physical needs of the society, and so are not amenable to change. Appeals to conscience, to humanity, to decency are thus doomed even before they’re made (and in fact can be harmful insofar as they allow all of us