• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2312 0

—from presidents to CEOs to generals to soldiers to activists to people who don’t much think about it—to pretend those in power could maintain that power without violence, and that the material production on which the entire culture is based could continue also without violence), not only because those in power have shown themselves—similarly to abusers in family violence, for similar reasons—eager to commit precisely as much violence as they can get away with, and not only because those in power have shown themselves psychologically impervious to such appeals (Dear Adolf, Please don’t hurt the Jews, nor take land from the Slavs or Russians. Be a pal, okay?) but more importantly—and more implacably—the institutions these individuals serve are functionally just as impervious to the appeals as the individuals are psychologically. They need the resources, and will get them, come the hell of depleted-uranium-induced malformations or the high water of melted ice caps. All of this means that movements for peace are damned before they start because unless they’re willing to unmake the roots of this culture, and thus the roots of the violence, they can at best address superficial causes, and thus, at best, provide palliation.

There are many superficial causes of the culture’s violence. There is the fact that those who make the political decisions that guide this culture are more interested in increasing their own personal power and the power of the state than they are in human and nonhuman well-being. Another way to say this is that gaining and maintaining access to resources, and facilitating production, are more important to them than life. Another way to say this is that power is more important to them than life. Another way to say this is that they are insane. If this were a root of the problem instead of a superficial manifestation, we could undermine the violence of this culture by simply replacing these decision-makers with those more reasonable, with those more sane, with those more humane, with those more human. But imagine if an American president decided tomorrow that the U.S. would no longer allow corporations to take oil from any region where the people themselves (not the government) did not want to relinquish it. The same would hold for metals, fish, meat, wood. Everything. What’s more, no resources would be extracted if their removal would harm the natural world in any way. In other words, the president decided to put in place a truly non-exploitative, sustainable economy, the sort of economy all but psychopaths would say they want, the sort of economy that environmental and social justice activists say they’re working toward. Presuming Congress and the Supreme Court went along—an extraordinarily dubious presumption—and presuming the president wasn’t assassinated by CIA operatives or oil or other company hirelings—even more dubious—prices would skyrocket, the American way of life would implode, and riots would (probably) fill the streets. The economy would collapse. Soon, the president’s head would be displayed atop the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The point is that the only people fit to be President are those who can institute policies that value economic production over life. A sane and humane person would not and could not last in that position.

Another superficial cause of the violence is that those who make the economic decisions (as opposed to political decisions, insofar as there is a difference) in this culture, too, are more interested in accumulating power—in this case monetary wealth—than they are in enriching the human and nonhuman communities that surround them. By itself, their interest in mining these communities would not be any more of a problem than any other compulsion, like excessive cleaning or obsessive hand-wringing. It really only becomes a problem because the power-hungry and the greedy work closely together as (somewhat) separate parts of the same corporate state, with the power-hungry wielding the military and police as muscle for the greedy, guaranteeing that the rich will get