Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [39]
But even the conjoining of commerce and politics is, by itself, not a source of the violence, but a mechanism for it. If the lock-step march of government and industry were the essential cause of the culture’s violence, we could solve it relatively easily by calling a constitutional convention and inserting new checks and balances to prevent this in the future. And if those in power were to oppose us, continuing their current policy of taxing us without representing us, well, we could simply follow the advice of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Beatles and say we want a revolution (recognizing that the Beatles waffled a bit more than the other two, although listening carefully to the doo-wop version I think provides a clue to their beliefs). But we would find, after the dust settled and the blood stopped flowing in the streets, that our glorious new revolutionary government faced the same old problem of how to take resources from the country and give them to the city, to the producers. Our new bosses would of necessity be as violent as our old bosses.
We could easily assemble a long list of other mechanisms or superficial causes of violence. There is the fact that those in power have surrounded themselves with institutions such as the military and judicial systems (in fact the entire governmental structure) in order to protect and maintain their power. There is the fact that the social system rewards the insatiable accumulation of wealth and power. There is the fact that we are all immersed in a mythology that, far from causing us to see this accumulation as a great source of violence, causes us to see it as not only acceptable, reasonable, and desirable, but the only way to be, the way, in fact, that “the real world” works. There is the fact that this same mythology glorifies violence, so long as it is perpetrated only by those in power or their surrogates: top Hollywood executives recently met with the president’s senior advisor to, in the words of The New York Times, find “common ground on how the entertainment industry can contribute to the war effort, replicating in spirit if not in scope the partnership formed between film-makers and war planners in the 1940s”; simultaneously, Tom Cruise is said to be concerned about his role in his next movie as a garbage collector, oh, sorry, a CIA operative, wanting to show the “CIA in as positive a light as possible.”90 There is the arrogance of the civilized, who consider themselves morally and otherwise superior to all others, and who therefore may exploit or exterminate these others with moral impunity (and immunity). There is the arrogance of the humanists, who believe us separate from and superior to nonhumans, who may also then be exploited or exterminated at will. And there is the culture’s death urge, pushing us all to end all life on the planet while simultaneously driving each and every one of us as much out of our bodies as we are out of our minds.
All of these are in place, and there is good reason to work on halting or slowing all of these. In no way am I suggesting we shouldn’t work to reduce the harmfulness of these mechanisms or superficial causes, anymore than I would suggest people not work on rape crisis hot lines, or that people not attempt to stop individual rapists. But I would also not suggest that working on a rape crisis hotline will in any way halt the very real crisis of rape. No one I know who has ever worked on issues of men’s violence against women has suggested that it will. Nor have they suggested that if only women will think nice enough thoughts, or practice the right sort of spiritual exercises, that men will stop raping women. Mitigation can be wonderful, and important, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking it is anything more than mitigation. Begging government and industry to stop destroying the planet and to stop killing people the world