Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [82]
Jealousy. The God of this culture has always been jealous. Time and again in the Bible we read, “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,”162 or “Ye shall not go after other gods, of the gods of the people which are round about you; (For the LORD thy God is a jealous God among you) lest the anger of the LORD thy God be kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.”163 God today is just as jealous, whether he goes by the name of Science, Capitalism, or Civilization. Science is as monotheistic as Christianity, moreso really, since Science doesn’t even have to say it’s jealous: we’ve so internalized its hegemony that many of us believe the only way we can know anything about the world is through science: Science is Truth. Capitalism is so jealous it couldn’t even allow the existence of the Soviet version of itself (they’re both state-subsidized command economies,164 the biggest differences being: a) the merging under the Soviet system of state and corporate bureaucracies into one huge bureaucracy that was even more inefficient and wasteful than the “capitalist” system of functionally separate bureaucracies working for the unified goal of production; and b) the Soviet Politburo was dominated by different factions of the Communist Party with more than 90 percent of the votes going to this party, while the American Congress is dominated by different factions of the Capitalist Party, with more than 90 percent of the votes going to this party). Civilization is just as jealous as science and capitalism, systematically disallowing anyone from perceiving the world in nonutilitarian terms, that is, perceiving the world not in terms of slavery, that is, not in terms of addiction, that is, perceiving the world relationally. Lots of so-called free thinkers like to comment on the tens of millions of people who have been killed because they refused to worship Christianity’s God of Love—because God is after all a jealous God—but even they rarely mention the hundreds of millions of (indigenous and other) people who have been killed because they refused to worship Civilization’s God of production, a God just as jealous as the Christian God, a God deeply devoted to the conversion of the living to the dead.
Control. I’ve thought for a couple of days now about what to put in this paragraph. I considered talking about the public school systems, which have as their primary function the breaking of children’s wills—getting them to sit in one place for hours, days, weeks, months, years on end, wishing their lives away—in preparation for their lives as wage slaves. Then I thought about advertising, and more broadly television, and how through our entire lives we’re manipulated by distant others who do not have our best interests at heart. I thought of the words of economist Paul Baran, “The real problem is . . . whether an economic and social order should be tolerated in which the individual, from the very cradle on, is so shaped, molded, and ‘adjusted’ as to become an easy prey of profit-greedy capitalist enterprise and a smoothly functioning object of capitalist exploitation and degradation.”165 But then I thought maybe I should write about face-recognition software, and of the implantation of ID chips first into pets, then into people. I thought of the words of a 1996 U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board Report: “One can envision the development of electromagnetic energy sources, the output of which can be pulsed, shaped, and focused, that can couple with the human body in a fashion that will allow one to prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions (and thus actions), produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory, produce