Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [88]
Stop. Think about it. Every sensation I have comes from one source: civilization. When you finish this paragraph, put down the book for a few moments, and check out your own surroundings. What can you see, hear, smell, feel, taste that does not originate in or is mediated by civilized human beings? Singing frogs on a Sounds of Nature CD don’t count.
This is all very strange. Stranger still—and extraordinarily revealing of the degree to which we’ve not only accepted but reified this artificially imposed isolation, turned our insanity into a perceived good—is the way we’ve made a fetish and religion (and science, for that matter, as well as business) of attempting to define ourselves as separate from—different from, isolated from, in opposition to—the rest of nature. Abusers merely isolate victims from other resources. Far moreso even than this, civilization isolates all of us—ideologically and physically—from the source of all life.
We do not believe trees have anything to say to us (nor even that they can speak at all), nor stars, nor coyotes, nor even our dreams. We have been convinced—and this is the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies—that the world is silent save civilized humans.
One of the most common and necessary steps taken by an abuser in order to control a victim is to monopolize the victim’s perception. That is one reason abusers cut off victims from family and friends: so that in time victims will have no standard other than the abusers’ by which to judge the abusers’ worldviews and behavior. Abusive behavior—behavior that would otherwise seem extraordinarily bizarre (how crazy is it to rape one’s own child? How crazy is it to toxify the air you breathe?)—can then become in the victim’s mind (and even more sadly, heart) normalized. No outside influence must be allowed to break the spell. There can be only one way to perceive and to be in the world, and that is the abuser’s way. If the abuser is able to mediate all information that reaches the victim, the victim will no longer be able to conceptualize that there is any other way to be. At this point the abuser will have achieved more or less total control.
This is, of course, the point we have reached as a culture. Civilization has achieved a completely unprecedented and nearly perfect monopolization of our perception, at least for those of us in the industrialized world. Fortunately, however, there do still exist people—mainly the poor, people from nonindustrialized nations, and the indigenous—who still have primary connections to the physical world. And fortunately, also, the physical world still exists, and all of us can at the very least reach out to touch trees still standing in steel and concrete cages. And we can see plants poking up through sidewalks, breaking cement barriers that keep them from feeling the sun. I would hope we can learn from these plants and break through these concrete and perceptual barriers.
The sixth characteristic is that abusers blame others for their problems. To make the jump to the cultural level it would be easy to simply list the ways our culture does this, and leave it at that. The capitalist media blames spotted owls and humans who love them for job losses in the timber industry, yet (surprise, surprise) ignores the greater number of jobs lost in the same industry to automation and raw log exports (as well as the cut-and-run nature of the industry). Politicians and other timber industry propagandists blame natural forests and environmentalists for fires, yet ignore the fact that logging is a significant cause of fires, and further, that fires burn hotter and more destructively in cutover forests and tree plantations than they do in natural forests. They ignore further the regenerative role fire plays in forests. We who care about the planet would be wise to not ignore this lesson about the destructive/regenerative powers of fire but