Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [89]
More blame: the bigot blames poor Mexicans when his employer’s plant closes and moves to Mexico. The owner blames market conditions or damn unions for leaving him no choice but to move the plant. Go back in time and we have Israel’s rulers, speaking through their God, blaming Canaanites because Israelites didn’t want to follow “God’s” (wink, wink) rules. Move forward and we have Crusaders blaming women for lack of success on the battlefield (sex, especially with an infidel, evidently displeases “God”). Then we have settlers blaming Indians for not giving up their land without a fight (as John Wayne later said, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves”). Hitler and the Nazis blamed Communists and Jews for everything from world wars to defective dentures. Americans agreed at least so far as the Communists. Now it’s terrorists who keep us from the Promised Land of Perpetual Peace and Prosperity™ (brought to you by ExxonMobil). There is always someone (else) to blame.
Something interesting happens when you combine an abuser’s propensity to blame with the monopolization of the victim’s perception: the victim comes to agree with the abuser, that all problems are actually the victim’s fault. The wife tries tirelessly to make the perfect meal and if she’s beaten it’s because she’s not a good enough cook, which means not a good enough wife, which means not a good enough person. Of course it’s not because her husband is violent, abusive, insane. The child tries to perfectly clean the dishes, and violence comes to her because she is too sloppy. The teen tries to park the car in the right place—or rather not in the ever-shifting wrong place—so as to not be beaten. In an attempt to maintain control in a situation that is grievously out of control and that can never be in control so long as victims stay within the perceptual box created for them by their abuser, victims conspire with their abusers to focus on alterations of their own behavior in futile attempts to placate the abuser or at least delay or mitigate the inevitable violence, or at the very least shift this violence to another victim. Even worse than this self-focus being a mere tactic, it becomes a way of being (or rather non-being) in the world, such that victims come to know the fault is their own. Instead of stopping the abuse by any means necessary, they join with the abuser in doing violence to themselves.
They forget that assigning “blame” in this sense is a toxic mimic of the necessary task of assigning appropriate and accurate responsibility for the violence done to them, and doing something about it.
These same patterns are replicated on the larger social scale, at least among those who have been sufficiently enculturated. This is probably not the case among the primary victims of our culture, of course: those who remain free of civilization’s perceptual box. I’m reasonably certain salmon, swordfish, and hammerhead sharks do not find themselves paralyzed by spasms of self-blame for their plight—What could I do differently to placate these people? If only I were a better fish they would not hate me—but instead know precisely who is killing them. The same can be said for the indigenous. You can’t get much clearer than Sitting Bull, who said, when forced to speak at a celebration of the completion of a railroad through what had been his people’s land: “I hate you. I hate you. I hate all the white people. You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts, so I hate you.” It’s important to note, by the way, that the white translator did not speak these words, but instead the “friendly, courteous speech he had prepared.”170
And that’s the problem.
Those of us whose vision has been defined by civilization, whose personalities have been formed and deformed