It’s not always cowards who say such lines. Sometimes it’s people who for whatever reason fail to grasp the insatiability and utter implacability of the dominant culture’s death urge. There were (and are) Indians—many of them—who pleaded with their relations to not upset the civilized: if only we all go along with this latest of the ever-shifting demands of the civilized, the logic went (and goes), we will finally be left somewhat alone on the remnants of our land. And there were Jews—many of them—who fell into the trap Nazis laid, baited with false hopes. If only we are reasonable, the logic once again goes, they, too, will be reasonable. If only we show ourselves to be good and worthy Germans—in some cases even good and worthy Nazis—the mass of good Germans will speak and act to protect us from harm.
What a load of horseshit.
It’s easier to see this sad gullibility in retrospect than in the present, isn’t it? It always is.
I think it’s just as much a mistake to count on help from the mass of good Americans as it was from the mass of good Germans. Some will certainly help, but I don’t think there will ever be a mass awakening, where suddenly the majority, or even significant minority, of people do what is best for their landbase.
When I lived in Spokane, I had a friend with whom I would get together for dinner once a month or so. Sometimes we’d go to the symphony, sometimes to pick up trash by the side of a road. And we’d talk. Given what you know about me from my books you can probably guess that I often found myself itching to talk about taking down civilization. That’s not an itch I generally leave unscratched. But I was delicate, because nice as this person was, and as dedicated to cleaning up roadside trash, he was definitely what my former agent would have called a fence-sitter. When I’d get too explicit about the need to take down civilization he’d too-quickly make a joke, or get distracted, or suddenly remember something important he had to tell me on some other subject—any other subject—or he would get angry at me about something that didn’t actually make him angry. So I learned to keep it light, to only hint, to make smaller and smaller talk while the world burned.
Fast-forward a decade to my last week before I left Spokane. He called me on the telephone. I could tell he was both excited and agitated.
He said, “I did it. I made the plunge.”
“What did you do?” I thought maybe he was getting married, though so far as I knew he wasn’t dating anyone.
He said, “I wrote a twenty dollar check to a local environmental organization.”
I told him, sincerely, that I was happy for him.323
The seventeenth premise of this book—and this is sort of a combination of the second premise, that this culture will not undergo a voluntary transformation, and the tenth, that most members of this culture are insane—is that it’s a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether our actions will or won’t frighten fence-sitters or the mass of Americans.
Sure, we can let the potential response of these people be one more piece of information that helps to influence our choices, but we must always remember that we are only responsible for our own actions. Just as we are not responsible for the choices—retributive or otherwise—made by those in power as putative response to any action we may take, so, too, we are not responsible for the response or non-response of the mass of Americans (or Czechs, Liberians, or Indonesians, for that matter).
Here’s another way to put the seventeenth premise: The mass of civilized people will never be on our side.324 I’m not saying by this that we should give up on educating or informing people (I am, after all, a writer: educating and informing is what I do). I’m saying, first, that we need to try to be aware of where our identification lies—with whom or what we identify—and we need to ask ourselves: If what the mass of Americans want is in opposition to what your own particular landbase needs, which do you choose to support? If it comes down to stark choices—which of course it already does—on which side will you take your stand (recognizing also that refusing to choose is just another way of choosing the default)?325
Second, I’m saying that we need to be aware that we have a finite amount of time each day and a finite amount of time in our lives, so if we actually hope to accomplish something tangible we need to choose wisely how we spend that time. Some people may feel it’s the best use of their time to inch fence-sitters closer to falling to the side of the living, and by all means they should do that. I don’t think most fence-sitters are effectively reachable, and so I do not write for them. I write for people who already know how horrible civilization is, and who want to do something about it. I want to encourage them to be more radical, more militant, just as others have encouraged me.
Further, we need to recognize that educating people will only go so far toward saving salmon, sturgeon, marlins, prairie dogs, forests, rivers, glaciers, oceans, skies, the planet. At some point we have to actually do something.
The problem is not and has never been that the mass of people do not have enough information, such that if we just present them with enough facts they will strive for justice, for sanity, for what is best for their landbase. Think again about rape. Rape is not caused by a lack of information. Similarly, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that dams kill salmon, or that deforestation kills creatures who live in forests. Would it have merely required information to get the whites who slaughtered Indians (or who took their land after the soldiers had done the slaughtering) to stand with these Indians against members of their own culture? Would it require that today, as traditional indigenous people continue to be put in reserves, concentration camps, prisons, and graves, and as their land continues to be stolen? When cancer kills those we love—our grandparents, brothers, sisters, children, friends, lovers—when chemicals cause little girls to develop breasts and pubic hair, when pesticides make children stupid and sickly, the problem is not education. The problem has never been education. To believe that it is, is to buy into yet one more lie that keeps us from acting to protect ourselves.
Or maybe it’s not one more lie, but the same old lie, the same old faith-based excuse for inaction, except that this time instead of it being some mythical god or great mother who will save us if only we act in good enough faith—if only we are nice enough, kind enough, loving enough (using the culture’s self-serving and toothless definition of love) to our exploiters—it is some just-as-mythical mass of Americans who will somehow save the day if only—if only—we are innocuous enough to not frighten them off (and not coincidentally, if only we do not upset those in power).
Even moreso than most people not being on our side, if we were to truly act in defense of our landbases, of our bodies, we would quickly find ourselves hated by the exploiters (of course), the fence-sitters, mainstream Americans, mainstream liberal activists. (My goodness, if mainstream social justice activists assault people, hold them for cops to arrest, and chant complaints about having their demos ruined just because some people break a few windows, imagine what these same activists would do if people began to strike more than symbolic blows against this death culture?) We would find ourselves hated by everyone who identifies more closely with civilization than with their landbase.
In The Culture of Make Believe I was attempting among other things to understand the relationship between exploitation, contempt, a sense of entitlement, threats to that entitlement, and hatred. I had learned that after the American Civil War the number of lynchings in the American South increased by at least a couple orders of magnitude. I wanted to know why. My understanding came when I happened across a line by Nietzsche, “One does not hate when one can despise.” I suddenly understood that perceived entitlement is key to nearly all atrocities, and that any threat to perceived entitlement will provoke hatred.
Here’s what I wrote:
“Europeans felt that they were (and are) entitled to the land of North and South America. Slave owners clearly felt they were entitled to the labor (and the lives) of their slaves, not only in partial payment for protecting s
laves from their own idleness, but also simply as a return on their capital investment. Owners of nonhuman capital today feel they, too, are entitled to the ‘surplus return on labor,’ as economists put it, as part of their reward for furnishing jobs, and to provide a return on their investment in capital. Rapists act on the belief that they are entitled to their victims’ bodies. Americans act as though we are entitled to consume the majority of the world’s resources, and to change the world’s climate. All industrialized humans act like we’re entitled to anything we want on this planet.”326
I then wrote:
“From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with—and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with—the perceived entitlement. That’s where Nietzsche’s statement comes in, and that’s where hatred of the sort I’m trying to get at in this book becomes manifest. Several times in this book I have commented that hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion, what have you. It is when those traditions are challenged, when the entitlement is threatened, when the masks of religion, economics, and so on are pulled away that hate transforms from its more seemingly sophisticated, ‘normal,’ chronic state—where those exploited are looked down upon, or despised—to a more acute and obvious manifestation. Hate becomes more perceptible when it is no longer normalized. Another way to say all of this is that if the rhetoric of superiority works to maintain the entitlement, hatred and direct physical force remain underground. But when that rhetoric begins to fail, force—and hatred—waits in the wings, ready to explode.”327
The point as it relates to the current book is that if you think the exploiters responded with fury and great violence when capitalists were merely disallowed from owning human beings328—when that particular perceived entitlement was thwarted—just imagine the backlash when civilized humans are stopped from perpetrating the routine exploitation that characterizes, makes possible, forms the basis of, and is the essence of their way of life.
The next few pages of The Culture of Make Believe continue to elaborate on this idea and I’d like to quote them now at length:
“Pretend that you were raised to believe that blacks—niggers would be more precise in this formulation—really are like children, but strong. And pretend that niggers working for whites is simply part of the day-to-day experience of living. You do not question it any more than you question breathing, eating, or sleeping. It is simply a fact of life: whites own niggers, niggers work for whites.
“Now pretend that someone from the outside begins to tell you that what you are doing is wrong. This outsider knows nothing of the life you live and that your father and his father lived. To your knowledge this outsider has never walked the fields and actually watched the slaves work, has never gone over the figures to see that your farm wouldn’t be viable without these slaves, and doesn’t know the slaves well enough to know that they, too, could not survive without the things you provide for them. Pretend that your slaves listen to this outsider, and because of this, your relationship with them begins to deteriorate, even to the point that you begin to lose money.
“If it were me—had I been raised under these circumstances and with those beliefs—I think it possible that once I got over my initial shock at the temerity of this outsider meddling in something that is none of his or her business, I would have become angry, and perhaps felt eventually outrage towards this interloper who was threatening to ruin my way of life. Raised in those circumstances, it would have taken more courage than most of us have, I think, to admit that one’s way of life is based on exploitation, and to gracefully begin to live a different way.
“It’s easy enough at this remove to simply say that slaveholders were immoral, and that members of the KKK and other hate groups were a bunch of stupid bigots with whom we have nothing in common.
“But are you sure?
“Try this. What if instead of owning people, we’re talking about owning land. Someone tells you that no matter how much you paid to purchase title to some piece of land, the land itself does not belong to you. No longer may you do whatever you wish with it. You may not cut the trees on it. You may not build on it. You may not run a bulldozer over it to put in a driveway. All of those activities are immoral, because they’re based on your exploitation of a living thing: in this case the land. Did you ask the land if it wants you to build on it? Do you care what the land thinks? But the land can’t think, you say. Ah, but that’s just what you think. It is how you were taught to think. Let’s say further that your livelihood and your way of life are based on working this land—the outsiders call it exploiting—and that if the outsiders have their way you’ll be out of business. Again and again they tell you that you are a bad person, a stupid bigot, because you refuse to see that your way of life is based on the exploitation of something you don’t perceive as having any rights—or sentience—to begin with.
“Angry yet?
“Then how about this? Outsiders take away your computer because the process of manufacturing the hard drive killed women in Thailand. They take your clothes because they were made in sweatshops, your meat because it was factory farmed, your cheap vegetables because the agricorporations that provided them drove family farmers out of business (or maybe because lettuce doesn’t like to be factory farmed: ‘lettuce prefers diversity,’ say the outsiders), and your coffee because its production destroys rainforests, decimates migratory songbird populations, and drives African, Asian, and South and Central American subsistence farmers off their land. They take your car because of global warming, and your wedding ring because mining exploits workers and destroys landscapes and communities. They take your TV, microwave, and refrigerator because, hell, they take the whole damn electrical grid because the generation of electricity is, they say, so environmentally expensive (dams kill salmon, coal plants strip the tops off mountains and generate acid rain, wind generators kill birds, and let’s not even talk about nukes). Imagine if outsiders wanted to take away all these things—without your consent—because they had determined, without your input, that all of these things are exploitative and immoral. Imagine that these outsiders actually began to succeed in taking away these parts of your life you see as so fundamental. I’d imagine you’d be pretty pissed. Maybe you’d start to hate the assholes doing this to you, and maybe if enough other people who were pissed off had already formed an organization to fight back against these people who were trying to destroy your life—I could easily see you asking, ‘What do these people have against me anyway?’—maybe you’d even put on white robes and funny hats, and maybe you’d even get a little rough with a few of them, if that was what it took to stop them from destroying your way of life.”329
This is the typical response of the civilized to any threat to their perceived right to exploit. Recall once again Thomas Jefferson’s explanation of what would happen to those Indians who fought back: “In war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.”330 Unfortunately, Indians and their allies have not yet been able to stop the grinding of this machine-culture. Yet they have still received that fury for even trying, and often for merely existing and showing to their exploiters that other ways of being are possible (and desirable).
You really wanna see some hatred? You wanna see some violence? Thwart the civilized. Shut them down. Stop them from destroying the planet.
The civilized will smile as they tear you limb from limb.
THEIR INSANITY WAS PERMANENT
Now, were Columbus and his fellow European exploiters sim- ply “greedy” men whose “ethics” were such as to allow for mass slaughter and genocide? I shall argue that Columbus was a wétiko, that he was mentally ill or insane, the carrier of a terribly contagious psychological disease, the wétiko psychosis. The Native people he described were, on the other hand, sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normal- ity among humans and other living creatures involves a respect
for other forms of life and other individuals, as I have described earlier. I believe that is the way people have lived (and should live).
The wétiko psychosis, and the problems it creates, have inspired many resistance movements and efforts at reform or revolution. Unfortunately, most of these efforts have failed because they have never diagnosed the wétiko as an insane person whose disease is extremely contagious.
Jack D. Forbes 331
WHY CIVILIZATION IS KILLING THE WORLD, TAKE EIGHTEEN. AN ACTUAL conversation that took place in an exercise center near Seattle. Men and women walked on treadmills as they stared at televisions, read books, or looked in mirrors.
One woman said, “I can’t handle my neighbors’ trees. I wish she’d cut them down when the crane comes through. After the last storm a branch came right through my deck.”
Another woman responded, “I know what you mean. Last year no one in my neighborhood wanted to cut their trees. Luckily, when I had the crane come, everyone on our cul-de-sac changed their minds, and we were able to get rid of sixteen of those trees.”
The first: “I still have two trees left. I’m ordering the crane this year. I don’t want one to fall on my house.”
A third woman, an environmentalist, said, “An arborist could thin the branches so the wind will go through them and the tree won’t fall.”
Endgame Vol.1 Page 40
