Stephanie McMillan:
Thank you for being determined to investigate and understand the different aspects of this catastrophic situation that we are facing. Especially I want to thank those of you here who are doing something about it, or thinking about doing something about it. It is very important that we do. I am going to get into some of the more structural aspects.
Want to join a movement fighting capitalism?
Deep Green Resistance is recruiting. We are a political movement for liberation and revolution. We aim for nothing less than total liberation from capitalism, extractive economics, white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, industrialism, and the culture of empire that we call civilization.
We all know that capitalism is killing the world. In order to stop it, we can’t just keep resisting its effects. Capitalism doesn’t care if we protest on street corners a thousand times. That just proves how democratic they are. The solutions are not to be found within its framework. And they are even less to be found at the individual level. We don‘t actually have any power as consumers, I‘m sure most of you here already know. They would like us to think we do, but we can‘t buy or refrain from buying our way out of this. It‘s a social system, a class system, and it can only be addressed at a level of collective organized class struggle.
We need to understand capital, how it works, the mechanisms that keep it in place and are at the core of its functioning.
Capitalism is a mode of production, based on the exploitation of labor and the generation of surplus value. This means that workers are paid a certain amount of wages for a day‘s work. But what they produce is worth more than that. The extra value is called surplus value, and the capitalist just steals it. This is what all profit is based on. This is what private property is all about. It is considered normal for the social means of production, the factories, land, everything that produces all the things that we all use, that these are privately owned, and for those owners to simply take whatever is produced in them.
Understanding capitalism.
Capitalism is not just an economic process, but the whole way that our society is arranged. It’s an ensemble or matrix of social relations, and these comprise three main fields: the economic, the political and the ideological. The economic field is determinate, profit is the point, and everything else is set up to solidify the relations of production that keep it coming. Capitalist ideology, centered on competition and individualism, is designed to make the way we live seem normal and inevitable. It‘s forced on us by its institutions, school, the church, the nuclear family, media and culture. Why would we need advertising for example, if they didn‘t need to convince us to participate? Ideological domination is unrelenting conditioning and indoctrination to naturalize capitalism, to make us compliant, passive, greedy and self-centered. To make us identify with it, instead of understanding it as the enemy that it really is.
Political domination.
Political domination, the job of the state, has two main aims: the first, performed by the government and its laws, is to regulate within and between classes, to keep the flow of capital smooth and free of obstacles. The second is for when ideological domination fails. When we can no longer accept living this way, the state turns to cohesion through terrorism. This function is performed by the state’s armed forces, its military and police. If we don‘t comply, that’s when the guns come out. We saw that with the Occupy movement. The entire purpose of this setup is economic, the accumulation of wealth for a small minority of people–those who own the means of production, namely the factories, tools, land.
Ownership and control.
This ownership was not ordained by a God, nor is it because capitalists are smarter or worked harder than anyone else and earned that right. It‘s because they took it. They started with trading, which many societies considered and understood as thievery, since it‘s the exchange of unequal values. This is still the way that mercantile capitalists accumulate wealth. They continued with land theft, backed up by war and genocide, which is still going on today as we all know. I just got back from Haiti a few days ago and saw huge areas of land that have been stolen from small farmers and towns people, their houses just bulldozed over without warning, so that the government could bring in foreign investors to build industrial parks and tourist resorts. They justified this by saying that the people will get jobs. They‘d be able to work in the new factories and hotels. That‘s the standard way that capitalists have been getting their workforce for the past 250 years.
Oppression and control.
The fundamental contradiction of capitalism, reproducing it and driving it forward, is capital versus labor and the production of surplus value for private accumulation. This process is what produces class divisions, class domination and class struggle. Classes are groups of people, defined by their role in social production. There are those who own and control it, and those are usually not the same people who are exploited in the process. Besides exploitation, capitalism also uses oppressive practices like racism and patriarchy, and has terrible effects like ecocides and war, which we all have to deal with. It‘s a social system that dominates all of social life, and all the dominated classes and social groups struggle against this in their own ways. But the core of it is embodied in the struggle of workers against exploitation.
Value and ethics.
Workers are the ones who face capital in their daily struggle for existence, in an inherently antagonistic relationship. They are the only ones able to offer an alternative to capitalism. Other classes can resist, but can‘t break the framework. So, if we‘re to actually destroy capitalism, the working class needs to lead all the dominated classes in a revolution to overthrow the capitalist class. We are all social agents, born into a structure that we didn‘t create. We are inserted into the existing relations of production, funneled into particular social slots, serving the various requirements of capital. Capital confines our relationships within a framework of relations between things. And it treats living beings, including humans, as objects. It has no moral or ethical framework, because it‘s not alive.
Nevertheless, it does have a motion, drive and imperative of its own. Its only aim is self-expansion. Even capitalists are merely stewards of capital and have no control over it. If they have an attack of conscience, an attempt to moderate it, then they are replaced. Sociopaths are drawn to this role; in fact a higher percentage are found in this class than in the general population. Because to serve capital in this way requires a lack, or total suppression, of empathy. Capital has no subjectivity and it doesn’t recognize it in others. But it is animate, thorough and embodied in its representatives. It has imbued them with its own sociopathy.
Value and growth.
Surplus value is generated only in industrial production, when labor power is exploited in the process of converting raw materials, otherwise known as the living world, into commodities. And that‘s why it‘s ecocidal. Other forms of capital expansion, such as mercantile and finance, create inflated bubbles of fictitious value through unequal trade and speculation. All that must be based on the production of physical goods. For example, China builds twelve to twenty-four ghost-cities every year, mile after mile of malls with no businesses in them and houses with no people living in them. And those empty buildings serve as repositories for capital investment, objects to hold value and to speculate on. Surplus value must be re-invested as new capital, or it will degrade, it will lose value.
We have a choice.
Capital will do whatever it takes to prevent its own devaluation, including all forms of brutal oppression, endless wars, total disregard for the needs of any living beings, stripping us of subjectivity, and turning us into functions for its own reproduction, even up to annihilation of all life on earth. This would of course mean its own destruction as well. Marx understood this when he said that class struggle will lead to either the overthrow of capitalism and the elimination of class domination in general, or the common ruin of contending classes. We still may have this choice to make, but that window is closing. We each need to make our choice now, and do the work required of us in this very intense and pivotal historical period.
The work of understanding the structural crisis and vulnerabilities of the system that we‘re facing, plus the work of organizing our forces so that we can become strong enough to weaken and ultimately destroy it.
Derrick Jensen: For eight years, Stephanie and I have had a bitter, bitter ideological battle. It‘s so bitter that we‘ve written a couple of books together and have become very dear friends. The question, that Stephanie and I have been having a great time slightly disagreeing on, is whether capitalism creates sociopathological behavior, or whether it took sociopaths to create a rationalization for their pre-existing issues, and to create a system that rewards this terrible behavior. And I don‘t really have an answer and I think the truth is, that they are mutually reinforcing, that once you get a system in place that starts creating sociopaths, then they will create additional rationalizations for their sociopathological behavior and additional ways to reward themselves. Especially when those in power are those who make the rules for those in power, then of course they‘re going to codify their pre-existing issues.
The tragedy of the commons.
I want to say one more thing. The tragedy of the commons just pisses me off. That essay by Garrett Hardin in 1968, it’s such a lie. He basically says that the tragedy of the commons is that if you have a common area, that it will eventually be destroyed. He says this is because if you have a community area where the village is allowed to, say, run a hundred sheep, ten families and every family can run ten sheep. Then what‘s going to happen is that one family is going to run eleven sheep, and then another is gonna run eleven sheep, and then eventually the commons will be destroyed. But this is complete bullshit. What that is, is a tragedy of the failure of community.
If you have a community, and everybody knows that they can run ten sheep, if somebody runs eleven sheep, the other members of the community come to them and say: Dude, that is not a good idea. And if the person does it again, they’d say: Dude, that‘s a really bad idea. And if they did it again, they‘d burn down their house. So, what he is describing is a situation in which your community has already been destroyed.
No matter how talented he was, if Jimi Hendrix would have been playing his music in the 1920s he would not have found an audience. You have to have a receptive audience in order to have something become popular. So if you have a purely functioning community in the first place, and somebody says “Hey, I‘ve got this great idea! Everybody acting selfishly will create a greater good for our entire community!” they would say “You are nuts.” The only way you can have people go “wow, that’s a great idea!” is if they are primed for it.
Spreading ideas/propaganda.
In 1992, the year that Clinton was elected, he did this one speech that had this great moment where he said “I want to try to show that Adam Smith‘s invisible hand has a green thumb.” It was great, because the entire audience was silent. And then he said: “I thought that was a really good line,” and everybody is like “Oh, yeah!“ This is just one of the ways that propaganda works. First, and everybody knows this, is: “Adam Smith‘s invisible hand? A green thumb? You‘re fucking nuts!” But then when it‘s repeated, and of course if you have the NY Times take it up, and then if you have the neo-environmentalists take it up, and then if you have all these other groups take it up, twenty years later, everybody‘s like “Oh yeah, of course green capitalism will solve everything.”
That‘s all.
Charles Derber:
95% of environmentalists in America believe that the solution to the environmental crisis is more capitalism. I had the quote from Tom Friedman, who made that argument very powerfully. He said there is “father capital and mother earth.” The two most powerful forces in the world to be married together will solve all our problems. Why this text is super important is that you‘re going up against a myth, a deeply embedded myth in the society. That the solution to climate change is more capitalism.
Derrick Jensen:
I would actually agree, that there is father capitalism and mother earth, and it‘s a deeply abusive relationship in which he is beating the shit out of her and raping her on a daily basis, and what she needs to do is put a gun to his fucking head and kill him.
Stephanie McMillan:
There is really no way to reform it or fix it. It is not a system that has gone too far or that has run off the rails. The rails are constructed that way, the whole system is born that way. It’s not something that can be restrained or reformed or fixed. It is not broken. It‘s doing exactly what has been predicted for the last 200 years.
The accumulation of capital is an inevitable process.
The concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, the monopolization of production, that‘s all part of how it works. And the only way that it can be gotten rid off is if we organize and become a powerful social force, more powerful than the lies, wealth and arms of our enemy. We have to first recognize it as our enemy. A lot of people don’t, because we are ideologically very dominated, and we’ve been conditioned for generations to accept this as normal.
Working together.
The propaganda that there is no alternative, that everything else has failed, that nothing else will work, this is our only choice—we have to break out of that. Yes, there have been attempts at other systems that have failed. But these were babies, trying to learn how to walk. And if they fell down, are we going to say “this baby is never gonna grow up and learn how to walk?” We have to learn from the mistakes of people who have tried different things, modify that according to our current situation, and collectively figure out a different way to live. We evolved as collective beings. We are not like this. This capitalist society has turned us into unsocial creatures, but we are social creatures, we are cooperative. This is our nature.
Organizing.
We have to organize and collectively build a movement, a mass movement that is strong enough, that is led by a politicized, revolutionary working class, and overthrow them. Take over. Take over the political system, get rid of it and institute our own, which is going to be built in the process of the revolutionary struggle; and we need to take over the means of production and convert it to—instead of profit—human needs that are in line with the requirements of the natural world. That is not an impossible dream. That is something that we would naturally do, if we weren’t being prevented by a class of people who controls everything and enforces that control with their armed might. If we can be strong enough, organize enough to break through that arms might and control society ourselves, we can do a lot better.
It is not going to be utopia, of course. There is going to be a lot to work through in the process and afterward a lot of conflict among the people. But that’s not an antagonistic conflict; we can work it out. The real antagonism is between all of us and those few at the top, who are preventing a decent society from coming into being and who are killing us all.
Charles Derber:
The conversation we‘re having is not a conversation that‘s on the plate in the United States. You tell me, how often you have seen in the New York Times or CNN or even MSNBC, any of the mainstream media, a conversation about whether we should have or get rid of capitalism? You‘re seen as freaking crazy if you raise this question. The idea is not only that capitalism is the only good, it’s the only possible way of organizing society. That‘s the bad news. And it’s really bad, because the ideological forces of control have consolidated around this idea. It’s only in very small niches and communities where this kind of question would get on the table without being laughed off.
Community is important.
When you actually question people about what they believe, it turns out they believe that capitalism is pretty fucked up. They think that capitalism is putting money into Washington and into political processes in a way that is pretty sociopathic, they are pissed off about the bailing out of the banks, they believe that people who work in McDonalds or in nursing homes deserve a living wage, they believe that unions are good things and that community is important, and they believe in the essential need to protect the environment. So, there is a resonance. When do people become receptive to ideas?
There is a counter-culture.
The contradiction that we‘re dealing with is, on the one hand you can‘t even talk about what we‘re talking about today. Capitalism is the only reality that the ideological apparatus of the country will accept as a dialog. And in a sense, there is a resonance to that. There aren’t masses out in San Francisco even who are saying “We want to talk about class revolution or about capitalism,” who would embrace what Stephanie just said. On the other hand, when you carefully interrogate people about what it is they believe on real issues, they want healthcare, good education for their kids, to save the environment for future generations. There is a counter-resonance, a counter-culture, but it operates under the formal mechanism of politics which has become spectacle- and money-driven.
The practice of resistance.
Somehow the practice of resistance and social change has to be diving under the surface of that resonant, controlling ideology, and finding the way to speak to the parts of people’s lives that are telling them everything is wrong in the society, that we need drastic change. We have to be really smart, and I mean that in an emotional way. We have to find a way to viscerally hook into the deep discontents that people are experiencing about their lives, and about their communities, about their kids’ prospects, about their own prospects. It‘s a little bit like an abused child.
You take an abused child, and you try to pull them away from their parents, and they will run to the parent who has been kicking them, and hold on to their knees and say “Don‘t take me away!” I think the body politic in the United States is operating a little bit like that. They know that they’re being abused, and they’re holding on for dear life to the abuser. And what a resistance movement has to do is to provide a source of safety and community that will allow people to realize I can let go of that and actually get rid of it, because it has been destroying my life.
Derrick Jensen:
A lot of environmentalists begin by wanting to protect a specific piece of ground, and they end up questioning the foundation of western civilization. And that‘s because they start by asking “Why is this land being destroyed?” and then they start asking “Why would any land be destroyed?” and then they hear that the needs of the economy are in opposition to the needs of the environment and they ask “Why would you have an economic system that is in opposition to the environment?” There is that huge split between grassroots environmental activists and mainstream activists. And the split is where their fundamental loyalty is.
Grassroots Activism.
With the grassroots environmental activists, the ones that I knew and grew up with is, their emphasis is always biocentric. And the loyalty of Tom Friedman is to capitalism. I keep thinking about the line by Harriet Tubman: “I freed hundreds of slaves, but I could have freed hundreds more if only they had known they were slaves.” It‘s the same thing with capitalism. One of our jobs in this pre-revolutionary phase is to help people to articulate the understanding that they already have, that they are enslaved by the system but they don‘t yet know it, just like the slaves Harriet Tubman tried to free didn’t know it.
Connection.
Charles Derber:
The young people in the country have a feeling like what Derrick is talking about, that their connection to their world is being destroyed. At some level it is translating to an understanding, that this is a symptom of something fundamentally wrong in their way of life. That the environmental destruction and climate change, as terrible as it is, is a symptom of something even deeper. Which is the way we’ve constructed our civilization and our way of life. This is the realm of possibility. But they have to go a long way in their movement, from that very gut-level understanding to being able to articulate the connections that at some level they feel.
Stephanie McMillan:
I agree that people are discontented. They understand that something is wrong. We can‘t go out and just talk about capitalism in abstract concepts at the start. I go out a lot and talk with people, pass out flyers and stuff like that, trying to organize. I start out by saying “It’s really difficult to survive under this system, where a few people take everything and we can’t even make a living,” and everybody is like “Yeah, it‘s horrible!” And I say, “We have to organize to do something about it. We have to fight back against this!”
Building connection.
“Yeah we do!” is a very common response. How do we crush it? I talked about it in very general terms, but a lot of people really want something more concrete. There is no easy formula for it. In order to make a political change—and a revolution is a political change—we need the ideological change first. In order to have a revolution in reality, we need to be able to imagine it in our minds. Organizing people means building relationships. If you can‘t find an organization that you agree with just start one. A conversation with one person, that’s how it starts. And then you find another person, and if you can’t find one or you don’t know one, then go out in the street and start talking to people. You don’t have to have all the answers, you need to open the conversation and you need to have regular meetings.
I know people don‘t like that, but you really need them. And you need to have study, and you need to have action. And that action is widely varied. Even going out and talking to people, that‘s an action. That’s how we start. There is no easy way to do it, there is no way around the tedious work of putting yourself out there. There is no other way to do it.
Derrick Jensen:
How do we crush the system? The North won the civil war before it started. Germany lost WWII before it started. The way you win war is by destroying the enemy’s capacity to wage war. That‘s the point of war. And one of the things we need to do—well, we need to recruit first, there is like fifteen of us—but one of the things we need to do is to destroy capitalism’s ability to wage war on us and on the world. We‘re not quite there yet.
Resisting change.
One of the really big barriers to recruitment is a wonderful metaphor that somebody told me. I was asking a fisheries biologist about blowing up dams, and the fisheries biologist was saying that a flood is a natural process. Every time a river floods, it changes course. It breaks her heart, because all these fish, the frogs and the trees who were in the old channel die. But she said that‘s what rivers do, they change course all the time.
There is a phrase that just stuck with me so hard—every time a river floods there is short term habitat loss and long term habitat gain. And as soon as she said that to me I got chills, thinking Why do we stay in bad relationships? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. Why do we stay in bad jobs? Because we are afraid of the short term loss for long term gain. I am not in any way attempting to dismiss the terror involved in the collapse of any system, which is completely dreadful. But that’s one of the biggest things that is holding us all back, because of the very real prospect of terrible short term loss in exchange for the very obvious long term gain that will be gained by getting rid of capitalism.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s March 2, 2014 Resistance Radio interview with David Zirin. Zirin writes about the politics of sports for The Nation and many other magazines and newspapers. He is the author or co-author of six books, including What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States, and Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Derrick Jensen: How did you find your niche?
Dave Zirin: I grew up a very serious, intense, over-enthused sports fan in New York City in the 1980s. It was a pretty high octane sports time and not just because all of the players were doing cocaine. I didn’t think about politics a great deal during my upbringing, but that changed deal in the 1990s as I was coming of age. I made a real effort to try to find a way to justify or rectify the fact that I wanted to be someone who devoted his life to fighting for social change and I wanted to maintain my sports fandom.
Dave Zirin
The more I looked at sports, the more difficult it was to do. The more you actually look beneath the surface, beneath the adrenaline packed plays, the more you see the rampant nationalism, the insane sexism, the homophobia. If you believe in social justice, sports does not seem like the friendliest place to be. But that perspective really changed for me in 1996 when a basketball player named Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf took the position of not coming out for the national anthem before games. Today if that happened it would be a huge story for 24 hours and then we would go on to something else. But in 1996 this was a huge sports story, big profiles about it, and Rauf was eventually drummed out of the league. I’ll never forget one of the talking heads on ESPN saying that Rauf must see himself in the tradition of activist athletes like Muhammed Ali or Billie Jean King.
I was a huge sports fan and I was not aware that there was this alternative tradition in sports of people who tried to use this hyper-exulted, brought-to-you-by-Nike platform to actually say something about the world. And the more I investigated that the more I started to be fascinated by the fact that so much of this history was hidden from people like myself who were more mainstream sports fans. The second thing that fascinated me was I was seeing parallels to today. I was seeing all the things that a lot of the athletes, then, were talking about—that these struggles were ongoing. That’s really what inspired me to write about it, and it’s definitely not always easy—to put it mildly—because it’s not the friendliest of communities for these kinds of ideas. But, at the same time, the only reason I have a career is that there are a lot of Derrick Jensens out there. People who maybe like sports but hate the practice of viewership because it is so steeped in a right-wing draw and there’s an under-served audience of people who love sports but really don’t like what they’ve become and appreciate a kind of alternative analysis.
DJ: I’ve been a sports fan forever. But, it breaks my heart that they are considered so apolitical. Of course, nothing is apolitical. If something pretends to be apolitical, that supports the status quo.
Derrick Jensen
The Florida State Seminoles and the BCS bowl championship brings together so much of the sexism, the racism against indigenous peoples, and the corporate welfare that characterize so much of the big-money sports.
DZ: Sure, and don’t forget that Jameis Winston, the star quarterback, Heisman Trophy winner of Florida State, had just been cleared of accusations of rape. I’m not going to comment on his innocence or lack thereof. But the investigation itself stunk to high heaven, in terms of how much the local Tallahassee police actually were looking into it. The mentalities that Florida State fans showed towards the young woman for daring to come forward and say that she was sexually assaulted really was a head-spinner. I was getting these really creepy emails from people in Florida State who were, first of all, naming her and encouraging me to out her, which is a journalistic practice I disagree with profoundly. Secondly, they were saying “you should know the real story about her”—what I believe is called “slut-shaming”—talking about her sexual past, and who knows if any of that was true or not? They were actively courting a sports writer, and I wasn’t the only one. There’s a scary culture around sports.
DJ: You mentioned in a recent article that one of the lessons to learn from that whole incident that it’s better to be him than Trayvon Martin in Florida.
DZ: I wrote a piece about that because this country has an unbelievably horrific history of black men accused of rape, particularly in the American South. We can remember Malcolm X’s phrase, “The American South begins at the Canadian border.” But we all know that was a feature of Jim Crow—“hang first, ask questions later,” and famous cases like Emmit Till, a black kid killed for supposedly whistling at a white woman, and the Scottsboro Boys.
Of course, there are so many other times where lynchings took place against black men who were accused of rape. It says a lot about 21st century America that here’s Jameis Winston, accused of rape, and because he’s a football star, the old boy network in Tallahassee rushes to defend him. Tallahassee is not southern Florida—it’s not where my mom grew up, which was with Cubans and Jews. Tallahassee is the old south, and its defense of Winston says something about football culture in the south, and the bizarre effect it has on race and racism there.
Image Credit: Michael Nelson/Epa/REX/Shutterstock (7935715k)
Trayvon Martin was not an athletic star. He was just a kid trying to get home during halftime of the NBA all-star game and you saw the way his death was dealt with in the south and in the power structure, particularly among the police. I’m talking the difference between the sheriff where Trayvon Martin was killed, his not wanting to do anything about that, and the situation in Tallahassee where the local police force are actually telling the woman you don’t want to mess with this player on the Seminoles because that’s serious business right there.
DJ: We can also see the same dynamic in place in Steubenville.
DZ: Maryville, as well. Torrington, Connecticut. The number of cases involving sexual assault by athletes—the only reason we can reference them right now is because of social media and the work of groups like Anonymous who’ve tried to bring them to light. This is ongoing. Is something inherent in jock culture that produces rape culture? And if there is, then how do we combat it?
One of the most hopeful interviews about this subject that I did was with a woman named Katie Hnida. She was a field goal kicker, the first woman to ever score a point in a Division 1 NCAA football game. Katie Hnida’s story is rather horrific. She was going to play for the Colorado Buffaloes—big time NCAA football. She was raped by her teammates, quit the team, and went through every horror story you can imagine for a young woman who accuses someone of rape—let alone football players of rape. She played for New Mexico after that, so she didn’t give up football despite what had happened. And she had an incredibly positive experience on the New Mexico football team. I had a long interview with her where we compared and contrasted those experiences, so we could really try to get at what it is about football in particular, but jock culture in general, that produces rape culture? Can it be isolated? And, frankly, can it be destroyed?
Katie Hnida, an American football player who became the first woman to score in an NCAA Division I-A game, college football’s highest level, as as placekicker for the University of New Mexico Lobos on August 30, 2003.
DJ: What were your and her conclusions?
DZ: That jock culture left unattended becomes rape culture. You have to have people in positions of authority. Partly because of the mentality of football. It’s not grass roots, it’s very militaristic, very top-down, and it’s the people at the top that usually determine what the locker room culture is going to be. That means coaches, head coaches, athletic directors. At the pro ranks it means general managers and team presidents. They create the locker room culture, and unless you have people in authority actively intervening to make it something less toxic, then this is the fruit it will bear.
DJ: That reminds me of some of the stuff I’ve read about the relationship of military culture to rape culture.
A military is going to be at risk for being a high rape culture anyway, but there are some militaries that have had zero tolerance policies for sexual assault that have had much lower rates of rape amongst the soldiers.
DZ: A genetic cousin of rape culture is bullying culture, which we saw in the Miami Dolphins locker room this year with Richie Incognito and Jonathan Martin. Incognito bullied his teammate Martin to the point that Martin left the team. Incognito was suspended, and it imposed this discussion on the NFL of how you define “manliness.” Is Richie Incognito the real man because he’s the guy who’s going to beat up anybody who doesn’t do it his way? Or is Martin not the real man, but the real adult because he’s saying, “Wait a minute this isn’t a school yard, this is a workplace, this is a union workplace, and I’m going to stand up for my rights and actually blow the whistle on this thing?” Who do you actually respect more in that context? It’s a question a lot of NFL players had to confront.
What’s the connection between what we were just talking about with rape culture? The main one is that none of that nonsense in the Miami Dolphins locker room would have happened without the tacit, implicit, or explicit okay of the head coaches themselves. They’re the people who create the culture in the locker room. And that culture’s either productive or helpful, or not. A lot of NFL coaches talked about how they dealt with bully culture. There was a real variance. Some coaches had real philosophies about how to actively intervene in bully culture. Wouldn’t it be great if coaches could talk as openly and as publicly about how they deal or don’t deal with rape culture? They’re very similar dynamics. Groupthink, testosterone, a kind of mob mentality, not wanting to be the person who is singled out—all of these things are similar ingredients in both cultures.
When I say rape culture, when I say bully culture, it’s not that everybody who plays sports is a potential rapist or a potential bully. The question of culture is, to me, much more about turning the other way. So you see a potential rape at a party or you see a bullying situation and you don’t say anything. You’re silent in the face of that. That’s what it means by rape culture or bully culture.
Colin Kaepernick, right, and Eric Reid kneeling during the national anthem before an N.F.L. game.
DJ: And we can say, of course, the same thing about sports writers or writers in general when they attend to it or don’t attend to it.
DZ: That’s absolutely correct. That’s one of the things that’s been difficult at times. Anyone who works at a workplace, whether you’re a professor at a university, or a teacher at a public high school like my wife, or at a hotel like my cousin, wants to feel like they have colleagues. Everybody wants to feel like they have the system’s support for the work that they do. It is difficult to do, sometimes, this kind of writing and sports investigative journalism because there are people who would rather you just shut up. You’re the turd in the punch bowl. That’s sometimes difficult, but it’s not as difficult, obviously, as the people who are actually victimized by rape and bullying. I think it’s very minor compared to that. But this is about fighting cultures. It’s not some kind of level playing field where the people with the best ideas win out. It’s much more complicated than that.
DJ: I think everything you’re saying is really great. It reminds me of this study I saw where they had a bunch of people in a waiting room with two people who were in on the test. One would say something overtly racist or overtly sexist to the group. What they found was that the response of the group as a whole was not so dependent upon what the first person said as it was on the response of the other person in on the test who would say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Then, everyone would look on the statement more approvingly. But if the second person said, “Wow, that’s a terrible thing to say”—expressing disapproval—it gave the other people in the room courage.
I say this in terms of the mob mentality and also what you were saying about the coaches helping to create a culture. If the coach sees it and shuts it down, it’s not going to be reinforced.
DZ: I think that’s absolutely correct. I’ve played on a number of teams over the years and I’ve only had this experience once. The best case scenario would be if the players themselves determined the culture in the locker room. If you have real leadership among people, among good people who attempt to create an atmosphere of respect, you can actually create something that’s positive, there. That’s something that can exist independent of the coach. Unfortunately, though, because hierarchy is so set in sports, that’s a very difficult thing to create organically. In my situation, it only happened because we had all played together on previous teams and then a new coach came in and that new coach was sensitive and smart enough to let us dictate how things went. He would only step in when he felt things going astray. This was basketball, where teamwork and trust is very important. Those are lessons I’ve taken with me my entire life. Most importantly, it keeps me from being too cynical about sports and about sports writing because as bad as it gets, I know it could be better.
DJ: In the face of many of the insanities of this culture, it’s really important to have examples we can look to either in our own experience or in history of people who resisted and actually made a difference.
DZ: It’s so interesting that you say that, too, because the other historical pattern in America (and this is what’s so frustrating) is that when people speak out they’re absolutely vilified for it in the present. Yet decades down the line, the same people who are vilifying them are praising them. Or their children or grandchildren. It’s so much easier to look back in the past than it is in the present day.
I was doing a story recently about the upcoming Sochi Olympics where a lot of athletes may be speaking out on LGBT rights in Russia. One of the heads of the International Olympic Committee was actually praising Tommie Smith and John Carlos for their memorable moment in ’68. He was asked, “Well, what do you think about athletes doing that now?” and it was like a switch flipped. The cognitive dissonance to be able to do that, to me, is absolutely stunning—to be able to just jump so quickly, so abruptly, and so crudely. The intellectual crudeness to be able to go from “Wow, dissent is beautiful” to “Well, not dissent today” to “Politics: keep them out of the Olympics.” It’s unbelievable. And yet, that’s the rhetoric, that’s the discourse, that’s what we’re dealing with all the time.
DJ: And, of course, this is not just in sports. We can say the same thing about John Brown. We can say the same thing about the Haymarket Martyrs. We can say the same thing with the suffragists.
DZ: That’s the truth. It’s usually one of two things—either you’re buried and forgotten or your political teeth are extracted and you’re smoothed down to become something else. We deal with it every year. There are articles about the “real” Martin Luther King by people on the left who try to remind everyone that King actually believed in things that are quite radical even today. Yesterday the Department of Defense was tweeting King quotes— I don’t even think they saw ghoulishness of this—“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.” Is that how the Department of Defense justifies drone bombings overseas? “Yeah, we may be limiting people’s lives but, hey, that’s not really what matters.” Is there any self-consciousness that goes into that? I’m sure if Martin Luther King had been in charge of the Department of Defense, he would have turned it into the world’s most luxuriant day care center. It’s just outrageous.
In sports, though, it’s particularly difficult to get the true stories out. One reason for that is oftentimes the retired athletes themselves don’t necessarily have a vested interest in going back to their more controversial pasts. There’s no money in that. You want to be able to be on the speaker’s circuit. You want to be able to go to autograph shows.
Also, context is everything. It’s easier to be a rebel in 1968 when the fires are burning all around than in 2014, even if those fires are still there just as much as they were in 1968. They just operate in a different way.
DJ: Can we touch on the mascot issue?
DZ: Why would anyone who doesn’t live in Oklahoma even know there was such a thing as the Oklahoma Seminole Nation? When are we taught that in history class? When is the Oklahoma Seminole Nation asked for comment on anything? This is some of the invisibility of racism. Few people in our society are treated with such abject invisibility as Native Americans.
I did a talk at a college in Oregon and I was asked a question by a perfectly well-meaning liberal college student. We were talking about the Washington name change, the “R” word, and this student said to me, “Do you think the reason why there are still teams with Native American mascots is because there are no Native Americans left?”
I understood what he was trying to ask. It’s a demographic question. The reason you don’t have teams named after Latinos or African Americans is because you couldn’t. Native Americans make up 0.9% of the United States. There was a Native American young girl sitting right in front of him. She was 12 years old and she stood up in the meeting and looked at him and said, “There still are some of us left, you know.” You could have heard a pin drop.
It’s this casual racism and invisibility. White people in particular get so damn defensive where if you talk about racism in society it immediately becomes, “Oh, so what we’re all racists.” Because it’s a lot easier to do that than confronting racism itself. This is one of those classic cases. I’m not saying everyone who wears a Redskins cap or a Seminole jersey is a racist like they’re George Lincoln Rockwell 2.0. I am saying we need to do some reflecting about why there’s a team named after a racial slur, about why the Florida State Seminoles are allowed to go around with impunity and say they do this with the seal of approval from the Seminole Nation when the Florida Seminoles don’t even make up forty percent of the Seminoles nationally. That gets to some very interesting points about why the majority of Seminoles are in Oklahoma, and then you have to look seriously at this nation’s past, about the Indian Removal Act. It’s like pulling a string on a sweater. When people are watching sports or enjoying sports that’s the last thing they want to do.
DJ: I didn’t know this about their mascot. Can you mention about Osceola and make a connection to Mandela?
DZ: Absolutely. When Nelson Mandela died, quite correctly he was discussed with the most hushed possible tones—not just in the United States, but around the world. I think one of the reasons why was this person who endured 27 years behind bars emerged as the leader of his country. A remarkable thing. And he was a freedom fighter, of course, behind bars.
Osceola
Osceola was an unbelievable freedom fighter in the Seminole Wars. He fought the US Army to a standstill on multiple occasions. There was supposed to be a treaty with Osceola and when he went to the treaty, he was immediately arrested and thrown in jail. The United States was actually subject to international condemnation because of this. That’s how esteemed Osceola was. And he died in prison. I wrote in my article that Osceola was in many respects the American Mandela if Mandela had never gotten out of Robbin Island, or he is the American Steven Biko—the South African who never came out.
Yet, before Florida State games, you have someone dressed up like Osceola—usually a white person in war paint—who rides out on a horse. Osceola never actually rode a horse because he fought in the swamps. You see this constant miseducation as everyone cheers for Osceola. And, the thing about it that’s hardest to stomach is that Osceola was the replacement of Florida State’s first mascot, who was a step-and-fetch-it Native American character who went by the name of Sammy Seminole. That really was his name. In a weird way, though, Sammy Seminole is more honest for what this is, which is minstrelsy, than Osceola who is an amazing historical figure.
Can you imagine worldwide condemnation if South Africa had someone dressed up like Steven Biko or dressed up like Nelson Mandela to dance around a stadium to psyche people up before a game? You would never see that in a million years. You see that in this country, frankly, because that’s the price of colonialism, depopulation, genocide, Indian Removal. This is what you get.
DJ: Can we do a two-minute version of “sports are just fun and games?” No, actually, they’re big business, with massive corporate welfare.
DZ: There’s no getting around that. This has been a real change in the economics of sports over the last 30 years—the mass infusion of corporate welfare in sports and stadiums really operating like a neoliberal Trojan horse where cities are re-organized on neoliberal grounds.
You and I can go on a magical mystery tour through the former industrial Midwest—Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit. What all these places have in common is new publicly funded stadiums for basketball, baseball, and football. At the same time the erosion of union jobs, and the jobs that are created are service industry jobs. It’s not just the question of public tax money going into these stadiums, it’s the question of the return on the investment, and what jobs are actually created. Unfortunately, far too much of public stadium funding is a magical alchemy that turns tax dollars into private property.
DJ: It’d be like if I wanted to start a business and then I went to the taxpayers to the get funding to build my factory.
DZ: It’s a hell of a scam. Often, it’s a popular thing to get a new stadium, although much less so according to polls over the last fifteen years, as they have clearly and dramatically not returned on their investment, like what happened in Seattle where the beloved Supersonics basketball team was ruthlessly ripped from the city. I think you see the price much more deeply in a place like New Orleans where the levees broke and the only place suitable for shelter was the Superdome, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars, when many of the people huddled in there could not have afforded to buy a ticket to actually see a game.
DJ: I read a study back in the early ‘90s about the “multiplier effect” when a new stadium is built. Could you comment on that?
DZ: That’s a classic line about stadium funding. If you literally dumped a billion dollars from a plane, and people just picked it up and spent it, it would have a better economic multiplier effect than the building of stadiums. That in itself exposes these things for what they are.
This is the truth, Derrick, I used to go on radio shows and debate people about public stadium funding and you can’t debate it anymore, because there’s so much data that it’s a terrific waste of money. It’s like debating whether or not the sky is green. No one wants to take that position on it, either. In the context of the new normal of perpetual crisis, in which we find cities starved by gentrification and privatization, the giving of public money isn’t through referendums or public votes, but in paying off the right politicians for their stadiums.
DJ: What’s the take home message of all this? What would you like for sports fans and people who want social change to see? I’m think about the basketball player Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, the guy you said influenced you back in the 90s, who played for the Denver Nuggets. It seems to me that his courage helped give you courage. I think that’s part of how social change takes place. One person stands up, and you stand up and hold his hand. Now the hope is that someone else will stand up and hold your hand, until we don’t have to have these discussions any more.
DZ: I think that’s great. I would also say that for a lot of these athletes the best thing we can do in the media is to be an ally. That’s like being an offensive lineman—you want to clear space so their voice can be heard. If people are saying your name too much, you might be doing something wrong.
DJ: This is Derrick Jensen for Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. Thank you so much.
When I’m on the road, I always carry a baseball bat in the back of my truck to use each time I see a snake. If the snake is sunning herself, I stop the truck and use the bat to shoo her to safety. Sometimes, if the snake is especially sluggish, I loop her over the bat and carry her out of traffic. If she’s already dead I don’t use the bat at all, but carry her to my truck, then take her to some quiet spot where she can lie to decompose with dignity.
But most often when I stop I have to use the bat not to save the snake but kill her. Too many times I’ve seen them live and writhing with broken backs, flattened vertebrae, even crushed heads.
I hate cars, and what they do. I do not so much mind killing, if there is a purpose; if, for example, I’m going to eat what I kill. But I despise this incidental killing that comes each time a soft and living body happens to be in our way. Such a killing is without purpose, and often even without awareness. I have driven through swarms of mating mayflies, and have seen a windshield turn red blotch by blotch as it strikes engorged mosquitos. I once saw a migration of salamanders destroyed by heavy traffic in a late evening rain. I leapt from my car and ran to carry as many as I could from one side of the road to the other, but for every one I grabbed there were fifty who made it not much further than the first white line.
A couple of years ago someone dropped off a huge white rabbit near my home. Knowing the cruelty of abandoning pets into the wild and the stupidity of introducing exotics did not lessen my enjoyment of watching him cavort with the local cottontails a third his size. But I often worried. If at one hundred yards I could easily pick him out from among the jumbled rocks that were his home, how much more easily would he be seen by coyotes or hawks? Each time I saw him I was surprised anew at his capacity to live in the wild.
I needn’t have worried about predators. One day I walked to get my mail, and saw him dead and stiff in the center of the road. I was saddened, and as I carried him away to where he could at last be eaten by coyotes, I considered my shock of recognition at his death. I had, as I believe happens constantly in our culture–in our time of the final grinding away at what shreds of ecological integrity still remain intact–been fearing precisely the wrong thing. I had been fearing a natural death. But in one way or another, most of us living today–human and nonhuman alike–will not die the natural death that has been the birthright of every being since life began. Instead we will find ourselves struck down–like the rabbit, like the snakes, like the cat whose skull I had to crush after his spine was severed by the shiny fender of a speeding car–incidental victims of the modern, industrial, mechanical economy. This is no less true for the starving billions of humans than it is for the salmon incidentally ground up in the turbines of dams, and no less true for those who die of chemically-induced cancers than it is for the mayflies I killed by the thousands, blithely driving from one place to another.
All of us today stand as if transfixed by the headlights of the hurtling machine that inevitably will destroy us and all others in its path. Oh, we move slightly to the left or slightly to the right, but I think, as I carefully place the rabbit in a tufted hollow at the base of a tree, that even to the last, most of us have no idea what it is that’s killing us.
Originally published in the September/October 1998 issue of “The Road-RIPorter.” Republished in the January-March 2007 issue of “Carbusters.”
A different version of this interview appeared in A Language Older Than Words
Derrick Jensen: What is the relationship between atrocity and silence?
Judith Herman: Atrocities are actions so horrifying they go beyond words. For people who witness or experience atrocities, there is a kind of silencing that comes from not knowing how to put these experiences into words. At the same time, atrocities are the crimes perpetrators most want to hide. This creates a powerful convergence of interest: No one wants to speak about them. No one wants to remember them. Everyone wants to pretend they didn’t happen.
DJ: In Trauma and Recovery, you write, “In order to escape accountability the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting.”
JH: This is something with which we are all familiar. It seems that the more extreme the crimes, the more dogged and determined the efforts to deny that the crimes happened. So we have, for example, almost a hundred years after the fact, an active and apparently state-sponsored effort on the part of the Turkish government to deny there was ever an Armenian genocide. We still have a whole industry of Holocaust denial. I just came back from Bosnia where, because there hasn’t been an effective medium for truth-telling and for establishing a record of what happened, you have the nationalist governmental entities continuing to insist that ethnic cleansing didn’t happen, that the various war crimes and atrocities committed in that war simply didn’t occur.
DJ: How does this happen?
JH: On the most blatant level, it’s a matter of denying the crimes took place. Whether it’s genocide, military aggression, rape, wife beating, or child abuse, the same dynamic plays itself out, beginning with an indignant, almost rageful denial, and the suggestion that the person bringing forward the information–whether it’s the victim or another informant–is lying, crazy, malicious, or has been put up to this by someone else. Then of course there are a number of fallback positions to which perpetrators can retreat if the evidence is so overwhelming and irrefutable it cannot be ignored, or rather, suppressed. This, too, is something we’re familiar with: the whole raft of predictable rationalizations used to excuse everything from rape to genocide: the victim exaggerates; the victim enjoyed it; the victim provoked or otherwise brought it on herself; the victim wasn’t really harmed; and even if some slight damage has been done, it’s now time to forget the past and get on with our lives: in the interests of preserving peace–or in the case of domestic violence, preserving family harmony–we need to draw a veil over these matters. The incidents should never be discussed, and preferably they should be forgotten altogether.
DJ: Something I wonder, as I watch corporate spokespeople utter absurdities to defend, for example, the polluting of rivers or the poisoning of children, is whether these people believe their own claims. I’ll give an example: I live less than three miles from the Spokane River, in Washington state, which begins about forty miles east of here as it flows out of Lake Coeur d’Alene. Lake Coeur d’Alene, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, is also one of the most polluted with heavy metals. There are days when more than a million pounds of lead drains into the lake from mine tailings on the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. Hundreds of migrating tundra swans die here each year from lead poisoning as they feed in contaminated wetlands. Some of the highest blood lead levels ever recorded in human beings were from children in this area. Yet just last summer the Spokesman-Review, the paper of record for the region, wrote that concern over this pollution is unnecessary because “there are no dead [human] bodies washing up on the river banks.” To return to the original question, to what degree do both perpetrators and their apologists believe their own claims? Did my father, to provide another example, really believe his claims that he wasn’t beating us?
JH: Do perpetrators believe their own lies? I have no idea, and I don’t have much trust in those who claim they do. Certainly we in the mental health profession don’t have a clue when it comes to what goes on in the hearts and minds of perpetrators of either political atrocities or sexual and domestic crimes.
For one thing, we don’t get to know them very well. They aren’t interested in being studied–by and large they don’t volunteer–so we study them when they’re caught. But when they’re caught, they tell us whatever they think we want to hear.
This leads to a couple of problems. The first is that we have to wend our way through lies and obfuscation to attempt to discover what’s really going on. The second problem is even larger and more difficult. Most of the psychological literature on perpetrators is based on studies of convicted or reported offenders, which represents a very small and skewed, unrepresentative group. If you’re talking about rape, for example, since the reporting rates are, by even the most generous estimates, under twenty percent, you lose eighty percent of the perpetrators off the top. Your sample is reduced further by the rates at which arrests are made, charges are filed, convictions are obtained, and so forth, which means convicted offenders represent about one percent of all perpetrators. Now, if your odds of being caught and convicted of rape are basically one in one hundred, you have to be extremely inept to become a convicted rapist. Thus, the folks we are normally able to study look fairly pathetic, and often have a fair amount of psychopathology and violence in their own histories. But they’re not representative of your ordinary, garden-variety rapist or torturer, or the person who gets recruited to go on an ethnic cleansing spree. We don’t know much about these people. And the one thing victims say most often is that these people look normal, and that nobody would have believed it about them. That was true even of Nazi war criminals. From a psychiatric point of view, these people didn’t look particularly disturbed. In some ways that’s the scariest thing of all.
DJ: Given the misogyny, genocide, and ecocide endemic in our culture, I wonder how much of that normality is only seeming.
JH: If you’re part of a predatory and militaristic culture, then to behave in a predatory and exploitative way is not deviant, per se. Of course there are rules as to who, if you want to use these terms, might be a legitimate victim, a person who may be attacked with impunity. And most perpetrators are exquisitely sensitive to these rules.
DJ: To your understanding, what are the levels of rape and childhood sexual abuse in this country?
JH: The best data we have is that one of four women will be raped over a lifetime. For childhood sexual abuse I like to quote Diana Russell’s data, which I believe is still the standard by which these studies are measured. She asked a random sample of 900 and some women to participate in a survey of crime victimization. The interviews were in-depth, and conducted in the subjects’ native languages by trained interviewers. She found that 38 percent of females had a childhood experience that met the criminal code definition of sexual assault. Some people have said that because Russell’s study was done in California, it’s not representative, but the results from other studies have been, while slightly lower, still in the same ballpark. It’s a common experience. It’s less common for boys, but there is still a substantial risk for them as well.
DJ: I remember reading something like 7 to 10 percent.
JH: I’d say a fair estimate would be around ten percent for boys, and two to three times that for girls. It is a little more difficult to determine levels of sexual abuse for boys, because most are victimized by male perpetrators, which adds a layer of secrecy and shame to the child’s experience.
DJ: This is a huge percentage of the population which has been severely traumatized. Why isn’t this front page news every day?
JH: Actually there is a point to be made here as well. One of the questions Diana asked her informants who disclosed childhood abuse was: What impact do you think this has had on your life? Only about one in four said it had done great or long-lasting damage. Virtually everyone said, “It was horrible at the time, and I hated it.” But half of the women considered themselves to have recovered reasonably well, and didn’t see that it had affected their lives in a major way. I say this not to minimize the importance of what happened, but to give due respect and recognition to the resilience and resourcefulness of victims, most of whom recover without any formal intervention.
Part of the reason for this is that not all traumas are equal. Diana and I took a look at the factors that seemed to lead to long-lasting impact, and they were the kinds of things you would expect. Women who reported prolonged, repeated abuse by someone close–father, stepfather, or another member of the immediate family–abuse that was very violent, that involved a lot of bodily invasion, or that involved elements of betrayal were the ones who had the most difficulty recovering.
But you were asking why this isn’t front page news. The answer is partly that this isn’t new. And it’s also not something unique to this country. Wherever studies of comparable sophistication are carried out, the numbers are pretty much the same. We may have a lot more street and handgun violence than, for example, Northern Europe and Scandinavia, but private crimes are an international phenonemon.
DJ: But they aren’t ubiquitous to all human cultures. I’ve read in multiple sources that prior to contact with our culture there have been some indigenous cultures in which rape and child abuse were rare or nonexistent. I know that the Okanagan Indians of what is now British Columbia, for example, had no word in their language for either rape or child abuse. They did have a word that meant the violation of a woman. Literally translated it meant someone looked at me in a way I don’t like.
JH: I think it would be hard to establish that rape was nonexistent in a culture. How would you determine that? But you can certainly say there is great variation. The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday looked at data from over one hundred cultures as to the prevalence of rape, and divided them into high- or low-rape cultures. She found that high rape cultures are highly militarized and sex segregated. There is a lot of difference in status between men and women. The care of children is devalued and delegated to subordinate females. She also found that the creation myths of high rape cultures recognize only a male deity rather than a female deity or a couple. When you think about it, that is rather bizarre. It would be an understandable mistake to think women make babies all by themselves, but it’s preposterous to think men do that alone. So you’ve got to have a fairly elaborate and counterintuitive mythmaking machine in order to fabricate a creation myth that recognizes only a male deity. There was another interesting finding, which is that high rape cultures had recent experiences–meaning in the last few hundred years–of famine or migration. That is to say, they had not reached a stable adaptation to their ecological niche.
Sadly enough, when you tally these risk factors, you realize you’ve pretty much described our culture.
DJ: I’d like to back up for a moment to define some terms. Can you tell me more about the phenomenon of psychological trauma?
JH: Trauma occurs when people are subjected to experiences that involve extreme terror, a life threat, or exposure to grotesque violence. The essential ingredient seems to be the condition of helplessness.
In the aftermath of such experiences it is normal and predictable that traumatized people will experience particular symptoms of psychological distress. Most people experience these transiently, and recover more or less spontaneously. Others go on to have prolonged symptoms we’ve come to call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
It’s important to note, by the way, that PTSD doesn’t merely affect “helpless” women and children. We see it in combat veterans. We see it in prisoners of war. Concentration camp survivors. We see it with survivors of natural disasters, fires, and industrial and automobile accidents. We see it in cops. Sophisticated police departments now include traumatic stress debriefing for their officers involved in any sort of critical incident such as a shooting. They had discovered that within two years of involvement in a critical incident, enormous numbers of well-trained, valuable, experienced police officers were being lost to disabilities, physical complaints, substance abuse, or psychiatric problems. We see it in firefighters who have to rescue people from burning buildings, and who sometimes have to bring out dead bodies. We see it in rescue workers who have to clear away bodies after a flood or earthquake. We see it most commonly in the civilian casualties, if you will, of our private war against women and children, that is, the survivors of rape and domestic violence.
DJ: What are the symptoms?
JH: It’s easiest to think about symptoms in three categories. The first are called symptoms of hyperarousal. In the aftermath of a terrifying experience people see danger everywhere. They’re jumpy, they startle easily, and they have a hard time sleeping. They’re irritable, and more prone to anger. This seems to be a biological phenomenon, not just a psychological one.
The second thing that happens is that people relive the experience in nightmares and flashbacks. Any little reminder can set them off. For example, a Vietnam veteran involved in helicopter combat might react years later when a news or weather helicopter flies overhead.
DJ: All through my teens and twenties when someone would ask me to go water skiing, my response externally would be to say, “No, thanks,” but my internal response was, “Fuck you.” I never could figure out why until a few years ago I asked my mom, and she said that there were beatings associated with water skiing trips when I was a small child. I never knew that. I just always knew that water skiing pissed me off.
JH: Sometimes people understand the trigger, but sometimes they won’t have complete memory of the event. They may respond to the reminder as you did, by becoming terrified or agitated or angry.
DJ: And it doesn’t have to be so dramatic as the stereotypical Vietnam vet who goes berserk when he hears a car backfire.
JH: A lot of times it’s more subtle. Someone who was raped in the backseat of a car may have a lot of feelings everytime she gets into a car, particularly one that resembles the one in which she was raped.
This reliving, these intrusions, are not a normal kind of remembering, where the smell of cinammon rolls, for example, may remind you of your grandmother. Instead, people say it’s like playing the same videotape over and over. It’s a repetitive and often wordless reexperiencing. People remember the smells, the sounds, or if it was raining, if it was cold. The images. It was dark. Sexual abuse survivors often say, “I felt like I was smothering. I thought I was going to choke.” But it’s very hard for people to remember it in a kind of fluid verbal narrative that is modifiable according to the circumstances. People can’t give you the short form and the long form, and describe it differently and understand it differently over time. It’s just a repetitive sequence of terrifying images and sensations.
DJ: Is that symptom also physiological?
JH: Oh, yes. Studies have shown that traumatic memories are perceived and encoded in the brain differently from regular memories.
The third group of symptoms that people have–and these are almost the opposite of the intrusive nightmares and flashbacks, the dramatic symptoms–is a shutting down of feelings, a constriction of emotions, intellect, and behavior. It’s characteristic of people with PTSD to oscillate between feeling overwhelmed, enraged, terrified, desperate, or in extreme grief and pain, and feeling nothing at all. People describe themselves as numb. They don’t feel anything, they aren’t interested in things that used to interest them, they avoid situations that might remind them of the trauma. You, for example, probably avoided water skiing in order to avoid the traumatic memories. Water skiing may not be much to give up, but people sometimes avoid relationships, they avoid sexuality, they make their lives smaller, in an attempt to stay away from the overwhelming feelings.
In addition, one finds all kinds of physical complaints. In fact, the more the culture shames people for admitting psychological weakness, the more these symptoms manifest themselves physically. Rather than seeking psychological help, people go to the doctor seeking sleeping pills, or go to the neighborhood bar to get the number one psychoactive drug available without prescription, which is alcohol. We see a lot of alcohol and substance abuse as a secondary complication of PTSD.
DJ: Where does dissociation fit into all this?
JH: It’s central. Dissociation itself is really quite fascinating, and I don’t think any of us can quite pretend to understand it. We all seem to have the capacity to dissociate, though for some people the capacity is greater. And certain circumstances seem to call it up: it involves a mental escape from experience at a time when physical escape is impossible.
When I teach, I quite often use automobile accidents to exemplify this. I’ll ask people, “Can you describe what it was like in the moment before impact, the moment of impact, and the moment after?”
People often describe a sense of derealization: this isn’t happening. They also describe depersonalization: this is happening, but to someone else, while I sit outside watching the crash and feeling very sorry for the person in the car. They may feel as though they’re watching a movie. They describe a slowing of time. They describe a sense of tunnel vision, where they focus only on a few details such as sounds or smells or imagery, but where context and peripheral detail fall away. Some people describe alterations of pain perception; we’ve all heard stories of people who walk on broken legs until they get to safety, and then collapse, or people who are able to ignore their own pain while they rescue others. And then, of course, some people have amnesia. Memory gaps in the aftermath. They’ll say, “I remember the moment before, and then the next thing I know I was on the shoulder outside the car.” Even with no head trauma and no loss of consciousness, there will often be a loss of memory. All of these, of course, are not specific to car wrecks, but happen with all sorts of psychological trauma.
DJ: Dissociation sounds like a very good thing.
JH: You’d think so. But more and more of the research is zeroing in on dissociation as a predictor of more longlasting symptoms. For example, some studies were done after the San Francisco earthquake, and the Oakland fire, two big disasters that happened in the last decade. Each is a single event that affected lots of people, and invoked large-scale responses by emergency personnel. So researchers had a couple of chances to interview and examine many survivors, and then to call them up three, six, and more months later to see how they were doing. Well, the folks who dissociated during the earthquake turned out to be more likely to have PTSD later. There seems to be something about that altered state of consciousness that is protective at the moment, but gets you into trouble later on. By the way, people who dissociated at the time of the fire also tended to lose some of their adaptive coping in the moment. They either behaved helplessly, almost like zombies or as if they were paralyzed, or they lost the capacity to judge danger realistically. The rescue people had the most trouble with this latter group, because they would insist on going back into burning houses to rescue possessions or animals. They exposed themselves to danger, seemingly heedless of the consequences.
DJ: What’s the difference between trauma and captivity?
JH: Trauma can emerge from a single event like a fire, earthquake, or auto accident, where you’re in the situation, you survive it, and then you get on with your life. You may continue to relive it in fantasy, but it’s not happening over and over. Even if you live in an earthquake or flood zone you still have a choice as to whether to rebuild or move away.
Based on my work with domestic abuse survivors, as well as victims of political terror, I began to ask: What happens when a person is exposed not to a single terrifying incident, but rather to prolonged, repeated trauma? I came to understand the similarities between concentration or slave labor camps or torture situations on the one hand, and on the other hand, the situation of domestic or sexual violence, where the perpetrator may beat or sexually abuse his wife or children for years on end. We see this also in the sex trade, where there’s a criminally organized traffic in women and kids, and we sometimes see this sort of captivity in some religious cults, where people are not free to leave.
In situations where the trauma happens over and over, and where it is imposed by human design (as opposed to the effects of weather, or some other nonhuman force), one sees a series of personality changes in addition to simple PTSD. People begin to lose their identity, their self-respect. They begin to lose their autonomy and independence.
Because people in captivity are most often isolated from other relationships–that this is so in normal captivity is obvious and intentional, but it is overwhelmingly the case in domestic violence as well, as perpetrators often demand their victims increasingly cut all other social ties–they are forced to depend for basic survival on the very person who is abusing them. This creates a complicated bond between the two, and it skews the victim’s perception of the nature of human relationships. The situation is even worse for children raised in these circumstances, because their personality is formed in the context of an exploitative relationship, in which the overarching principles are those of coercion and control, of dominance and subordination.
Whether we are talking about adults or children, it often happens that a kind of sadistic corruption enters into the captive’s emotional relational life. People lose their sense of faith in themselves, in other people. They come to believe or view all relationships as coercive, and come to feel that the strong rule, the strong do as they please, that the world is divided into victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and rescuers. They believe that all human relations are contaminated and corrupted, that sadism is the principle that rules all relationships.
DJ: Might makes right. “Social Darwinism.” The selfish gene theory. You’ve just described the principles that undergird our political and economic systems.
JH: And there are other losses involved. A loss of basic trust. A loss of feeling of mutuality of relatedness. In its stead is emplaced a contempt for self and others. If you’ve been punished for showing autonomy, initiative, or independence, after a while you’re not going to show them. In the aftermath of this kind of brutalization, victims have a great deal of difficulty taking responsibility for their lives. Often, people who try to help get frustrated because we don’t understand why the victims seem so passive, seem so unable to extricate themselves or to advocate on their own behalf. They seem to behave as though they’re still under the perpetrator’s control, even though we think they’re now free. But in some ways the perpetrator has been internalized.
Captivity also creates disturbances in intimacy, because if you view the world as a place where everyone is either a victim, a perpetrator, an indifferent or helpless bystander, or a rescuer, there’s no room for relationships of mutuality, for cooperation, for responsible choices. There’s no room to follow agreements through to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. The whole range of cooperative relational skills, and all the emotional fulfillment that goes with them, is lost. And that’s a great deal to lose.
DJ: It seems to me that part of the reason for this loss is not simply the physical trauma itself, but also the fact that the traumatizing actions can’t be acknowledged.
JH: And much more broadly, because they take place within a relationship motivated by a need to dominate, and in which coercive control is the central feature.
When I teach about this, I describe the methods of coercive control perpetrators use. It turns out that violence is only one of the methods, and it’s not even one of the most frequent. It doesn’t have to be used all that often; it just has to be convincing. In the battered women’s movement, there’s a saying: “One good beating lasts a year.”
DJ: What constitutes a good beating?
JH: If it’s extreme enough, when the victim looks into the eyes of the perpetrator she realizes, “Oh, my God, he really could kill me.”
What goes along with this violence are other methods of coercive control that have as their aim the victim’s isolation, and the breakdown of the victim’s resistance and spirit.
DJ: Such as?
JH: You have capricious enforcement of lots of petty rules, and you have concomitant rewards. Prisoners and hostages talk about this all the time: if you’re good, maybe they’ll let you take a shower, or give you something extra to eat. You have the monopolization of perception that follows from the closing off of any outside relationships or sources of information. Finally, and I think this is the thing that really breaks people’s spirits, perpetrators often force victims to engage in activities that the victims find morally reprehensible or disgusting. Once you’ve forced a person to violate his or her moral codes, to break faith with him- or herself–the fact that it’s done under duress does not remove the shame or guilt of the experience–you may never again even need to use threats. At that point the victim’s self-hatred, self-loathing, and shame will be so great that you don’t have to beat her up, because she’s going to do it herself.
DJ: That reminds me of something I read about those who collaborated with the Nazis: “A man who had knowingly compromised himself did not revolt against his masters, no matter what idea had driven him to collaboration: too many mutual skeletons in the closet. . . . There were so many proofs of the absolute obedience that could be expected of men of honor who had drifted into collaboration.”
JH: Perpetrators know this. These methods are known, they’re taught. Pimps teach them to one another. Torturers in the various clandestine police forces involved in state-sponsored torture teach them to each other. They’re taught at taxpayer expense at our School of the Americas. The Nazi war criminals who went to Latin America passed on this knowledge. It is apparently a point of pride among many Latin American torturers that they have come up with techniques the Nazis didn’t know about.
DJ: We’ve spent a lot of time delving into the abyss, and I think what I would like to do now is emerge on the other side. But first, there’s something else about victims I would like to explore. You’ve written that symptoms of PTSD can be interpreted as attempts to tell their story.
JH: People not only relive the experiences in memory, but sometimes behave in ways that reenact the trauma. So a combat vet with PTSD might sign up for especially risky duty, or reenlist in the special forces. Later he may get a job in another high risk line of work. A sexual survivor may engage in behaviors likely to result in another victimization. Especially regarding revictimization after child abuse, the data are really very sobering. One way to view all this is that the person is trying desperately to tell the story, in action if necessary. That’s a bit teleological, but we do know that when people are finally able to put their experiences into words in a relational context, where they can be heard and understood, they often get quite a bit of relief.
DJ: You wrote in Trauma and Recovery that “When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery.” How does that work? What happens inside survivors when the truth is recognized?
JH: I wish I knew. It’s miraculous. I don’t understand it. I just observe it, and try to facilitate it. I think it’s a natural healing process that has to do with the restoration of human connection and agency. If you think of trauma as the moment when those two things are destroyed, then there is something about telling the trauma story in a place where it can be heard and acknowledged that seems to restore both agency and connection. The possibility of mutuality returns. People feel better.
The most important principles for recovery are restoring power and choice or control to the person who has been victimized, and facilitating the person’s reconnection with her or his natural social suports, the people who are important in that person’s life. In the immediate aftermath, of course, the first step is always to reestablish some sense of safety in the survivor’s life. That means getting out of physical danger, and that means also creating some sort of minimally safe social environment in which the person has people to count on, to rely on, to connect to. Nobody can recover in isolation.
It’s only after safety is established that it becomes appropriate for this person to have a chance to tell the trauma story in more depth. There we run into two kinds of mistakes. One is the idea that it’s not necessary to tell the story, and that the person would be much better off not talking about it.
DJ: It’s over. Just get on with your life.
JH: That may work for a while, and it might be the right choice in any given circumstance, but there comes a time eventually where if the story isn’t told it festers. So one mistake is suppressing it, which comes back to the silencing we spoke of earlier. These are horrible things and nobody really wants to hear or think about them. The victim doesn’t, the bystander doesn’t, the perpetrator certainly doesn’t. So there’s a very natural tendency on everyone’s part to say, “Let’s forget the whole thing.”
The other mistake is to try to push people into talking about it prematurely, or when the circumstances aren’t right, or when it isn’t the person’s choice. It’s almost as though we respond with either numbing or intrusion; we either want to withdraw and avoid hearing the story, or we want the victim to tell all in grotesque detail. Sometimes there’s a kind of a voyeuristic fascination that gets engaged. If the timing, pacing, and setting isn’t right, all you’re going to have is another reenactment. You’re not going to have the integrative experience of putting the story into a context that makes meaning out of it and gives a sense of resolution, which is what you’re really aiming for. You don’t want just a simple recitation of facts, you want the person to be able to talk about how it felt, how she feels about it now, what it meant to her then, what it means to her now, how she made sense of it then, how she’s trying to make sense of it now. It’s in that kind of processing that people reestablish their sense of continuity with their own lives and connection with others.
DJ: This seems to be tied to mourning what was lost.
JH: Part of the motivation for the idea of “Let’s not talk about it” is the belief that you can go back to the way you were before the trauma, and what people find is that’s just not possible. Once you’ve seen, up close, the evil human beings are capable of, you’re not going to see the world the same way, you’re not going to see other people the same way, and you’re not going to see yourself the same way. We can all fantasize about how brave or cowardly we would be in extreme situations, but people who’ve been exposed know what they did, and what they didn’t do. And almost inevitably they failed to live up to some kind of expectation of themselves. There has to be a sense of grieving what was lost. It’s only after that mourning process that people can come through it and say, “That was a hard lesson, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, but I am stronger or wiser.” There is a way that people learn from adversity. People will say, “I had a crisis of faith and I found out what’s important, what I really believe in.”
DJ: How especially does an abused child mourn what he’s never known?
JH: It’s what you’ve never had that is the hardest to grieve. It’s unfair. You only get one childhood, and you were cheated out of the one that every child is entitled to.
DJ: What comes next?
JH: The recovery doesn’t end with the telling and hearing of the story. There is another step after that, which has to do with people reforming their connections, moving from a preoccupation with the past to feeling more hopeful for the future, feeling that they have a future, that it’s not just a matter of enduring and going through life as a member of the walking dead. Instead there is an ability to knowingly affirm life even after surviving the worst other people have to dish out. And I do think that what renews people is the hope and belief that their own capacity to love has not been destroyed. When people feel damned and doomed, and feel they can’t go on living, the fear often has to do with the feeling that they have been so contaminated with the perpetrator’s hate, and taken so much of it into themselves, that there is nothing left but rage, and hate, and distrust, and fear and contempt.
When people go through mourning, and through their crisis of faith, what they come back to as bedrock is their own capacity to love. Sometimes that connection is frail and tenuous, but whether it is with animals, nature, music, or other humans, that’s the bedrock to which they must return, to that one caring relationship the perpetrator was never able to destroy. And then they build from there.
I think as people move into their lives again, the ones who do best are the ones who’ve developed what Robert Jay Lifton calls a survivor mission. I’ve seen it happen so many times, that people turn this experience around, and make it a gift to others. That really is the only way you can transcend an atrocity. You can’t bury it. You can’t make it go away. You can’t dissociate it. It comes back. But you can transcend it, first by telling the truth about it, and then by using it in the service of humanity, saying, “This isn’t the way we want to live. We want to live differently.”
In the aftermath of terror many survivors find themselves much clearer and more daring about going after what they want in life, and in relationships. They straighten things out with their families and lovers and friends, and they often say, “This is the kind of closeness I want, and this is the kind of stuff I don’t want.” When people are sensitized to the dynamics of exploitation, they are able to say, “I don’t want this in my life.” And they often become very courageous about speaking truth to power.
I have heard so many survivors say, “I know what terror is. I will live in fear every day for the rest of my life. But I also know that I will be all right, and that I feel all right.” And I have heard them join others in saying, “This is the thing we want to protect, and this is the thing we want to stop. We don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we do know that this is what we want. And we’re not indifferent.” Sometimes through atrocity people discover in themselves courage that they didn’t know they had.
Originally published in the May 1998 issue of The Sun (under the pseudonym Richard Marten)
With an entire planet being slaughtered before our eyes, it’s terrifying to watch the very culture responsible for this – the culture of industrial civilization, fueled by a finite source of fossil fuels, primarily a dwindling supply of oil – thrust forward wantonly to fuel its insatiable appetite for “growth.”
Deluded by myths of progress and suffering from the psychosis of technomania complicated by addiction to depleting oil reserves, industrial society leaves a crescendo of atrocities in its wake.
A very partial list would include the Bhopal chemical disaster, numerous oil spills, the illegal depleted uranium-spewing occupations of Iraq, Afghanistan, mountaintop removal, the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima, the permanent removal of 95 percent of the large fish from the oceans (not to mention full-on systemic collapse of those oceans), indigenous communities replacement by oil wells, the mining of coltan for cell phones and Playstations along the Democratic Republic of the Congo/Rwanda border – resulting in tribal warfare and the near-extinction of the Eastern Lowland gorilla.
As though 200 species going extinct each day were not enough, climate change, a direct result of burning fossil fuels, has proved not only to be as unpredictable as it is real, but as destructive as it is unpredictable. The erratic and lethal characteristics of a changing planet and its shifting atmosphere are becoming the norm of the 21st century, their impact accelerating at an alarming pace, bringing this planet closer, sooner than later, to a point of uninhabitable ghastliness. And yet, collective apathy, ignorance and self-imposed denial in the face of all this sadistic exploitation and violence marches this culture closer to self-annihilation.
Lost in the eerily comforting fantasy of limitless growth, production and consumption, many people cling to things like Facebook, Twitter, “Jersey Shore” and soulless pop music as if their lives depended on it, identifying with a reality that’s artificial and constructed, that panders to desire rather than necessity, that delicately conceals the violence at the other end of this economy, a violence so widespread that we’re all not only complicit in it to a degree (e.g., if you’re a taxpayer, you help subsidize the manufacturing of weapons of mass destruction), but victims of it as well. As Chris Hedges admonished in his books, “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy” and the “Triumph of Spectacle,” any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill itself.
Moreover, any culture that cannot distinguish reality from illusion will kill everything and everyone else in its path as well as itself.
As the world burns, as species die off, as mothers breastfeed their children with dioxin-tainted breast milk, as nuclear reactors melt down into the Pacific while the aerial deployment of depleted uranium damages innocent lives, it is perplexing that so few people fight back against a system that has horror as a reality for most living on the planet. And those who fight back, who stand in opposition to the culture behind such wholesale abuse and call it what it is – a genocidal mega-state (especially if you believe that the lives of nonhumans are as important to them as yours is to you and mine is to me) – are met with hostility and hatred, scoffed at, harassed, even tortured. With so much at stake, why aren’t more people deafening their ears to the nutcases who preach a future of infinite-growth economies? And why do so many people continue to put “the economy” first, to take industrial capitalism as we know it as a given and not fight back, defend what’s left of the natural world?
“One of the reasons there aren’t more people working to take down the system that’s killing the planet is because their lives depend on the system,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me from his home in California when I interviewed him on the phone recently. “If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them,” Jensen explained. “If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a land base and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that land base and that stream. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it’s very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
“The other problem is that fear is the belief we have something left to lose. What I mean by this is that I really like my life right now, as do a lot of people. We have a lot to lose if this culture is to go down. A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Even in the absence of global warming, this culture would still be murdering the planet, bumping off pods of whales and flocks of birds; detonating mountaintops to access strata of coal and bauxite, eliminating entire ecosystems. All this violence inflicted upon an entire planet to run an economy based on the foolish and immoral notion that we can sustain industrial societies, all while trashing the planet’s land bases, ecosystems and life. And the fantastic rhetoric those who insist on adapting to these changes promulgate – that technology will find a fix, that we can adapt, that the planet can and will conform to fixes in the market – is dangerous.
“Another part of the problem,” Jensen told me, “is the narratives behind this culture’s way of living. The premises of these narratives grant us the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet. Whether you subscribe to the religion of Science or of Christianity, these narratives tell us that our intelligence and abilities permit us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is here for us to use. The problem with these stories, whether you believe in them or not, is that they have real effects on the physical world. The stories we’re told about the world shape the way we perceive the world and the way we perceive the world shapes the way we behave in the world. The stories of industrial capitalism – that we can sustain infinite-growth economies – shapes the way this culture behaves in the world. And this behavior is killing the planet. Whether the stories we are told are fantasies or not doesn’t matter, what matters is that these narratives are physical: the stories of Christianity may be fantasy – let’s pretend for a moment that God doesn’t exist – well, the Crusades still happened; the notion of race or gender may be up for debate, but obviously, race and gender does matter and this postmodern attitude drives me crazy because, yeah, race and gender is not an actual thing, but it all has real-world effects – African Americans comprise 58 percent of the prison population and one-third of all black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine are under some sort of criminal justice supervision; as for gender, well real males rape females.
“Another example [of how things that truly aren’t real still have real-world effects],” Jensen continued, “is there was this serial killer a while back who was killing women in Santa Cruz. Voices in his head were telling him that if he didn’t kill these women, then California would slide off into the ocean. It’s apparent this guy was delusional, a total nut job and sick in the head, but his delusions still resulted in real-world effects. Hitler too had the delusion that Jews were poisoning the race. That delusion had real-world effects. And we can sit around and discuss whether Weyerhaeuser truly exists, but forests still get deforested. Or better yet, it’s pretty clear that it’s silly to really believe that the world won’t run out of oil … and then it’s suddenly clear that it’s not so silly – there is a physical reality. In the real world, you can’t have a nature/culture split, but in this culture you do and it has real effects on the physical world. You can’t live on a planet and kill it at the same time.”
You find the problem with an industrial production economy when you unpack the word “production.” As Jensen makes clear in his book “The Culture of Make Believe,” production is essentially the conversion of the living to the dead: animals into cold cuts, mountains and rivers into aluminum beer cans, trees into toilet paper, oil into plastics and computers (one computer uses ten times its own mass in fossil fuels). To go paperless is not to go green, or maybe it is, depending on what shade of Green we’re talking about here. Basically, every commodity one comes in contact with is soaked in oil, made from resources, marked by, as Jensen puts it, the turning of the living to the dead: Industrial production.
And with conflicts and wars that are waged or instigated by this culture to access (steal) the resources needed to fuel this economy’s colossal machines, this culture winds up butchering entire non-industrialized communities of people … the elderly, children who cling to their mothers as drones hawk over staggered onlookers … the innocent and vulnerable written off as “collateral damage.” Himmler used a similar epithet for Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Serbs, Belarusians, and other Slavic peoples in a pamphlet he edited and had distributed by the SS Race and Settlement Head Office: “Untermenschen.”
This is an acceptable price we must pay it, so we are told.
In the US, more lives are lost weekly from preventable cancers and other illnesses than are lost in ten years from terrorist attacks. And the corporations this culture fights for overseas are the very organizations culpable for these domestic deaths every week.
The list of victims whose lives are subject to violent assault and extinction to feed this culture’s “production” is as long and as diverse as you want to make it.
“An infinite-growth economy is not only insane and impossible,” remarked Jensen, “it’s also abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators. And a successful abuser will always ensure that there are some ‘benefits’ for the victim, in this case, e.g., we can watch TV, we can have computer access and play games online – we get ‘benefits’ that essentially keep us in line.
“Furthermore, according to the stories of industrial capitalism, this economic system must constantly increase production to grow and what, after all, is production? It is indeed the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks and ultimately all of these into money. And really, what is gross national product? It’s a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. And these simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.
“And if we take global warming into consideration here – oh and I believe the latest study on global warming mentioned something along the lines of the planet now being on track to heat up by 29 degrees in the next eighty years … if that isn’t curtailed immediately, no one will survive that … And so all the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given. And here we see the same old abusive behavior: the narratives are not only created around the perceptions of the perpetrators, i.e. those in power, but are forced upon us by them as well, so we come to believe the narratives and accept them as a given. And, essentially, to take industrial capitalism as a given when it comes to solutions to global warming is absolutely absurd and insane. It’s out of touch with physical reality. Yet it has disastrous effects on the real physical world. If you force a planet to conform to ideology you get what you get.
“A while back I had a conversation with an anarchist who was complaining that I was ‘too ideological,’ and that my ideology was ‘the health of the earth.’ Well, actually, the earth is not and cannot ever be an ideology. The earth is physical. It is real. And it is primary. Without soil, you don’t have a healthy land base and without a healthy land base you don’t eat, you die. Without drinkable clean water you die.”
And this is one of the problems with our culture: its lack of ability to separate ideology – the kind that accommodates maximizing pleasure and domination – from the needs of the natural world. And, so, if solutions to global warming do not immediately address the basic needs of the planet, well … we’re fucked.
“One has to ask,” pressed Jensen, “if hammerhead sharks could provide solutions, if the indigenous could give solutions and if we would listen to the solutions they are already giving, would these solutions take industrial capitalism as a given? The bottom line is that capitalist solutions to global warming are coming from the capitalist boosters, from those in power who are responsible for exploiting and destroying us and more importantly, the planet.”
By the 1940s, in Germany, Arthur Nebe’s gassing van was in wide use. Those who drove Nebe’s death vans never thought of themselves as murderers, just as another somebody getting paid to drive a van, to do a job. Today, those who work for Boeing, Raytheon, Weyerhaeuser, Exxon Mobil, BP, the Pentagon … will always see themselves as employees, not murderers. They will always see themselves as working a job that needs to be done.
Those members of this culture who blindly go along without interrogating the culture’s narratives, who identify with the pathology of this culture, will always see themselves as just other members of society. For these people, the murder of a planet feels like economics; it feels normal after having been pushed out of consciousness by careers, styles and fashions; it may not even feel like anything at all after being psychically numbed by pop radio, sitcoms, smart phones, video games … But at the other end of all these glittery distractions is an unremitting array of violence, poverty, extinction, environmental degradation.
“I saw this right-wing bumper sticker the other day that read, ‘You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers,’ but it’s not just guns: we’re going to have to pry rigid claws off steering wheels, cans of hair spray, TV remote controls and two-liter bottles of Jolt Cola,” cautioned Jensen. “Each of these individually and all of these collectively are more important to many people than are lampreys, salmon, spotted owls, sturgeons, tigers, our own lives. And that is a huge part of the problem. So of course we don’t want to win. We’d lose our cable TV. But I want to win. With the world being killed, I want to win and will do whatever it takes to win.”
When Adolph Eichmann stood before the Jerusalem District Court and was asked why he agreed to the task of deporting Jews to the ghettos and concentration camps, his response was, No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. Today, 200 species have become extinct; another indigenous community will disappear from this planet forever; an entire forest will be removed; and millions of human lives will be forced to endure the agonies of famine, war, disease, thirst, the loss of their land, their community, their way of life. Not enough people have stepped forward to say that what this culture is doing to the planet is wrong.
Well, here it is folks: What this culture is doing to our very selves, what it’s doing to the planet, is wrong. So damn wrong. And the sooner we replace this economy, the sooner we can dissolve these toxic illusions and their formative narratives. Only then, can we begin to live the free lives we were born to live and win the fight.
