by DGR News Service | Feb 8, 2014 | Alienation & Mental Health, Movement Building & Support
By Susan Hyatt and Michael Carter / DGR Southwest Coalition
This article is the first part of a series on mental health. You can read part two: “Mental Illness As a Social Construct” and part three: “Medicating”.
The environmental crisis consists of the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide, entailing the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea, with many species being pushed to the brink of extinction, and into extinction. People who passively allow this to happen, not to mention those who actively promote it for economic or other reasons, are already a good distance down the road to insanity. Most people do not see, understand, or care very much about this catastrophe of the planet because they are overwhelmingly preoccupied with grave psychological problems. The environmental crisis is rooted in the psychological crisis of the modern individual. This makes the search for an eco-psychology crucial; we must understand better what terrible thing is happening to the modern human mind, why it is happening, and what can be done about it.
—Glenn Parton, “The Machine in Our Heads”
A thesaurus entry for “inhuman” includes cruel, brutal, ruthless, and cold-blooded. If one is merciless, callous, and heartless, one is the very opposite of human, the antithesis of what it means to be a standard example of Homo sapiens sapiens. If being human means we are for the most part kind-hearted, compassionate, and sensitive creatures, then the destruction of the planet—“the deterioration and outright destruction of micro and macro ecosystems worldwide…the elimination of countless numbers of wild creatures from the air, land, and sea,” goes against humanness. It’s a product of something against our nature, an anti-human system.
We propose a name for this system: civilization. While civilization connotes nurturing, safe, and supportive conditions synonymous with humanity itself, we maintain that the great paradox of this age is that civilization is the opposite of all these things. Civilization must consume whole biomes of living things—including humans—to concentrate the material wealth needed to support human populations too large to be sustained by their immediate surroundings. Because the planet’s resources are finite and there are no perpetual means of running the modern economy—no replacement for the fossil fuels needed for industry, no New World of topsoil to extract agricultural food from—we are living in a time when a single way of life, a particular cultural strategy is based on eventual total consumption. This culture isn’t widely perceived as being fundamentally reckless or harmful, but for our purposes here the negative effect of modern, industrial civilization on the biosphere is a given. [1] Our aim is to examine the mental and emotional health of civilized people, how this drives the cultural strategy of civilization, and how those who oppose it might best fortify their mental and emotional defenses.
Individualism as Isolation
In the US, where most resource consumption takes place [2], the overarching importance of the individual is a hallmark myth. Not that US citizens don’t enjoy a comparable amount of political and personal freedom—though this is eroded day by day—but rather it’s a part of our national consciousness that US citizens are free to do what they wish within a very reasonable framework of Constitutionally balanced rules. The effect of being alone to fend for one’s self, though, has much more to do with insecurity and dependence than it does personal liberty.
By isolating individuals and glamorizing independence, people can then be easily groomed for fealty to power. We grew up pledging allegiance to a flag and can name the tune of the national anthem in three notes; more immediately most of us depend on someone else writing a paycheck for our sustenance. Nevertheless we like to think of ourselves as a nation of individualists. This is easy to believe. It allows us to feel good about ourselves regardless of accomplishment or character by the expedient of being born here.
Yet our material well-being requires a tremendous amount of power over other nations, peoples, and species; this power can only be exerted by institutions whose behavior isn’t governed at all by our own personal sense of justice or fair play. We have nearly no say in the conduct of states and corporations, and so long as we can pretend our inherent merit as US citizens, their conduct can usually be denied or ignored. They do our job, we do ours: that’s the American Way. Keeping this order is relatively easy; just laying claim to an abstract, inspirational word can suffice. The company responsible for the January, 2014 chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River was named “Freedom Industries.”
Nationalism is only an example of this wider condition. The arbitrary advantage of US citizenship can be compared to the advantages of being male, or white, or wealthy; they all depend on powerful organizations that exist for their own reasons, and mine our lives for their power as surely as they mine mountains for coal. Notions of individual, national, race, or gender virtue serve their goals (of accumulating wealth and power) by masking our exploited condition with a sense of deserved good fortune. Those in power hide behind emotionally potent ideas like freedom that relatively privileged groups are eager to protect. It’s only chance to be born a white male American, yet plenty of them volunteer for militaries that supposedly defend freedom. Far fewer would volunteer to die for oil company profits, though many of them inadvertently do.
Individuality is a valuable trait, especially in a culture devoted to cultivating oblivious consumer and sacrificial classes. [3] But its value in overcoming blind conformity and vacuous rewards can become idealized as an end unto itself—individualism. When civilized power is essentially inescapable, a foundering ship, individuality seems to restore a sense of personal worth and even social sanity. Yet individuality is more like a life preserver than the sailboat of a sustainable and independent culture—perhaps useful, but doing little to affect the power over our lives. When it becomes indoctrinated as individualism, it can actually benefit those in power because of its mistrust of group belonging that stifles organizing. The demonizing of labor unions is a classic example.
Our mostly unrecognized dilemma is that we’re physiologically “primitive” social animals living under the rule of a dictatorial, isolating, extraction culture. Unless we are able to participate in it, we’re shunted into extremely uncomfortable conditions of poverty and wretchedness, scavenging the carcasses left by agriculture and industry. The authors, Hyatt and Carter, are relatively wealthy by global standards, with our access to the resources that civilization has up for sale. Yet we live mostly hand to mouth. There is very little in the way of socially stabilized security in our lives. If we stop working for a month or two the kitchen cabinets quickly empty; stop work for a while more and we’re evicted from our homes. Because we aren’t allowed to fashion a comfortable dwelling from the wild and freely hunt or gather our food, we must join in working for it, which means we must consume gasoline, industrial food, and electricity. None of these things will remain available forever. More urgently, there is about forty-one years of topsoil left [4], and without topsoil, there will be no food for anyone or anything. Ultimately, civilization has undermined all security, for everyone.
Human beings tend to want consistency, and their organizations tend to conserve the status quo. The idea of “behaviorally modern” humans, creatures on a progressive trajectory, has no real physical evidence. [5] We are creatures of the Paleolithic, identical to people of at least 190,000 years ago. [6] Our brains and bodies are those of people who hunted animals with stone-pointed spears and lived in clan or tribal groups. There was no spontaneous human revolution that changed that. Cities and the industries needed to support their regionally unsustainable appetites did not arise simultaneously from the sum of individual impulses for toil and control, but rather spread by resource warfare. [7] What we see now is the global dominance of a single, war- and extraction-dependent social strategy. Paradoxically this seemingly unifying strategy instead isolates us, picking us apart from the close-knit and small scale cultures our ancestors evolved to form. Even if we’re lucky enough to have a close family or uncommonly good friends, we are all expected to more or less make it on our own. Our health can’t help but be affected by that dramatic change. It is critical for anyone working for social justice and sustainability to recognize this.
Defying Social Order
Because of the inherent injustice involved with work, where lower social and economic classes must be maintained to do dangerous or menial labor, it takes denial and silence to keep civilization running. Confronting social and environmental injustice necessarily begins with breaking denial and silence. This can be very hard to do, as anyone who has broken free of any abusive situation knows. Our own avoidance tendencies can be strong and impossible even to see, and our human animal selves shy from the fear of standing up to those with power over us. The elaborate structures of power now in place are so immense and deeply embedded that defiance of them seems ludicrous and foolhardy, the very definition of quixotic. The system’s many dependents and hired goons stand behind them, no matter how atrocious its actions. Attack Freedom Industries, you may as well attack freedom itself. So of course most people never will.
For those who are willing to fight back, anger at injustice can make us think we can defy unjust systems by social transgression, such as alcohol and drug abuse, promiscuity, petty crime, and other self-destructive practices. In reality, these are enactments of civilization which encourage us to hate ourselves and to reproduce our own subordination. Self-harm and isolated disobedience does the police work of oppression, essentially for free, as a kind of safety valve. Just as it’s too much for individuals to be burdened with systemic problems, defying social order is an overwhelming task for one person. Serious resistance requires a community, and a healthy community requires us to make internalized oppression visible. It is helpful to remember that many of our troubles aren’t our own fault, but are necessary creations of civilization, meant to keep us enslaved.
The contrived circumstances we live under are full of paradoxes and confusion; it’s easy to fall into despair and apathy. The dominant culture that is consuming the world—and any chance of a sane and intact society—demands our time and loyalty, and it’s far easier to give them up than to fight. A paradox that can help is realizing we must take care of ourselves to be ready and able to take care of anything or anyone else. This seems counter to the impulses of altruism that often drive activists, but it really isn’t. Warriors must eat, they must have some sense of support and approbation; if this doesn’t come from their toxic society, it must come from somewhere else. The energy, endurance, and courage it takes to stop a coal mine cannot itself be mined from our bodies and spirits, leaving us empty, but rather must be cultivated and maintained as living things.
In his early years of activism, Carter spent a great deal of time and money fighting National Forest timber sales in a conservative Montana community where environmentalists were mostly ridiculed and hated outright. His colleagues were scattered and remote, usually also alone. He believed himself an appeal-writing machine, and fueled his effort with alcohol and a carbohydrate-heavy vegetarian diet. Eventually the pressure and isolation exhausted his ability to keep up his work, and the self-abuse didn’t become visible for years.
Civilization, based on power-over, undermines our sense of self and our meanings for existence. Nearly every child is raised in some form of domestic captivity under civilization, and many continue to be victimized by control and dominance, resulting in what psychiatrist Judith Herman calls Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). [8] Traumatic events make us question basic human relationships; we lose a sense of belonging, and our lives fill with stress and loneliness. Women in this culture often experience further trauma as the victims of male violence. In Hyatt’s case, male violence left her with undiagnosed PTSD for over three years; the medical industry offered pills and relaxation techniques to cover up the symptoms. This is the typical solution offered by modern medicine: one that blames the individual and isolates us further. No one has to be passively victimized by institutional pressure, though; people can be responsible for themselves, for the predictable consequences of their actions and choices. This doesn’t mean anyone has to take on what isn’t theirs—a recovery plan that favors pharmaceutical companies, for instance.
A healthier strategy is to value our response to trauma. The symptoms of PTSD, such as avoidance, emotional numbing, self-blame, and helplessness, are reasonable reactions to an inhuman system. PTSD sufferers have been so traumatized that we often blame ourselves for our symptoms. Active resistance reduces the feeling of despair and helplessness. Resistance even reduces the feeling of humiliation brought on by toleration of abuse and the humiliation in feeling we are to blame for the trauma. Recovery requires that we retell our trauma stories and engage with a healthy community, which can be hard to find. Support groups such as Al-anon and Alcoholics Anonymous may be a helpful place to start.
Remember that civilization is the root cause of trauma. By contrast, non-coercive cultures have few mental health disorders. Bruce Levine notes that “Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls ‘efficiency,’ they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry.” [9]
Building a resistance to fight for social justice and sustainability might begin with attentive self-care and a dignified, gentle, and supportive culture. In the essays that follow, we’ll examine the effects of civilized society on mental and emotional health, and explore ways of bolstering our health and well-being so we may ready ourselves to fight. Addiction, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder are all conditions Hyatt and Carter have personally experienced and emerged from intact. It is our hope that our history and study will aid resisters in their own personal engagement and public struggle, that they may emerge intact and successful.
John Trudell said, “We understand the pollution of the air, of the water, we understand the pollution of the environment has come from this plundering and mining of the planet in an irresponsible manner. But you think about every fear, every doubt, every insecurity, every way that we ever beat ourselves up inside of our own heads — that is the pollution left over from the mining of our spirit.” As activists, we must question not only the logic of a culture that consumes its own future—eradicating the soil, water, and atmosphere needed for life—we must question the system and culture that leads to addiction, abuse, and hopelessness; the destruction of our very living self.
References
[1] Madhusree Mukerjee, “Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?” Scientific American, May 23, 2012, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=apocalypse-soon-has-civilization-passed-the-environmental-point-of-no-return
“Has Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” University of California—Berkeley, as reported in Science Daily, March 5, 2011, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110302131844.htm
These are only approximately representative examples; many more can be found with the most casual perusal of the daily news. Because it’s so continual and overwhelming, it tends to escape public attention.
[2] “While the consumer class thrives, great disparities remain. The 12 percent of the world’s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent.” “The State of Consumption Today,” Worldwatch Institute, January 8, 2014, http://www.worldwatch.org/node/810
[5] “There are no such things as modern humans, Shea argues, just Homo sapiens populations with a wide range of behavioral variability. Whether this range is significantly different from that of earlier and other hominin species remains to be discovered. However, the best way to advance our understanding of human behavior is by researching the sources of behavioral variability in particular adaptive strategies.” John J. Shea, “Homo Sapiens is as Homo Sapiens was: Behavioral Variability vs. ‘Behavioral Modernity’ in Paleolithic Archaeology,” Current Anthropology 2011; 52 (1): 1, as reported in Science Daily, February 15, 2011, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110214201850.htm
[7] Thomas B. Bramanti, W. Haak, M. Unterlaender, P. Jores, K. Tambets, I. Antanaitis-Jacobs, M.N. Haidle, R. Jankauskas, C.-J. Kind, F. Lueth, T. Terberger, J. Hiller, S. Matsumura, P. Forster, and J. Burger, “Europe’s First Farmers were Immigrants: Replaced Their Stone Age Hunter-gatherer Forerunners.” Science 2009, DOI: 10.1126/science.1176869, as reported in Science Daily, September 4, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090903163902.htm
This is one reference among many that underscores that agriculture and the cultures it supports did not “arise” worldwide as of some spontaneous awakening, but rather was spread by conquest.
[8] “What happens if you are raised in captivity? What happens if you’re long-term held in captivity, as in a political prisoner, as in a survivor of domestic violence?” Judith Herman, M.D. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1997. See pages 74-95 for more information on captivity and C-PTSD.
Susan Hyatt has worked as a project manager at a hazardous waste incinerator, owned a landscaping company focused on native Sonoran Desert plants, and is now a volunteer activist. Michael Carter is a freelance carpenter, writer, and activist. His anti-civilization memoir Kingfisher’s Song was published in 2012. They both volunteer for Deep Green Resistance Southwest Coalition.
From DGR Southwest Coalition: “An Inhuman System”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 1, 2013 | Gender, Male Violence, Women & Radical Feminism
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance
The following speech was originally given at the Stop Porn Culture Conference at Wheelock College, Boston, in July 2013.
Hello everyone, my name is Kourtney Mitchell and I am a political activist and a member of the group Deep Green Resistance. We are a radical organization dedicated to social, political and environmental justice. As an organization we ally ourselves with indigenous communities, women, people of color and the poor. Our aim is to stop the destruction of the planet and the oppression of people and animals.
We are a relatively new organization just a couple of years old but we are growing and have numerous chapters with hundreds of activists around the world who are all dedicated to stopping the genocide of the planet.
So, I’ll offer just a brief background on my experience as a man with pro-feminist activism and educating men. I attended university and it was there that I first received academic and activist training in feminism and anti-violence through the peer education program on campus.
The peer education program consists of graduate students, faculty, and staff who train undergraduate volunteers. The training includes education about the widespread violence that women face and volunteers learn to give presentations to peers on rape, sexual assault, relationship violence, and feminism.
In turn, peers would then join our organizing efforts and events. This was the most profoundly significant and life changing time for me. To travel around the country raising awareness of violence against women, facilitating workshops, speak-outs, and protests was fulfilling, not to mention meaningful. The training threw me into another world, one in which violence and misogyny could no longer be ignored. Our advisors did a really comprehensive job of giving us an adequate scope of the problem, and creating a sense of urgency about these issues.
They helped facilitate the creation of a student culture based on the belief that it is possible to end violence against women, and knowing that possibility helped galvanize us to take action. Many of us went on to make this our life’s work.
My primary role in the campus activist community was recruiting and teaching men about pro-feminism and anti-violence. I helped lead the male ally program, which included a weekly discussion group, activism in the community, pro-feminist art and performance, and collaborations with other similar programs around the country.
I remember vividly the anxiety of pouring over every detail of presentations I would be giving to men, worrying if the way I presented concepts was too complicated or if men would shut down for the rest of the talk if I said something too complicated. I left some events feeling like no one was reachable, but I also walked away feeling really good about the successes which were accomplished.
Many men joined our organizations and became quite active – some because they just felt it was the right thing to do, but many more because of personal experiences and the experiences of their loved ones. Several men randomly wandered into our office and left planning to attend the next ally meeting, and sure enough did continue coming. This was just one of the many things that kept me optimistic about bringing more men to pro-feminist ideas and activism.
Unfortunately, the campus activist community was largely liberal and very much influenced by queer theory. Pornography was widely accepted, and a real revolution against the patriarchal order was more joked about than seriously considered. It wasn’t until I was introduced to the radical feminist perspective that I began to see the flaws of the liberal approach to pro-feminist education.
The liberal approach leaves out an important aspect of the violence men commit against women: that men hate women. It’s important to say that out loud and allow it to inform our actions. The dominant culture is insane. Its norms and values are pathological, and it socializes people into roles that encourage, even necessitate abuse and exploitation in order to fulfill accepted social roles.
The systems of rewards in this culture makes it appear as if the masculine identity and domination imperative are in our best interest, and dissent is seen as blasphemy — a violation of a sacred order.
And that sacred order is gender.
Masculinity fraternizes men into a veritable cult, one that requires violence and callousness in order to ensure the privileges of membership. The liberal approach has been able to raise the awareness of some men concerning the male violence, but it doesn’t challenge men on the mechanism of their oppression of women.
Just when I thought we could really get somewhere with bringing men into pro-feminist activism, the radical analysis gave me a hard dose of reality. I had always thought that if we could just get men to stop and think for a minute, to look around and see the world for what it really is, to get them to cultivate some empathy, then maybe we could start to see a reversal of toxic male culture. What I learned was that it’s hard enough to get men to consider feminism at all let alone to consider challenging their own behavior.
Once you start to get too radical, most men shut down or lash out against it. A few really do embrace it, and that’s something I hold on to—that there are some men out there who are thoughtful enough, and self-reflective enough, and honest enough to internalize the hard truths—but I also realize that most men will never be genuine allies. In fact, most so-called radical men have proven that they are not only incapable of understanding the radical feminist analysis of gender but that they will actively fight against women who espouse it.
The liberal approach to activism is disheartening because it constantly conditions activists to keep working to build an impossible mass movement, and it keeps people hopeful that this can actually happen if they keep spending time and resources on it.
We talk to men about the violence, give them all the evidence they need, and it’s still like trying to drill a hole through a brick wall. I could just as easily take a more passive approach when talking to men and cut them some slack because patriarchy and masculinity do cause men suffering, but last time I checked, emotionally and psychologically mature adults don’t ignore or gloss over the hard truths. Instead those hard truths need to be faced, and men have no excuse to stay passive on this.
Genuine alliance with women means prioritizing the goals of liberation as they are articulated by women and for women, no matter the insecurity and defensiveness men may feel.
As a radical political person of color, I do not accept surface-level activism against white supremacy and privilege. I see the impact of racist oppression in and on my community every single day, and it would be antithetical to my interest in the preservation of my people to avoid engaging with racist culture on a radical level. The oppression of my people needs to end by any means necessary, and this includes the end of the social construction of race.
I wrote an article critiquing white backlash against militant anti-racism, and of course I received still more white backlash. I believe that some white people will agree with me and I hope this is true for pro-feminist alliance with women as well.
Even at my young age I feel that I have spent a long time trying to find the right way to tell men the truth of the widespread violence that women face, but it seems as though the violence is only increasing. I can only imagine the road that some of the women here have walked and the frustration they feel in seeing the violence continue and grow exponentially.
It’s too much. The radical analysis is needed. The situation is urgent and getting worse by the day and I feel like it oftentimes takes so long to educate men and get them to do something, anything.
Some have said to me that I’m impatient. I say I’m fed up. So many men have sided with the violence of this culture and have made themselves the enemy of women and their genuine liberation. And this is pretty simple to me – if a man is an enemy of women, then he is an enemy of mine. Men need to be told, regardless of whether or not they want to hear it, that nothing less than the complete dismantling of patriarchy is acceptable, and men who don’t declare their allegiance to women have sided with the oppressors and they should be treated as such.
Men must try and understand what it takes to become real allies – constant self-critique, checking our privilege, and becoming mindful and aware of when our socialization is causing us to behave in abusive ways. We need to deconstruct this socialized person we’ve been conditioned to become and discover who we are as human beings.
I’ve been told that ultimately men aren’t ready to make comprehensive personal and political changes and to dismantle male culture, and I say so what? It’s ridiculous to think how many men will reject the simple suggestion that they try to become decent human beings. You can’t argue with a person like that. Meanwhile, women are raped on public transportation while the driver looks on and does nothing. A girl is raped in class and the teacher does nothing about it. Women are locked in basements for a decade, or enslaved or beaten or killed. At what point do we as men admit that men hate women and want to harm them?
When do we as men prioritize the safety, integrity and autonomy of women and give men the ultimatum: either you’re with women or you’re against them.
If you want to look at this from the perspective of approaching men in a way that encourages them to engage with us, rather than shutting down and ignoring us, then I can understand that. Sometimes you need to meet people where they are so you can increase the chance of them actually listening and considering what you have to say. This is a long process and oftentimes it takes several intense conversations on these issues with the same men over a period of time to get it to click. Sadly, we don’t always have that kind of time, and most men wouldn’t take the time anyway.
I think it’s important to focus our efforts on constantly engaging and challenging men on their abuse and misogyny and demonstrating to men who insist on continuing that abuse that they will be met with resistance. We will put an end to their abuse using whatever means we have to. They are the ones who cannot be reasoned with, and force is the only language they understand.
A crucial aspect of genuine alliance with women is that it’s our responsibility to educate other men, not women’s responsibility. Saying it’s a women’s issue ignores the perpetrator. It is unfair to leave this work to women who daily endure the onslaught of patriarchal violence. Women have a right to organize away from men, and to demand that we take responsibility for our actions. No, most of us men did not ask for this kind of world. And no, most of us didn’t play an integral part in constructing it. But because we are socialized into it as members of the dominant class; because we are conditioned to use our genitals as weapons against women; and because we are rewarded for doing so, we must do the hard work of separating ourselves from this unfortunate set of affairs and confronting men who refuse to do the same. What do we value more—privilege or justice? Privilege may be comfortable for a while, maybe even for a long time, but eventually it results in the same kind of horrible state of affairs that the planet is currently enduring.
I have had some success presenting this issue to men in the following manner: what does it mean to live in a culture so oppressive to women that they have a good reason to hate us? What does it mean for us that every woman with whom we come into contact can legitimately consider us a potential rapist or batterer? Is this the kind of world we want to live in— a world in which every relationship we have with women is fraught with the anxiety of being perceived as violent simply for being a man? Personally, I do not want to live in this kind of world.
Men need to be given the radical perspective, or else we are simply training them to be ineffective in addressing the problem we claim to care so much about. Just as in radical environmentalism where we base strategy and tactics on the numbers we have so we can be most effective with those numbers, we should do the same with radical pro-feminist education of men. We leverage force against male supremacy and teach each other how to become more complete human beings, how to build loving and nurturing communities, and how to abandon the pathology central to our abuse. This work hasn’t ever been and won’t ever be easy, but it’s necessary and we have a planet and its community of life to save.
Time is short. We should not be prepared to accept any more of this violence. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our loved ones, and future generations to end the violence or die trying.
Thank you.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 4, 2013 | Strategy & Analysis, The Problem: Civilization
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance Wisconsin
We’ll need a miracle to save the world, and the only miracle we’re going to get is us. Right now, we—as in life on this planet we—are losing. That nobody wants to say this out loud doesn’t change its truth: we are losing, and badly.
For all the tireless marching, writing, petitioning, film-making, and purification of our lifestyles, how much destruction has actually—in the real world, not just our hearts and minds—been stopped?
We are losing. No one wants to say this out loud. Every impassioned conversation, book, and documentary film seems to follow the same wishful script: things are bad—okay, things are really bad—and while that’s certainly not good, it doesn’t change the fact that we are actually winning, that our individual actions are making a difference, that hearts and minds are changing, that we’re on the cusp of a great turning, that sustainability is upon us. All this whether the greedy or ignorant like it or not.
With our hands up in the air, who will do the work to make sure this future turns to reality? It’s easy to be optimistic in the cradle of privilege. It’s easier to look out the window and see winds of change when that window isn’t found in a sweatshop or prison complex. Those who feel firsthand the destruction of life—of democracy, community, freedom, landbase, and bodily integrity—do not have this luxury; they cannot pretend justice is now, or will be, prevailing when every day is testament of the opposite.
Many on the Left would call this cynicism. They would say it reflects a negative attitude. They would say negative attitudes don’t get us anywhere. They fail to mention what will.
The first step to not losing is to admit that we are. Cynicism is defined as a “feeling of distrust.” We would all agree that it is distrustful of humanity to imagine that we can do nothing. But it is also distrustful of our own collective power to lie about our dire situation and stake the future of the planet on mere hope and prayer.
We are losing. Most of the world’s old-growth forests, prairies, and large ocean fish have been wiped out. Indigenous species—including human beings—are under perpetual assault. Every river in the world is contaminated with carcinogens. 27 million people live in slave conditions. One in four women are raped and less than 10 in 100 perpetrators spend even one night in jail. The richest 1% own more wealth than the poorest 95%. One in nine African-American men are incarcerated. Nearly half a million farmers in India have committed suicide after having their livelihoods destroyed by multinational corporations. Every moment, every hour, every day, every year, it all gets worse.
In giving up the fantasies of some inevitable paradigm shift and subsequent global salvation—however good the fantasies may make us feel—another option reveals itself: actually changing the world. There is no shortcut to the nitty-gritty work of organizing, mobilizing, and taking action. Those not blinded by privilege know this all too well.
Despite intricate visions of what is to come, the activists so quick to employ lullabies in the place of concrete action are in fact doing a great disservice to the struggle. For those actively engaged in challenging unjust power certainly need encouragement, yes, and certainly need the assurance of knowing a better world is on the other side, yes, but they do not need to be lied to and they do not need reality watered down. Calling this a disservice is an understatement. Activists betray the oppressed they claim to stand for by promising a future they won’t act to create. They are witnessing a crime—be it land theft, rape, white supremacy, gay-bashing, or ecocide—and doing precisely nothing, safe in the excuse of a sweet, imagined tomorrow. It doesn’t get much more cynical than that.
We are losing. Where is the evidence showing this is not the case? The world isn’t dying from a lack of righteous rhetoric or symbolic action; it’s dying from the largest campaign of exploitation staged by the most unholy of alliances between the richest 1%. More, it’s dying because we aren’t doing anything about it. Setting good and pure thoughts aside, we haven’t even really begun to do anything about it.
Admitting to the vastness of the odds we face does not imply giving up. On the contrary, it is a sobering reassurance that there is much work to be done. It is an obligation for each of us to act. As Lierre Keith puts it, “any institution built by humans can be taken apart by humans.” We may be losing, but this does not mean we can’t start fighting back; it doesn’t mean there aren’t those who already have. Indeed, it is the underprivileged that lack the naivety—and, indeed, the cynicism—about the possibility of social change who have been most courageously engaged in it.
Ours is not a happy story. But while scene after scene depicts ever more loss, the ending has not yet been written. This is not cause for guessing what will happen. This is cause for fighting like hell to make sure it includes a living planet.
Members of the dominant culture—including the most progressive and well-meaning of us—teeter between cynicism and blind hope. When we feel despair, it’s all we can do to desperately explain it away by conceding to our own powerless: the problems are too big, so we may as well give up. On the flip side, we see a glimmer of humanity beneath the haze of apathy and conclude a revolution is nigh. Neither impulse serves our struggle.
Right now, we are losing. We need to not be so cynical as to pretend this loss is inevitable and not so idealistic as to pretend that we can wish our way to victory. Change happens when we fight for it. To begin this fight, we’ll have to at least be honest about our predicament: those on the side of a just, sustainable world are losing to those who would destroy it. This means we need to try harder.
It took five centuries for the Irish independence movement to break the stranglehold of British colonial rule. Every generation passed down the struggle to the next one; they passed down a culture of resistance and the understanding that this fight is a long haul. Other resistance movements have shared the same courage and determination, struggling for years and years to taste justice, persisting even when all seemed lost.
We too often forget our own history. Far from five centuries, today’s activists can barely manage five minutes without gratifying results. Worst of all, these (non-)actions reflect their unfounded expectations and, when change invariably doesn’t show, they give up.
Denying reality because it’s hard. Promising results without any plan of action to see them through. These are the qualities of children, not a strategy for success. As Frederick Douglass so bravely said, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men [and women] who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.”
The rest of the world beckons activists of privilege to see past our blinders, past our cynical apathy, and open our hearts to reality, however uncomfortable it may be. It’s time to say this out loud: we are losing. It’s time to make a promise and dedicate our lives to seeing it through: we will win.
Beautiful Justice is a monthly column by Ben Barker, a writer and community organizer from West Bend, Wisconsin. Ben is a member of Deep Green Resistance and is currently writing a book about toxic qualities of radical subcultures and the need to build a vibrant culture of resistance. He can be contacted at benbarker@riseup.net.
A Swedish translation of this article is available at: http://djupgron.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/berattigad-till-forlust/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 5, 2013 | People of Color & Anti-racism, White Supremacy
By Kourtney Mitchell / Deep Green Resistance
As a radical black male living in the most hegemonic culture to ever exist, I consistently find myself keenly aware of instances in daily life to recognize and critique white supremacy. I have experienced firsthand this culture’s systemic racism. From the racist and sexist police department which harassed and conspired against my mother while she worked for them, to the fairly routine instances of micro-aggressions, racial profiling and predatory business practices all people of color endure in this culture, I have a personal relationship with oppression informing my analysis of racism. So when whites accuse people of color of being unable to let go of the past, they are missing some critical considerations.
Many whites have a difficult time accepting any attempt to redistribute wealth and resources to historically oppressed classes because they fail to see the reality of life as a person of color in this society. And when our stories are silenced, the dominant narrative of this culture can proliferate.
So I want to speak directly to whites who honestly believe society is post-racial and that they are being oppressed. I want you to listen and try to understand if you can.
One of white supremacy’s more insidious aspects is that it has perfected the art of double-speak. While it appears you are saying society is post-racial and we are all equal now, and therefore any redistribution of resources to historically oppressed classes is reverse racism, what you are really saying is the comfort and safety which was a result of a historically privileged position in society as leech members of a parasitic class of people is being challenged, and that makes you uncomfortable.
You want to know what I mean with that statement. Dominant classes of people are parasites, because they feed on the oppression of others. Whether or not you realize it, if you are a member of a dominant class, you are benefiting from the oppression of another class.
As a man, I benefit from patriarchy and misogyny. Members of my class of people are leeches, and that makes me a leech as well. It is my responsibility as an aspiring male ally to women to constantly critique my own participation in this culture and to do whatever I can to deconstruct the sexist and misogynistic tendencies I possess from this culture’s indoctrination. That is the minimal task of an ally, and the same applies to whites who wish to ally with people of color to combat racism. You must first admit your complicity in it.
Whiteness is hegemony. To be clear, race does not exist inherently – it is a social construct with no basis in actual biology other than the melanin levels in your skin and its relationship to how your ancestors evolved on their preferred landbase. The creation of race was a direct result of the hegemonic tendency inherent in parasitic classes of people.
“White” is purported to be related to skin color and ancestry, but what is it really? A social class. If race is not actually real, then we must consider more real, tangible indicators of difference and their real effects on the material conditions of our everyday lives. When we search for other indicators, the most glaringly obvious one is privilege and access to resources. By far, without doubt, whites own more land and possessions, earn a higher income, and experience far fewer discriminatory experiences than people of color.
It is important to understand what it means to view racial oppression in the context of class analysis. Whiteness is a class experience, and not based in biological reality. But that does not mean one can just decide to stop being white, just like I cannot decide to stop being a man as long as the dominant culture classes me as a man. As long as you are classed as white, you will continue to benefit from white privilege. This is what allies need to remember.
The identity of persons of color serves the purpose of organizing through common cause. For my culture, black identity is about survival, not about superiority or a desire to exercise power over whites. It is a response to cultural genocide, an example of class consciousness as the starting point in combating oppression. As stated in Racial Formations in the United States:
Whites tend to locate racism in color consciousness and find its absence color-blindness. In so doing, they see the affirmation of difference and racial identity among racially defined minority students as racist. Non-white students, by contrast, see racism as a system of power, and correspondingly argue that blacks, for example, cannot be racist because they lack power.
When people of color are afforded opportunities on the basis of their skin color, this is not racism. It is redistribution of the privilege of access to resources, an attempt to even the playing field that is skewed towards whites.
If you think past racism has no effect on today’s reality, you are in denial. Your ancestors were given a huge head start because they were not enslaved and they did not suffer under white supremacist Jim Crow laws and murderous gangs of thugs in white sheets and hoods. They did not suffer under the tyranny of the White Citizen’s Council, or the 3/5 law, or the Fugitive Slave Law. They did not suffer under the Tuskegee Experiments, the Japanese internment camps, the ghettos and reservations and racist police departments.
To be white in this society is to start ahead, even if you are poor. The poorest white is still privileged in ways the middle class black person is not. Rich, wealthy and affluent blacks are still racially profiled and discriminated against in various ways.
The dominant narrative of this culture – that of the white patriarch – forbids redistribution of resources and privilege, because that would mean the empowerment of historically oppressed classes, affording them a little more ability to even the score. So this culture must adjust the narrative to encourage backlash against resistance to white supremacy, otherwise the narrative of the resistance will proliferate and threaten to turn the tide in our favor. So it convinces privileged members they are being discriminated against, and that they should not consider or listen to or even hear the stories of people of color, because goddess forbid you have your identity challenged for once. You cry reverse racism and deny the presence of the same tendencies of the past because you have never lived in our world.
Of course, redistribution of resources is not the end goal. We must ultimately bring down the capitalist, industrial infrastructure facilitating white supremacist oppression of people of color. We must permanently disable the control mechanisms of the culture – the police, the military and the media – because they all play a role in the subordination of people of color, the theft of their resources and the erasure of their cultures and stories.
A comprehensive anti-racist strategy includes a critique of civilization itself. It recognizes civilization as the interlocking systems of oppression inherent in infinite growth economies. It realizes the colonial, imperialist agenda of empires as being intimately connected to the white supremacist tendency, and as being the stumbling block to real autonomy and self-determination for people of color. And it relates the destruction of the natural world to the destruction of cultural diversity among human populations.
My people are being killed in the streets, incarcerated, enslaved and denigrated, and any analysis avoiding this reality is dishonest and immoral. If we are going to attempt to “speak truth to power,” we had better at least speak the truth, regardless whether or not people are ready to hear it. We do not have time to wait for people to “get it.” We needed militant action a hundred years ago. We are far into complete biotic collapse and continued genocide of non-white cultures. We must act now to rid the planet of this scourge and ensure it never returns.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Aug 5, 2012 | Male Supremacy, White Supremacy
By Ben Barker / Deep Green Resistance
In the early days of my being politicized, I spent time with people in a subculture which can be summed up with the title “anti-authoritarian punk.” A favorite activity of people in this group was to bash something they called “political correctness.” At almost every gathering I attended—without fail—hours would be spent snickering and bad-talking the notion of being politically correct, and ostracizing activists accused of subscribing to that notion.
As I understand it, the argument went that political correctness, or “P.C.,” was apparently a plot by some do-gooders to censor everyone else and prevent them from saying and doing what they want (for example using infamously common hate speech against women and people of color). The battle they claimed to be fighting was one of retaining the “freedom” to “shock” people, because, in the end, the ultimate goal is one of breaking social conventions rather than justice.
Later in my life, having been an activist and a radical for several years, I now see the whole subculture of “anti-authoritarian punk” as having been entirely entrenched in, and supportive of, the privileges that come with being a beneficiary of sadistic arrangements of power (be it white supremacy, patriarchy, or capitalist exploitation).
Historically, those in power have had to objectify others—made into “capital O” Others—before they could exploit them. When I think of the people I knew in this “anti-P.C.” camp, I am generally overcome with disdain and rage, because they are simply a new face doing the same objectification. Their effect on social justice movements is not benign, but a significant part of the problem. Oppression is effectively normalized by their brand of “freedom to” rhetoric, thus duping disenfranchised youth and others who stumble upon this sentiment to buy into the thrills of breaking boundaries instead of realizing their potential to make the world a better place and then plugging into projects and communities of righteousness.
If “P.C.” means I’m not okay with hate speech, if it means that I stand against behavior that is cruel and obviously inappropriate, then I’m fine being identified with it. But, if we want to speak honestly about the political element of reinforcing unequal dynamics, I’d much prefer the term “politically opposed”. I am politically opposed to actions and words that are oppressive, because I see it as a part of the continuum of struggle that has been the reality for many generations of people coming from traditions of feminism, anti-racism, and social justice activism.
The political element of these situations is what causes the impossibility of their harmlessness. It’s one thing to poke fun at your close friend in a way where you can both share a laugh. It’s quite a different matter for a person who is, for example, a white man, to verbally or physically assault another person who is, for example, a woman of color, despite the perpetrator claiming the guise of “freedom of expression.” The former scenario can be called “joking”, but the latter scenario can’t be called anything but oppression.
I certainly am politically opposed to oppression. Whether someone thinks I am correct or not to hold this position is of little concern to me.
From Kid Cutbank: http://kidcutbank.blogspot.com/2012/02/politically-correct-vs-politically.html
