If perpetrators of domestic violence cannot be cured, they must simply be stopped. If you believe, as I think I sufficiently showed in A Language Older Than Words, that familial violence within this culture is in many ways a microcosm of the violence the culture tricks out on the larger stages of history and the landscape, the implications for the culture—and its human and nonhuman victims—are, I think, sobering. As well as exploring the psychological irredeemability of this culture I discussed in that book many of the reasons for the culture’s death urge—its urge to destroy all life, including our own—and the reasons for this urge’s intractability.
In The Culture of Make Believe, I approached the question of the culture’s essential destructiveness, and its death urge, from an entirely different direction, exploring the mutually reinforcing interplay of an economic and social system based on competition; the belief that humans are the apex of creation and our culture is the apex of this apex (it’s always been pretty clear to me that all of evolution has taken place simply to bring me into existence, so that I can watch television); the valuing of material production over all else, including (most especially) life; the consistent preference for abstraction over the particular (manifesting, to provide three quick examples among many, as the promulgation of moral systems based on abstract principles rather than circumstances; as the flood of pornography (abstract images of naked women on the internet account for $90 billion in revenue per year, making porn the number one cash generator online, accounting for 13 percent of all revenue); and as the ability, and proclivity, to kill at ever-greater psychic and physical distances); and the increasing bureaucratization of this society. I showed how all of these vectors come together to lead ineluctably to the attempted elimination of all diversity, to the attempted killing of the planet, and to the increasingly routine mass murder of fellow humans (and of course nonhumans).
I’m taking a more fundamental approach here to understanding the reasons for the implacability of this culture’s violence, and I’m discovering that just as all roads lead, as the saying goes, to Rome, all pathways here lead to the perception and articulation of civilization’s basis in exploitation. In other words, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about the psychological, social/economic, or physical/resource levels (none of which are separable anyway), we come to the same conclusion. To put this yet another way, the micro manifests the macro, which mirrors back the micro. Or to change terms once again, we’re in trouble, and we need to figure out what we’re going to do about it.
Because every city-state (and now the entire globally interconnected industrial economy) relies on imported resources, our entire culture’s basis in exploitation must remain in place no matter how spiritual, enlightened, or peaceful we may seem to ourselves, may claim to be, or may in fact personally become. This basis in violence is in place whether or not we choose to acknowledge it. It is in place whether or not we call ourselves peaceloving, and whether or not we tell ourselves (each time) that we are fighting to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to people who, unaccountably, often do not seem to want what we have to offer. Stripped of all lies, we are fighting, or rather killing (remember premise four), to take their resources. More precisely, those in power are doing so. More precisely yet, those in power are ordering their servants to do so, servants who have bought into the belief that those in power are entitled to take these resources.89
This culture has killed a lot of people, and will continue to do so until it collapses, and probably long after. It must, because these killings inhere in the structure and physical needs of the society, and so are not amenable to change. Appeals to conscience, to humanity, to decency are thus doomed even before they’re made (and in fact can be harmful insofar as they allow all of us—from presidents to CEOs to generals to soldiers to activists to people who don’t much think about it—to pretend those in power could maintain that power without violence, and that the material production on which the entire culture is based could continue also without violence), not only because those in power have shown themselves—similarly to abusers in family violence, for similar reasons—eager to commit precisely as much violence as they can get away with, and not only because those in power have shown themselves psychologically impervious to such appeals (Dear Adolf, Please don’t hurt the Jews, nor take land from the Slavs or Russians. Be a pal, okay?) but more importantly—and more implacably—the institutions these individuals serve are functionally just as impervious to the appeals as the individuals are psychologically. They need the resources, and will get them, come the hell of depleted-uranium-induced malformations or the high water of melted ice caps. All of this means that movements for peace are damned before they start because unless they’re willing to unmake the roots of this culture, and thus the roots of the violence, they can at best address superficial causes, and thus, at best, provide palliation.
There are many superficial causes of the culture’s violence. There is the fact that those who make the political decisions that guide this culture are more interested in increasing their own personal power and the power of the state than they are in human and nonhuman well-being. Another way to say this is that gaining and maintaining access to resources, and facilitating production, are more important to them than life. Another way to say this is that power is more important to them than life. Another way to say this is that they are insane. If this were a root of the problem instead of a superficial manifestation, we could undermine the violence of this culture by simply replacing these decision-makers with those more reasonable, with those more sane, with those more humane, with those more human. But imagine if an American president decided tomorrow that the U.S. would no longer allow corporations to take oil from any region where the people themselves (not the government) did not want to relinquish it. The same would hold for metals, fish, meat, wood. Everything. What’s more, no resources would be extracted if their removal would harm the natural world in any way. In other words, the president decided to put in place a truly non-exploitative, sustainable economy, the sort of economy all but psychopaths would say they want, the sort of economy that environmental and social justice activists say they’re working toward. Presuming Congress and the Supreme Court went along—an extraordinarily dubious presumption—and presuming the president wasn’t assassinated by CIA operatives or oil or other company hirelings—even more dubious—prices would skyrocket, the American way of life would implode, and riots would (probably) fill the streets. The economy would collapse. Soon, the president’s head would be displayed atop the fence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The point is that the only people fit to be President are those who can institute policies that value economic production over life. A sane and humane person would not and could not last in that position.
Another superficial cause of the violence is that those who make the economic decisions (as opposed to political decisions, insofar as there is a difference) in this culture, too, are more interested in accumulating power—in this case monetary wealth—than they are in enriching the human and nonhuman communities that surround them. By itself, their interest in mining these communities would not be any more of a problem than any other compulsion, like excessive cleaning or obsessive hand-wringing. It really only becomes a problem because the power-hungry and the greedy work closely together as (somewhat) separate parts of the same corporate state, with the power-hungry wielding the military and police as muscle for the greedy, guaranteeing that the rich will get the resources required for them to increase their wealth—at gunpoint, if necessary—and guaranteeing also that those who effectively oppose these transfers of resources will get killed.
But even the conjoining of commerce and politics is, by itself, not a source of the violence, but a mechanism for it. If the lock-step march of government and industry were the essential cause of the culture’s violence, we could solve it relatively easily by calling a constitutional convention and inserting new checks and balances to prevent this in the future. And if those i
n power were to oppose us, continuing their current policy of taxing us without representing us, well, we could simply follow the advice of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the Beatles and say we want a revolution (recognizing that the Beatles waffled a bit more than the other two, although listening carefully to the doo-wop version I think provides a clue to their beliefs). But we would find, after the dust settled and the blood stopped flowing in the streets, that our glorious new revolutionary government faced the same old problem of how to take resources from the country and give them to the city, to the producers. Our new bosses would of necessity be as violent as our old bosses.
We could easily assemble a long list of other mechanisms or superficial causes of violence. There is the fact that those in power have surrounded themselves with institutions such as the military and judicial systems (in fact the entire governmental structure) in order to protect and maintain their power. There is the fact that the social system rewards the insatiable accumulation of wealth and power. There is the fact that we are all immersed in a mythology that, far from causing us to see this accumulation as a great source of violence, causes us to see it as not only acceptable, reasonable, and desirable, but the only way to be, the way, in fact, that “the real world” works. There is the fact that this same mythology glorifies violence, so long as it is perpetrated only by those in power or their surrogates: top Hollywood executives recently met with the president’s senior advisor to, in the words of The New York Times, find “common ground on how the entertainment industry can contribute to the war effort, replicating in spirit if not in scope the partnership formed between film-makers and war planners in the 1940s”; simultaneously, Tom Cruise is said to be concerned about his role in his next movie as a garbage collector, oh, sorry, a CIA operative, wanting to show the “CIA in as positive a light as possible.”90 There is the arrogance of the civilized, who consider themselves morally and otherwise superior to all others, and who therefore may exploit or exterminate these others with moral impunity (and immunity). There is the arrogance of the humanists, who believe us separate from and superior to nonhumans, who may also then be exploited or exterminated at will. And there is the culture’s death urge, pushing us all to end all life on the planet while simultaneously driving each and every one of us as much out of our bodies as we are out of our minds.
All of these are in place, and there is good reason to work on halting or slowing all of these. In no way am I suggesting we shouldn’t work to reduce the harmfulness of these mechanisms or superficial causes, anymore than I would suggest people not work on rape crisis hot lines, or that people not attempt to stop individual rapists. But I would also not suggest that working on a rape crisis hotline will in any way halt the very real crisis of rape. No one I know who has ever worked on issues of men’s violence against women has suggested that it will. Nor have they suggested that if only women will think nice enough thoughts, or practice the right sort of spiritual exercises, that men will stop raping women. Mitigation can be wonderful, and important, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking it is anything more than mitigation. Begging government and industry to stop destroying the planet and to stop killing people the world over is never going to work. It can’t.
This might be a good place to mention the primary stated goal of the United States military. No longer is it simply, as it was in the days of Manifest Destiny, the coast-to-coast conquest of the continental United States and the dispossession and/or extermination of the land’s original inhabitants. Nor is it what it was at the turn of the twentieth century—the time of Theodore Roosevelt’s ironically named Good Neighbor Policy—when the frontier was extended westward to the Philippines and beyond, where the U.S. killed one out of every ten Filipinos and did the same to residents of other countries in order to liberate them from themselves, and brought those they did not kill under their control so they could better use their land. Of course it was not only westward that they looked, but south and east as well, to bring as much of the globe as possible under U.S. control. Nor is the goal merely what it was fifty years ago, when National Security Council documents stated the obvious need for “a political and economic climate conducive to private investment,”91 and when State Department Policy Planning staff head George Kennan said that if “we” are to maintain a “position of disparity” over those whose resources “we” must take, “We should cease to talk about vague and . . . unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization,” and instead should “deal in straight power concepts,” not hampered by idealistic slogans about “altruism and world-benefaction.”92 All of this is merely another way to say the same thing I’ve been hammering so far, that in order to move resources into cities—in order to steal resources—you have to use physical force. Nor does the present goal leave as much to the imagination as it did a mere decade ago, when a Defense Planning Guide (written when current Vice President Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense) stated explicitly that the U.S. must hold “global power” and a monopoly of force,93 and that it must make certain that no others are allowed even “to protect their legitimate interests.”94
Instead, after all this time, those in power have finally gotten to the point. Or rather, their powers to surveil and kill have finally caught up with their lust for control. And they have articulated this clearly. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff recently put out their Joint Vision 2020, which defines their goals for the next twenty years and beyond. The U.S. military, according to the first words of this document, consists of: “Dedicated individuals and innovative organizations transforming the joint force for the 21st Century to achieve full spectrum dominance.” To make sure we get the point, the military bolded the phrase “full spectrum dominance.” Just in case we still don’t get it, the phrase is repeated thirteen more times in this brief, 8,700-word document, and is specified in U.S. military press releases and articles as the “key phrase” of the vision statement.95
I suppose we should at least thank them for their directness, although the question remains, as always: do we really get the point?
COUNTERVIOLENCE
The condemnation of liberation movements for resorting to violence or armed struggle is almost invariably superficial, hypocritical, judgmental, and unfair, and tends strongly to represent another example of the generalised phenomenon of “blaming the victim.” The violence of the situation, the pre-existing oppression suffered by those who eventually strike back, is conveniently ignored. The violence of the oppressed is a form of defensive counterviolence to the violence of conquest and oppression. In no armed national liberation movement I know of in history has this not been the case.
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THIS BOOK ORIGINALLY WAS GOING TO BE AN EXAMINATION OF THE circumstances in which violence is an appropriate response to the ubiquitous violence upon which this culture is based. More specifically, it was going to be an examination of when counterviolence, as termed by Franz Fanon, is an appropriate response to state or corporate violence. I wanted to write that book because whenever I give talks in which I mention violence—suggesting that there are some things, including a living planet (or more basically clean water and clean air, by which I mean our very lives), that are worth fighting for, dying for, and killing for when other means of stopping the abuses have been exhausted, and that there exist those people (often buttressed or seemingly constrained by organizations) who will not listen to reason, and who can be stopped no way other than through meeting their violence with your own—the response is always the same. Mainstream environmentalists and peace and justice activists put up what I’ve taken to calling a “Gandhi shield.” Their voices get thin, and I can see them psychically shut down. Their faces turn to stone. Their bodies do not move, but the ghosts of their bodies form fingers into the shapes of crosses as they try to keep vampires and evil thoughts at bay, and they begin to chant “Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Jr.” in an effort to k
eep themselves pure. Grassroots environmentalists generally do the same, except after the talk some will sidle up to me, make sure no one is watching, and whisper in my ear, “Thank you for raising this issue.” Often, young anarchists get excited, because someone is articulating something they know in their bones but have not yet put words to, and because they’ve not yet bought into—and been consumed by—the culture. The most interesting response comes from some of the other people with whom I’ve spoken: survivors of domestic violence; radical environmentalists; Indians; many of the poor, especially people of color; family farmers; and prisoners (I used to teach creative writing at Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermaximum security facility here in Crescent City). Their response is generally to nod slowly, look me hard in the eye, then say, “Tell me something I don’t already know.” Some will say, “What are you waiting for, bro? Let’s go.”
A major reason for the difference in response, I realized a long time ago, was that for these latter groups violence is not a theoretical question to be explored abstractly, philosophically, or spiritually,97 as it can often be for more mainstream activists, for those who may not have experienced violence in their own bodies, and who can then be more distant, even—and I’ve seen this a lot—acting as if these were political or philosophical games instead of matters of life and death. The direct experience of violence, on the other hand, often brings these questions closer to the people involved, so the people are not facing the questions as “activists” or “feminists” or “farmers” or “prisoners,” but rather as human beings—animals—struggling to survive. Having felt your father’s weight upon you in your bed; having stood in clearcut-and-herbicided moonscape after moonscape, tears streaming down your face; having had your children taken from you, land stolen that belonged to your ancestors since the land was formed, and your way of life destroyed; having sat at a kitchen table, foreclosure notice in front of you for land your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents worked, shotgun across your knees as you try to decide whether or not to put the barrel in your mouth; feeling the sting of a guard’s baton or the jolt of a stun gun (“I was tired,” one of my students wrote of being tasered, “I was 50,000 volts of tired”)—to suffer this sort of violence directly in your body—is often to undergo some sort of deeply physical transformation. It is often to perceive and be in the world differently.
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