“How so?”
“Once we unplug from our vital connections—connections more like the fiber of what we call nature where there aren’t barriers between the relationships of things to each other—once we unplug from the way everything branches into everything, and instead pursue the goals of civilization as we know it, the energy source has to come from somewhere else. To some extent it can come from sucking the labor of the poor, and to some extent it can come from exploiting the bodies of animals and people treated like animals. The exploiting of the bodies of women gives a lot of energy. But the parasitism of the dominant culture is endless, because once you cut yourself off from the free flow of mutually permeable life you have to get your life back somehow, artificially.”
I came back to the conversation with my mom, and heard her say, “That was part of your father’s problem. He had no solid identity of his own, which was one reason he was so violent. Because he wasn’t secure in his own identity, in order to exist, he
needed
for those around him to constantly mirror him. When you or I or your siblings didn’t match his projections—when we showed any spark of being who we actually were, thus forcing him to confront some other person as someone different than himself—he became terrified, or at least he would have become terrified if he would have allowed himself to feel that. But to become terrified was too scary, and so he flew into a rage.”
I just looked at her. I’d never heard this analysis before. It was very good. I was thinking also that if my publisher were present he would probably be tearing his hair out at her penchant for making parenthetical comments, just as he does with mine.
She continued, “His lack of a secure identity is also why he was so rigid. If you’re not comfortable with who you are, you have to force others to confront you only on your own terms. Anything else is once again too scary. If you’re comfortable with who you are, however, it becomes no problem to let others be
their own selves around you: you have faith that whoever they are and whatever they do, you will be able to respond appropriately. You can be fluid and respond differently to different people, depending on what they need from you. He couldn’t do that.”
This same thing happens on a larger scale, of course. Deadened inside, we call the world itself dead, then surround ourselves with the bodies of those we’ve killed. We set up cityscapes where we see no free and wild beings. We see concrete, steel, asphalt. Even the trees in cities are in cages. Everything mirrors our own confinement. Everything mirrors our own internal deadness.
“One more thing,” my mother said. “This lack of an identity is one of the reasons so many abusers kill their partners when their partners try to leave. They’re not only losing their partners (and punching bags) but their identities as well.”
That’s also one of the reasons this culture must kill all non-civilized peoples, both human and nonhuman: in order to preclude the possibility of our escape.
Which brings us to the next category: abusers isolate their victims from other resources. I’m typing these words sitting in a manufactured chair staring at a manufactured computer screen, listening to the hum of a manufactured computer fan. To my left are manufactured shelves of manufactured books, written by human beings. Civilized, literate human beings who write in English (languages, many of them indigenous, are being destroyed as quickly as all other forms of diversity, and to as disastrous an effect: the language you speak influences what you can say, which influences what you can think, which influences what you can perceive, which influences what you can experience, which influences how you act, which influences who you are, which influences what you can say, and so on). To my right a window leads to the darkened outside and reflects back to me my uncombed dark hair surrounding the blur of my own face. I’m wearing mass-produced clothes, and mass-produced slippers. I do, however, have a cat on my lap. All sensory inputs save the cat originate in civilized humans, and even the cat is domesticated.
Stop. Think about it. Every sensation I have comes from one source: civilization. When you finish this paragraph, put down the book for a few moments, and check out your own surroundings. What can you see, hear, smell, feel, taste that does not originate in or is mediated by civilized human beings? Singing frogs on a
Sounds of Nature
CD don’t count.
This is all very strange. Stranger still—and extraordinarily revealing of the degree to which we’ve not only accepted but reified this artificially imposed isolation, turned our insanity into a perceived good—is the way we’ve made a
fetish and religion (and science, for that matter, as well as business) of attempting to define ourselves as separate from—different from, isolated from, in opposition to—the rest of nature. Abusers merely isolate victims from other resources. Far moreso even than this, civilization isolates all of us—ideologically and physically—from the source of all life.
We do not believe trees have anything to say to us (nor even that they can speak at all), nor stars, nor coyotes, nor even our dreams. We have been convinced—and this is the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies—that the world is silent save civilized humans.
One of the most common and necessary steps taken by an abuser in order to control a victim is to monopolize the victim’s perception. That is one reason abusers cut off victims from family and friends: so that in time victims will have no standard other than the abusers’ by which to judge the abusers’ worldviews and behavior. Abusive behavior—behavior that would otherwise seem extraordinarily bizarre (how crazy is it to rape one’s own child? How crazy is it to toxify the air you breathe?)—can then become in the victim’s mind (and even more sadly, heart) normalized. No outside influence must be allowed to break the spell. There can be only one way to perceive and to be in the world, and that is the abuser’s way. If the abuser is able to mediate all information that reaches the victim, the victim will no longer be able to conceptualize that there is any other way to be. At this point the abuser will have achieved more or less total control.
This is, of course, the point we have reached as a culture. Civilization has achieved a completely unprecedented and nearly perfect monopolization of our perception, at least for those of us in the industrialized world. Fortunately, however, there do still exist people—mainly the poor, people from nonindustrialized nations, and the indigenous—who still have primary connections to the physical world. And fortunately, also, the physical world still exists, and all of us can at the very least reach out to touch trees still standing in steel and concrete cages. And we can see plants poking up through sidewalks, breaking cement barriers that keep them from feeling the sun. I would hope we can learn from these plants and break through these concrete and perceptual barriers.
The sixth characteristic is that abusers blame others for their problems. To make the jump to the cultural level it would be easy to simply list the ways our culture does this, and leave it at that. The capitalist media blames spotted owls and humans who love them for job losses in the timber industry, yet (surprise, surprise) ignores the greater number of jobs lost in the same industry to automation and raw log exports (as well as the cut-and-run nature of the industry). Politicians and other timber industry propagandists blame natural forests
and environmentalists for fires, yet ignore the fact that logging is a significant cause of fires, and further, that fires burn hotter and more destructively in cutover forests and tree plantations than they do in natural forests. They ignore further the regenerative role fire plays in forests. We who care about the planet would be wise to not ignore this lesson about the destructive/regenerative powers of fire but learn it, and apply it when appropriate to the perceptual and physical barriers that monopolize our perception and that are killing the planet.
More blame: the bigot blames poor Mexicans when his employer’s plant closes and moves to Mexico. The owner blames market conditions or damn unions for leaving him no choice but to move the plant. Go back in time and we have Israel’s rulers, speaking through their God, blaming Canaanites because Israelites didn’t want to follow “God’s” (wink, wink) rules. Move forward and we have Crusaders blaming women for lack of success on the battlefield (sex, especially with an infidel, evidently displeases “God”). Then we have settlers blaming Indians for not giving up their land without a fight (as John Wayne later said, “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves”). Hitler and the Nazis blamed Communists and Jews for everything from world wars to defective dentures. Americans agreed at least so far as the Communists. Now it’s terrorists who keep us from the Promised Land of Perpetual Peace and Prosperity™ (brought to you by ExxonMobil). There is always someone (else) to blame.
Something interesting happens when you combine an abuser’s propensity to blame with the monopolization of the victim’s perception: the victim comes to agree with the abuser, that all problems are actually the victim’s fault. The wife tries tirelessly to make the perfect meal and if she’s beaten it’s because she’s not a good enough cook, which means not a good enough wife, which means not a good enough person. Of course it’s not because her husband is violent, abusive, insane. The child tries to perfectly clean the dishes, and violence comes to her because she is too sloppy. The teen tries to park the car in the right place—or rather not in the ever-shifting wrong place—so as to not be beaten. In an attempt to maintain control in a situation that is grievously out of control and that can never be in control so long as victims stay within the perceptual box created for them by their abuser, victims conspire with their abusers to focus on alterations of their own behavior in futile attempts to placate the abuser or at least delay or mitigate the inevitable violence, or at the very least shift this violence to another victim. Even worse than this self-focus being a mere tactic, it becomes a way of being (or rather non-being) in the world, such that victims
come to
know
the fault is their own. Instead of stopping the abuse by any means necessary, they join with the abuser in doing violence to themselves.
They forget that assigning “blame” in this sense is a toxic mimic of the necessary task of assigning appropriate and accurate responsibility for the violence done to them, and doing something about it.
These same patterns are replicated on the larger social scale, at least among those who have been sufficiently enculturated. This is probably not the case among the primary victims of our culture, of course: those who remain free of civilization’s perceptual box. I’m reasonably certain salmon, swordfish, and hammerhead sharks do not find themselves paralyzed by spasms of self-blame for their plight—
What could I do differently to placate these people? If only I were a better fish they would not hate me
—but instead know precisely who is killing them. The same can be said for the indigenous. You can’t get much clearer than Sitting Bull, who said, when forced to speak at a celebration of the completion of a railroad through what had been his people’s land: “I hate you. I hate you. I hate all the white people. You are thieves and liars. You have taken away our land and made us outcasts, so I hate you.” It’s important to note, by the way, that the white translator did not speak these words, but instead the “friendly, courteous speech he had prepared.”
170
And that’s the problem.
Those of us whose vision has been defined by civilization, whose personalities have been formed and deformed in this particular crucible of violence, sometimes, like victims of childhood abuse, fail to adequately and accurately assign responsibility for the violence we suffer or witness, instead transforming raw impulses to assign responsibility—“You have taken our land and made us outcasts, so I hate you”—into friendly, courteous speech: some environmentalists even give training in “verbal nonviolence” so activists will be certain to not say “Fuck you” to police putting them, in copspeak, into “pain compliance holds,” that is, torturing them. Abused children��and I know this from experience—generally are unable to face the fact that they have almost no power to stop the violence done to them and to those they love. As a consequence of this—and this dovetails nicely, or more accurately horrifically, with abusers blaming others for their own problems as well as abusers monopolizing victims’ perceptions—victims often internalize too much responsibility, which in this case means any responsibility at all, for the violence they suffer or see.
I must have done something wrong, or my father would not hit me. I must be a slut or a temptress, and I must want him to do this to me—I know this because he tells me all of this—or he would not visit me at night
. This allows these children to pretend they have at least some power
to halt or slow violence done to them, however illusory all evidence shows this power to be. That illusion can in fact be crucial to emotional survival. Of course when they’re no longer children, the illusion becomes absurd and harmful.
Similarly, many of us trying to stop the destructiveness of this culture—and I know this not only from my own experience but from having worked with and talked to hundreds or even thousands of other activists—are routinely struck by the near-complete ineffectiveness of our work on any but the most symbolic levels. By almost any measure, our work especially as environmental activists is an appalling failure. Just today I spoke with a friend who for the past ten months has been sitting in an ancient redwood in Humboldt County, just south of here, in an attempt to keep the tree and the forest of which it is a part from being cut. Pacific Lumber is deforesting that watershed, as it is deforesting much of the state, and will eventually get to the tree in which she now lives. Previous cutting by this corporation has caused such severe flooding that local residents’ homes have been destroyed. Some have put their homes on stilts. Once-pristine water supplies now resemble chocolate milk garnished with sticks, spiked with herbicides and diesel fuel. Years ago, in response to citizen outrage, the state’s North Coast Region Water Quality Control Board—appointed by the governor, who is deeply beholden to big timber corporations—put together a scientific panel to study the problem, which is nearly always a good way to delay action while allowing primary destruction to continue. But the panel surprised the Board by unanimously declaring that cutting needs to be drastically reduced
now
, not only to protect local human residents, but for critically imperiled coho salmon and many other species. The Board’s decision? You guessed it: ignore the citizens it purports to serve, ignore the scientific team it assembled, ignore everything but the “needs” of this grossly destructive corporation. This is democracy in action. This is the severing of reality from politics (or really, there’s nothing to sever, since they’ve always been separated). This is the dismemberment of the planet. This is breathtakingly and obscenely routine.