The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen

Author:Derrick Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603581837
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing

ARBEIT MACHT FREI

WORK WILL

MAKE YOU

FREE

(MOTTO OVER

THE GATES

AT AUSCHWITZ)

PRODUCTION

I USED TO THINK WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. Every person has a vote, I’d been told, and every vote counts. I guess there are two senses in which I still believe we live in a democracy. The first is in a classical Greek sense, democracy for the few based on the exploitation of the many, better defined, really, as a plutocracy, rule by wealth (or, as corporate raider Charles Hurwitz says, government by the Golden Rule: The one with the gold makes the rules). We consider the Athenian democracy golden, although slavery was indispensable to the system—slaves were considered instrumental, and not having existences sufficient to themselves. Today our democracy continues that tradition, with workers, consumers, and the earth considered as only instrumental, and virtually nonexistent outside of their utility.

Even if we were to pretend that the votes of the poor count as much as the votes of the rich, the rich frame the terms of any given issue. So the poor can only voice their preferences as predicated by questions concocted by a wealthy minority. Imagine, for example, a national referendum to decharter all corporations, to hold corporate stockholders criminally and financially liable for deaths caused by these corporations, and to return all corporate-claimed lands to the poor. I believe the phrase is, in your dreams. In any case, even when the poor do get to vote, it’s only after they’ve been bombarded by waves of propaganda: Imagine, to push the decorporatization example further, the sorts of editorials one could expect, were any such referendum to come to a vote.

The second way in which we participate in a democracy is similar to the way in which the early Ku Klux Klan was a popular grassroots organization. We have to admit that in many ways the government does give us what we want, or rather what we’ve been trained to want. Consider, although we do not rebel, when faced with the reality that we must pay for clean (bottled) water, or against the fact that we are being killed by myriad carcinogenic processes central to our industrial economic system, or against the government’s interception of our communications, or the incarceration of significant portions of targeted populations (e.g., young black males), I strongly suspect that if the government were foolish enough to ban television entertainment, or cut off cell phone service, heads would roll within the week. The same would happen if prices in this country were raised to levels where they were no longer subsidized by: (a) the unsustainable use of nonrenewable resources; (b) the unsustainable use of renewable resources; (c) the expropriation of natural resources from the colonies; and (d) the exploitation of workers worldwide. You say you want a revolution? Pop the price of gasoline up to ten dollars a gallon and watch the fun begin. I once heard farmer, writer, and activist Wes Jackson say Wal-Mart is the main thing keeping Americans from rebelling: So long as we can get our diapers cheap, we’ll stay in line.

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