[D66] Endgame: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization

[R.O.]

*https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/*

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*Premise One*: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is 
especially true for industrial civilization.

*Premise Two*: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up 
or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their 
communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their 
landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can 
be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what 
they can to destroy traditional communities.

*Premise Three*: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, 
requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and 
widespread violence.

*Premise Four*: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely 
accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those 
higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that 
is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence 
done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and 
when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization 
of the victims.

*Premise Five*: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more 
valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above 
to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to 
make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is 
called production. If those below damage the property of those above, 
those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This 
is called justice.

*Premise Six*: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not 
undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable 
way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue 
to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet 
until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects 
of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a 
very long time.

*Premise Seven*: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the 
longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the 
crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who 
live during it, and for those who come after.

*Premise Eight*: The needs of the natural world are more important than 
the needs of the economic system.

*Another way to put premise Eight*: Any economic or social system that 
does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is 
unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and 
intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such 
economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from 
damaging your landbase.

*Premise Nine*: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans 
than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in 
population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or 
activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of 
these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: 
nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and 
consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a 
continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be 
characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by 
this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s 
not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that 
do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions 
themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and 
privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population 
and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the 
current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) 
movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be 
marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. 
Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and 
soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and 
perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we 
do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and 
what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be 
far more severe, the privation more extreme.

*Premise Ten*: The culture as a whole and most of its members are 
insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

*Premise Eleven*: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been 
a culture of occupation.

*Premise Twelve*: There are no rich people in the world, and there are 
no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces 
of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed 
riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and 
the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are 
often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the 
police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green 
paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions 
almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry 
with them extreme consequences in the real world.

*Premise Thirteen*: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we 
break ourselves of llusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least 
begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are 
going to resist.

*Premise Fourteen*: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m 
not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively 
enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate 
wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear 
our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not 
allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, 
we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

*Premise Fifteen*: Love does not imply pacifism.

*Premise Sixteen*: The material world is primary. This does not mean 
that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there 
is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world 
actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, 
Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of 
this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the 
movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess 
ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or 
not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned 
or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is 
our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though 
this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live 
our lives as though our lives are real.

*Premise Seventeen*: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base 
our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t 
frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

*Premise Eighteen*: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable 
than our current use of energy or technology.

*Premise Nineteen*: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief 
that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

*Premise Twenty*: Within this culture, economics—not community 
well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives 
social decisions.

*Modification of Premise Twenty*: Social decisions are determined 
primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these 
decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and 
those they serve.

*Re-modification of Premise Twenty*: Social decisions are determined 
primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these 
decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they 
serve.

*Re-modification of Premise Twenty*: Social decisions are founded 
primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined 
belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to 
magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

*Re-modification of Premise Twenty*: If you dig to the heart of it—if 
there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are 
determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the 
ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

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