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<address>https://www.wildernessp*dc*st.com/derrick-jensen<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 08-08-2020 09:56, R.O. wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:9ee7fe7c-fade-45d8-ef83-0826ab7c724e@ziggo.nl">
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<address><strong><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/"
moz-do-not-send="true">https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/</a></strong></address>
<p><strong><br>
</strong></p>
<p><strong>Premise One</strong>: Civilization is not and can never
be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial
civilization.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Two</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Three</strong>: Our way of living—industrial
civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very
quickly without persistent and widespread violence.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Four</strong>: 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. </p>
<p><strong>Premise Five</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Six</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Seven</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Eight</strong>: The needs of the natural world
are more important than the needs of the economic system.</p>
<p><strong>Another way to put premise Eight</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Nine</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Ten</strong>: 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. </p>
<p><strong>Premise Eleven</strong>: From the beginning, this
culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Twelve</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Thirteen</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Fourteen</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Fifteen</strong>: Love does not imply pacifism.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Sixteen</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Seventeen</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Eighteen</strong>: Our current sense of self is
no more sustainable than our current use of energy or
technology.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Nineteen</strong>: The culture’s problem lies
above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural
world is justifiable.</p>
<p><strong>Premise Twenty</strong>: Within this culture,
economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not
justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.</p>
<p><strong>Modification of Premise Twenty</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Re-modification of Premise Twenty</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Re-modification of Premise Twenty</strong>: 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.</p>
<p><strong>Re-modification of Premise Twenty</strong>: 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.</p>
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