In The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen sets the bar as high as possible, examining the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture -- from lynchings in early 20th century America, modern slavery and corporate misdeeds to manufacturing disasters, death squads in developing nations and the destruction of the natural world.
Interweaving political, historical, philosophical and deeply personal perspectives, Jensen argues that only by understanding past horrors can we hope to prevent future ones. Impeccably researched, The Culture of Make Believe arrives at some shocking and thought-provoking conclusions. As readers of A Language Older Than Words can attest, Jensen is a public intellectual of rare abilities.
That’s the blurb on the back of the book -- and it sold me. It’s big. 700 pages. But yes, let’s do this. Let’s dive right into that world.
One System to Rule Them All
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
That’s a quote from Primo Levi, and it’s the first of many that will lead off each of Jensen’s short chapters. It’s also a good one to tease out one of the major themes of his book -- a theme that is eerily reminiscent of the last book I read. Simply put, when it comes to the atrocities that are committed in our society, it is not the individuals committing those atrocities that are finally to blame for them, not unless and until you assess and assign the appropriate blame to the cultural system in which they have lived all their lives.
Jensen first develops this idea when talking about the racial violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.
But to simply blame the KKK for the violence would be to miss a deeper point, akin to blaming McDonald’s for high blood pressure or Weyerhaeuser for global deforestation. The Ku Klux Klan, like McDonald’s, like Weyerhaeuser, like the United States government, is a fiction created or adapted to accomplish some set of social purposes. It exists only insofar as we believe it does.
This doesn’t mean that violence committed by people who called, or call themselves Klan members isn’t real, nor that membership in the Klan doesn’t encourage certain behaviors on the parts of its members, because, clearly, it does, as membership in any social organization does. I don’t know of many people who, for example, deforest hillsides simply for the hell of it; they do so because they’re socially rewarded -- in this case, paid -- for doing so, Weyerhaeuser being just one of the social forms created to facilitate this social reward.
What this means is that on one hand it’s pointless and misleading -- and thus harmful -- to demonize the KKK (or McDonald’s, Weyerhaeuser, or the United States government), because the impulse to commit atrocities doesn’t so much originate with the organization as pass through and become amplified by it. To merely eliminate the KKK -- no matter how tempting a thought -- would not stop the atrocities.
The power of the system -- or the frame -- to blind us to finding the real culprits in our world is not something easily dismissed or underestimated. One powerful demonstration of this comes from another of Jensen’s chapter-heading quotes, this one from Allan Griswold Johnson.
“It is difficult to believe that such widespread violence (that girls twelve years old in the United States now stand a twenty to thirty percent chance of being violently sexually assaulted in their lifetimes) is the responsibility of a small lunatic fringe of psychopathic men. That sexual violence is so pervasive supports the view that the locus of violence against women rests squarely in the middle of what our culture defines as “normal” interactions between men and women. The numbers reiterate a reality that American women have lived with for years: sexual violence against women is part of the every-day fabric of American life.”
But If you’re squeamish about the linking of the KKK to corporate America and then to the United States government, you’d better stop reading now -- because Jensen won’t be deviating from that line of thought. Indeed, as he digs deeper and deeper into the “system” that bares responsibility for atrocities, he begins by calling it by a familiar name -- capitalism. And on that frame he will make one of the truly meaningful distinctions when it comes to worldviews -- economic or otherwise.
The Tyranny of the Zero Sum Game
Much of the danger of our social system is that, in contradistinction to the majority of human societies for the majority of human existence, it is based not on cooperation but on competition, always on the victory of one at the expense of another.
Yes, the old canard of the “zero-sum game.” When those indoctrinated into it meet people of a different perspective -- let’s call them “win-winners” instead of “zero-sumers” -- there is always and only one reaction. Destroy the infidel! Because, of course, the zero-sum game is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you believe that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is competition (or if the fundamental organizing principle of your society is competition) you will perceive the world as full of ruthless competitors, all of whom will victimize you if they get the chance. The world as you perceive it will begin to devolve into consisting entirely or almost entirely of victims and perpetrators: those who do, and those who get done to; the fuckers, and the fucked. Your society will devolve -- not in perception but in all truth -- into these roles you have projected onto the world at large. You will begin to believe that everyone is out to get you. And why not? After all, you are certainly out to get them.
It’s funny how Jensen will come to lay this cut-throat, zero-sum worldview at the feet of capitalism -- as opposed to say, communism -- since, from where I sit capitalism, despite its flaws, is the one system of the two that can actually grow the size of the pie that we all inequitably share.
But as Jensen correctly points out, this misunderstanding of reality creates all kinds of undetected misrepresentations in a society -- some with troubling consequences. But, as he again goes out of his way to stress, even those misperceptions are not some single person’s or class’s fault.
The near ubiquity of this misperception -- that of the poor perceiving others of their station in life to be the source of their misery, a misperception that continues unabated to this day -- is not the product of mass stupidity on the part of members of those great sectors of the population who fall prey to it, nor is it part of a fiendishly clever plot by the rich to consistently keep the poor at each other’s throats instead of their own (although the inculcation in this direction by those who own and thus control the media is literally mind numbing). It is a manifestation of the selective blindness that besets us all. We have been trained, from early on, to be able to perceive only certain threats, to perceive only certain forms of hatred, contempt, violence, and to perceive only certain sorts of people as even potential perpetrators of horrible crimes. We have been trained to perceive the world and those in it in very specific ways.
Yes, the misperceptions are endemic to the system -- not the fault of any of the people subservient to that system. And therefore one should be careful with the language one uses to describe the phenomenon. Jensen says we have been “trained,” but to my ear that implies a “trainer” -- perhaps one of those who “own and thus control” the media. Like evolution, there really is no designer. The journey forward is driven by forces as blind as natural selection.
Slavery to an Idea
As I see it, there are two key problems with Jensen’s argument. Here’s a tight summary of the first.
Our culture has made us all slaves to an idea, and idea that takes precedence over everything, over our own lives and the lives of others. And slavery to an idea is far more dangerous than slavery to a human, because we do not even know that we are slaves. We pass through our days with the freedom of a dog who never reaches the end of its leash, certain that what we see is all of reality, all there ever was, all there ever will be, all that is possible. Having enslaved ourselves to this idea, we then enslave others, passing on the knowledge of how to be a slave from father to son, father to daughter, mother to son, mother to daughter, sibling to sibling, teacher to student, owner to laborer, boss to employee, slave to slave.
In other words, it’s not just slavery to this idea that is the problem, but our very tendency to become slaves to our ideas in the first place. But is there an idea that won’t “enslave” me in exactly the way that Jensen describes? Whether the idea is capitalism, communism, anarchy, or the hundreds of gradations in-between, how does any idea prevent us from being the dog that has not yet found the end of its leash? What idea can transport me beyond the limits of my own understanding, my own abilities, my own finite existence? Be careful, Fido, if you think you’ve found one. From the philosopher’s point of view, some leashes are longer than others, but none of them are infinitely long.
The Blame Game
The second problem has to do with Jensen’s unfortunate tendency, usually after arguing persuasively that there is no one to blame, to assign blame. Here’s another useful quote from the front of one of Jensen’s chapters, this one from philosopher John Lachs.
“The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts. … As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions become motions without consequence. With the consequence out of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility. Wage earners who insert the fuse in bombs can view their activity as but a series of repetitive motions performed for a living. Railroad workers who take trainloads of prisoners to extermination camps can think of themselves as simply providing transportation. … The remarkable thing is that we are not unable to recognize wrong acts or gross injustices when we see them. What amazes us is how they could have come about when each of us did none but harmless acts. We look for someone to blame then, for conspiracies that might explain the horrors we all abhor. It is difficult to accept that often there is no person and no group that planned or caused it all. It is even more difficult to see how our actions, through their remote effects, contributed to causing misery. It is no cop-out to think oneself blameless and condemn society. It is the natural result of large-scale mediation which inevitably leads to monstrous ignorance.”
Lachs here is saying both that it is natural for us to look for someone to blame and how wrong it is for us to do so. Jensen, especially is some of his transcribed dialogues with his colleagues and mentors, seems to focus a little too much on the first point, less so on the second.
For example:
“I’m not talking about a conspiracy here[,” said sociologist George Ritzer. “]Instead it’s simply a system of rewards. There are a limited number of things that any system rewards, and that people within a system -- any kind of system -- want. When we talk about our economic system, we’re talking about people wanting profit, and more deeply, we’re talking about control and power. Now, having control and power as goals -- and as requirements -- leads to the creation of a series of systems, all of which are set up to maximize profitability, power, and control. When we find ourselves either working with those systems or trapped inside of them, we consciously or unconsciously work to achieve that kind of profitability or control. But even when we’re not in those kinds of systems, we may or may not become conscious of the fact that those systems are still exercising that power and control over us.”
See. It’s a system. It’s not so much the people in the system. It’s the system itself. But Jensen responds:
I said, “It seems to me that the problem isn’t that there is a code, as such, All cultures must have codes. All communication involves codes. The question, it seems, always comes down to who benefits.”
Yes. Let’s talk about who benefits.
He answered, “You can’t address that question without addressing capitalism.” … “It’s clear that, especially with the increasing elimination of alternatives, capitalism is rigged in favor of the haves. We have by some definitions the most successful economic system in the world’s history, yet it is a system which benefits a relatively small number of people. The great majority of the people in the world benefit little or nothing by this.”
“Far from benefitting,” I said, “many are killed.”
“And just in the United States,” he said, “a small number of people have grown incredibly wealthy in this great economic expansion of the 1990s while the vast majority have gained little or nothing. So, who gains from all of this? The people in power, the people who control these systems, the people who own blocks of shares in these systems: they gain. It’s part of our mythology in this country -- part of our code, if you will -- that what is good for capitalism is good for the country.”
They. The ones who control the system. They’re the ones to blame, right? To be fair, I guess Jensen doesn’t say that flat out, but I think that’s the implication. But I’m not sure Peter Senge would agree. Senge would say that the people in the system -- even the ones that benefit from it -- are part of the system. They are no more “in control” of it than the raindrop is “in control” of the rainstorm.
And although I think it’s true that income inequality has increased in the United States since the 1990s -- I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been the case throughout the history of capitalism. Take a look at any chart showing the decline in global poverty over the last hundred years and then come back and argue that “the great majority of the people in the world benefit little or nothing” from the system. Isn’t the lower class American better off today than the European serf in the Middle Ages? Or the ancient hunter-gatherer on the African savannah?
The God Standing Behind the God
But capitalism isn’t really the system that Jensen thinks of as the problem. He sees another driving force -- another system -- behind that one. First, he calls it production.
In a nutshell, our culture’s real response to diversity is this: Nothing shall be deliberately or unthinkingly allowed to detract from the central movement of our culture, toward monolithic control, toward production -- which, after all, is nothing but the turning of the living (forests) into the dead (two-by-fours), the living (mountains) into the dead (aluminum cans) -- toward the annihilation of all that is different. In other words, it calls for the annihilation of life. Production is the manifestation in the physical world of the psychic process of objectification. It is the turning of the subject (a cow, for example) into the object (profit on the hoof, as agribusinessmen say). To do so, necessarily kills the subject, first inside the objectifier’s experience, and then in the physical world.
Production, however, is not the end point. Production, deified as it has become, is not the god who stands behind the god. The god who stands behind the god is annihilation. Where does our production lead us? Psychic death. Emotional death. Physical death. And, as should be increasingly clear to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, it is leading us ever more quickly toward the death of every living being.
Admittedly, this is where Jensen begins to lose me. From where I sit, his argument sounds a little like saying that water is bad because you can drown in too much of it. Yes, water can kill you -- can, in fact, lead us “ever more quickly toward the death of every living being” -- but the right amount of water -- for drinking, or bathing, or cleaning -- is actually a good thing. Production itself isn’t bad, even if production taken to certain extremes is very, very bad.
And yet Jensen will go on to describe the worst of all possible cases of production, and thereby imply that all production is bad. Here’s one especially compelling example of his technique, taken from the time of the First World War.
At the same time Tom Lamont [of the J. P. Morgan Company] was articulating the abstract monetary rewards that would accrue “if the war lasts long enough to encourage us,” people were dying in Europe: “Men had lost arms and legs, brains oozed out of shattered skulls, and lungs protruded from riven chests; many had lost their faces and were, I should think, unrecognizable to their friends. … One poor chap had lost his nose and most of his face, and we were obliged to take off an arm, the other hand, and extract two bullets like shark’s teeth from his thigh.” While Lamont spoke of becoming “lenders on a really stupendous scale,” a frontline nurse spoke of other, more tangible topics: “I pushed the clothes back and saw a pulp, a mere mass of smashed body from the ribs downwards; the stomach and abdomen were completely crushed and his left leg was hanging to the pulped body by only a few shreds of flesh. … The soldier’s dull eyes were looking at me and his lips moved, but no words came. What it cost me to turn away without aiding him, I cannot describe, but we could not waste time and material on hopeless cases, and there were so many others waiting.” At the same time that Jack Morgan, having fully internalized Thomas Mellon’s advice that a man may “be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health,” served at home -- either his fifty-seven room home on two hundred and fifty acres near Long Island (twelve bedrooms, twenty-five bathrooms, eighteen marble fireplaces, sixteen-car garage, and gymnasium), or his “unexpectedly light and spacious” home in New York City (forty-five rooms, twenty-two fireplaces, and a dozen bathrooms) -- others were being killed far away from family, home, and any friendly face: “Those who could walk, got up and followed us; running, hopping, limping, by our sides. The badly crippled crawled after us; all begging beseeching us not to abandon them in their need. And, on the road, there were others, many others; some of them lying down in the dust, exhausted. They, too, called after us. They held on to us; praying us to stop with them. We had to wrench our skirts from the clinging hands.”
See what he did there? Production enables war. War is bad. Therefore, production is bad. And profiting from the production that enables war is especially bad. That could all be true -- but aren’t the men who profit from the production that enables the war and the men who are killed and maimed in that war part of the same system? The House of Morgan may have profited from the First World War, but did the House of Morgan start the First World War? Did they bring it about so they could profit while other men died? That, I think, is what Jensen would have us believe, which leans us back toward to conclusion that someone -- not something -- is to blame for all this death and horror.
But Jensen’s argument will go even farther than this. It’s not just the bad men in the system, and it’s not just the system -- capitalism or the production that fuels it. The real enemy is something even more diffuse and fundamental than that.
Our culture’s deep foundation of competition creates waves of rage and hatred. Not only does this anger get misdirected because it’s easier to express it against the powerless, and not only because we are routinely pitted against others of the powerless, but, most especially, because, if we were to focus on the real sources of that rage and hatred, we would soon find ourselves questioning our very identities. Because so many of us have identified ourselves so deeply as civilized, as producers, consumers, workers, engineers, bakers, writers, soldiers, policemen, teachers, we have forgotten that first we are human beings. And what is that? We have no idea. To identify so deeply with the system of production that permeates the deepest recesses of our bodies, just like dioxin from manufacturing, like radiation from fallout, like heavy metals from mining, is to identify with the founding processes of civilization: conquest and repression. To recognize that our lives are based on the processes would -- if we reject instead of embrace them -- set us adrift in unknown territory. Who would I be and how would I live if I were not part of this system?
When I first read passages like this I had a hard time wrapping my head around what Jensen was talking about. He’s not saying civilization itself is the problem, is he?
Get rid of civilization? I can hear you say. That’s your solution? The hatred that characterizes so much of our system -- the hatred I’ve described and analyzed in this book -- is not a product of biology. People are not fundamentally hateful. Our hate is not a result of several billion years of natural selection. It’s a result of the framing conditions under which each of us are raised. It’s a result of the unquestioned assumptions that inform us. If we want to stop the hate, we need to get rid of the framing conditions. Until we do that, we’re bound to fail. So, yes, that is precisely my solution, we need to get rid of civilization.
Yes, he is. Civilization is the god that stands behind all the other gods.
But I think Jensen makes a fatal error here. You may be able to convince me that conquest and repression are the founding processes of production, and later of capitalism, but you aren’t going to convince me that civilization itself (not “our civilization,” but “civilization itself”) is based on them. Civilization began when humans started growing rather than hunting their own food. Growing food meant staying in one place rather than moving around, and the relative abundance that it created allowed different people in the culture to take on different roles. No longer did everyone have to be always dedicated to the acquisition and preparation of food, now some, as Jensen correctly says above, could be “engineers, bakers, writers, soldiers, policemen, teachers.” It was agriculture and this division of labor that first created civilization in its modern sense. Only later, when different cultures began rubbing uncomfortably against others did things like conquest, repression, production, and capitalism come into their own.
But that distinction seems lost on Jensen. He wants to throw the civilized baby out with the repressive bathwater.
The Solution That Wasn’t There
And how are we supposed to do this? How are we supposed to get rid of civilization? Does he want us to go back to being hunter-gatherers? We’re not going to do that. Never. Isn’t there some other path -- some middle path -- that we could take? What is your solution, Jensen?
How do we bring down civilization? I cannot tell you.
How do I describe how unbelievably frustrating it was to get to the bottom of page 603 only to be told that all I have been reading is a diagnosis without a prescription? Jensen doesn’t know how we get rid of civilization, but more than that, he hasn’t done enough to convince me that we even should. Throughout his text he wavers back and forth between blaming the system and blaming the people at the top of the system. In fact, a handful of pages before this disappointment, he passionately lays out the many-layered challenge that his “civilization system” represents. For this section, it will be helpful to understand who Jensen has previously defined as members of his four groups.
Group 1 = the elite
Group 2 = the upper class
Group 3 = the lower class
Group 4 = the invisible people
What will the great holocausts of the twenty-first century look like? It depends on where you stand. Look around.
If you’re in group one, the decent White men, your postmodern holocausts will be, at most, barely visible, and, at least, a price you’re willing to pay, as Madame Albright said about killing Iraqi children. The holocausts will probably share similarities with other holocausts, as you attempt to maximize production -- to “grow the economy,” as you might say -- and, as when necessary, you attempt to eradicate dissent. This means the holocaust will look like a booming economy beset by shifting problems that somehow always keep you from ever reaching the Promised Land, whatever that might be. The holocaust will look like numbers on ledgers. It will look like technical problems to be solved, whether those problems are increasing your access to necessary resources, dealing with global warming, calming unrest on the streets, or figuring out what to do about too many unproductive people on land you know you could be put to better use. The holocaust will look like houses with gates, limousines with bulletproof glass, and a military budget that can never stop increasing. … The holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.
If you’re in the second group, you will continue to be co-opted into supporting the system that does not serve you well. Perhaps, the holocaust will look like a new car. Perhaps it will look like eating a bar of chocolate. Perhaps it will look like lending your talents to a major corporation -- or, more broadly, toward economic production -- so you can make a better life for your children. Perhaps it will look like working as an engineer for Shell or on an assembly line for General Motors. Maybe it will look like basing a person’s value on her or his employability or productivity. Perhaps it will look like anger at Mexicans or Pakistanis or Algerians or Hmong who compete with you for jobs, and who, of course, because they don’t live like fully human beings, can afford to work for less. Perhaps it will look like outrage at environmentalists who want to save some damn suckerfish, even (or especially) if it impinges on your property rights, or if it takes water you need to irrigate, to make the desert bloom, to make the desert productive. Maybe it will feel like continuing to do a job that you hate -- and that requires so little of your humanity -- because, no matter how you try, you never can seem to catch up. Maybe it will feel like being tired at the end of the day, and just wanting to sit and watch some television. …
If you’re in the subsection of the third group, who might some day resist but don’t know where to put your rage, the holocaust might look like armed robbery, auto theft, assault. It might look like joining a gang. It might look like needle tracks down the insides of your arms, and might smell like the bitter, vinegary stench of tar heroin. Or maybe it smells minty strong, like menthol, like the sweet smell of crack brought into your neighborhood at the behest of the CIA. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the unmistakable smell of the inside of a cop car, and a vision through that rear window of a little girl eating an ice cream cone, with the knowledge that never in your life will you see this sight again. Maybe it looks like Pelican Bay, or Marion, or San Quentin, or Leavenworth. Or maybe it feels like a bullet in the back of the head, and leaves you lying on the streets of New York City, Cincinnati, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C.
If you’re a member of the subsection of group three, already working against the centralization of power, against the system, then, maybe, from your perspective, the holocaust looks like rows of black-clad armored policemen, and it smells like tear gas. Maybe it looks like lobbying a Congress you know has never served you. Maybe it looks like the destruction of place after wild place, and feels like an impotence sharp as a broken leg. Maybe it looks like staring down the barrel of an American-made gun in the hands of a Colombian man wearing American-made camo fatigues, and knowing that your life is over.
For those of the fourth class, the simply extra, maybe it looks like the view from just outside the chain link fence surrounding a chemical refinery, and maybe it smells like Cancer Alley. Maybe it looks like children with leukemia, children with cancer of the spine, children with birth defects. Maybe it feels like the grinding ache of hunger that has been your closest companion since you were born. Maybe it looks like the death of your daughter from starvation, and the death of your son from diphtheria, measles, or chicken pox. Maybe it feels like death from dehydration, when a tablet costing less than a penny could have saved your life. Or maybe it feels like nothing. Maybe it sounds like nothing, looks like nothing: What does it feel like to be struck by a missile in the middle of the night, a missile traveling faster than the speed of sound, a missile launched a thousand miles away?
Maybe it feels like salmon battering themselves against dams, monkeys locked in steel cages, polar bears starving on a dwindling ice cap, hogs confined in crates so small they cannot stand, trees falling to the chainsaw, rivers poisoned, whales deafened by sonic blasts from Navy experiments. Maybe it feels like the crack of tibia under the unforgiving jaws of a leghold trap.
Maybe it looks like the destruction of the planet’s life support systems. Maybe it looks like the final conversion of the living to the dead.
This litany becomes either increasingly compelling or increasingly ridiculous, depending on your point of view. To me, it underscores the wild complexity of it all, and the untenableness of the notion that someone, or some class of people, is to blame for it. It is a system -- one that is likely endemic to our reality. It may be the ultimate system, and there is no larger system that one can ascend to in order to get a better grasp of all its interlocking pieces.
As much as I cannot help but see the similarities between prisons and concentration camps, it seems to me a grave error to count on Zyklon-B-dispensing showers to mark the new holocaust. Perhaps the new holocaust is dioxin in polar bear fat, metam sodium in the Smith River. Perhaps it comes in the form of decreasing numbers of corporations controlling increasing portions of our food supply, until, as now, three huge corporations control more than 80 percent of the beef market, and seven corporations control more than 90 percent of the grain market. Perhaps it comes in the form of these corporations, and the governments which provide the muscle for them, deciding who eats and who does not. Perhaps it comes in the form of so much starvation that we cannot count the dead. Perhaps it comes in the form of all of these, and in many others I could not name even if I were able to predict.
But, this I know. The pattern has been of increasing efficiency in the destruction, and increasing abstraction. Andrew Jackson himself took the “sculps” of the Indians he murdered. Heinrich Himmler nearly fainted when a hundred Jews were shot in front of him, which was surely one reason for the increased use of gas. Now, of course, it can all be done by economics.
And, this I know, too. No matter what form it takes, most of us will not notice it. Those who notice will pay too little attention. We will follow the rules laid down by Noah and his remaining sons and we will walk backward to not see our father’s nakedness. It does not matter how great the cost to others nor even to ourselves, we will soldier on. We will, ourselves, walk quietly, meekly, into whatever form the gas chambers take, if only we are allowed to believe they are bathrooms.
I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But another is to realize that, as cruel and inhumane as it all seems, there are really no dragons to slay. There are only systems to reform. And although I am reminded of the philosopher’s words about the master’s tools never being used to dismantle the master’s house, something along those lines may be the only rational way we have out of this atrocious mess.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Thank you for this thoughtful commentary!
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