Derrick Jensen: Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in bla...

If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?

Derrick Jensen

limited-time courses cases

So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.

Derrick Jensen

law long believe

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

Derrick Jensen

veins pages writing

I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.

Derrick Jensen

important culture thinking

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

Derrick Jensen

environmental killing kind

If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.

Derrick Jensen

injustice community ifs

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

Derrick Jensen

important home talking

The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.

Derrick Jensen

spring giving long

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

Derrick Jensen

mass-destruction historical hatred

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

Derrick Jensen

lifestyle-choices responsibility civilization

We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.

Derrick Jensen

suicide mean children

I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime."

Derrick Jensen

dimes land men

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

Derrick Jensen

eight important needs

A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid.

Derrick Jensen

stupid kids sex

To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.

Derrick Jensen

slavery believe thinking

Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.

Derrick Jensen

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

civilization

Civilization can never be sustainable.

Derrick Jensen

civilization

As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?

Derrick Jensen

hated people school

I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.

Derrick Jensen

reading sleep thinking

Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.