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The name of this blog is inspired by Endgame by Derrick Jensen.
Often the premises of the media are shrouded in secrecy. We have to read between the lines to try to understand where the news writers stand, for example. This leads to the right being able to claim the media is left wing, and the left being able to claim the media is right wing. The obscurity of the premises that the media operates on results in this situation. A given media source will be written by a lot of people and so can easily be accused of a lot of different things. A person levelling such criticism is likely to focus on the aspects which support their case and ignore the aspects which don’t. Were the media to put their premises up front and be honest about them then this couldn’t happen. You could argue that given articles operated within different premises, or that many articles did and thus the media was lying about its premises, but you couldn’t make any claim you wanted to about them.
Because we don’t know their premises we don’t know what questions they are asking. Because we don’t know what questions they are asking we can’t know if the answers given to us within their content are actually of any use or not. The formulation of a question is very, very important, as anyone who has spent time on compiling a good questionnaire will tell you. Ask the wrong question, or even the right question in the wrong way, and you get a useless answer. Assume the answer and ask a question aimed at getting it and you might as well not have wasted your time. However, assuming the answer is what happens every single day in the media. Their premises are assumptions they don’t even admit to themselves. These assumptions lead them to answers which leads them to questions. A meaningless exercise.
The stealthy nature of the media’s premises leads to the general public having no idea that there is even a problem. They don’t understand the importance of questions. They belittle the role of stories and narrative. They fail to realise that every news item they absorb is based on assumptions, assumptions which they probably would agree with without understanding why (simple truth is they’ve absorbed the assumption from so many stories that they see it as ‘just the way things are’ and not as an assumption based on nothing more than other’s having made the same assumption).
This blog isn’t claiming to have the right answers and to have asked the right questions. It is simply an attempt to get people who read it to think in different ways, to ask questions about their assumptions. To motivate people to try to find out more. To compel people to find their own questions, their own answers. To help them to open their eyes to the scary reality of the world they live in and ask why, who, how. To get to the bottom of the mess so they at least understand what they are doing to the planet, to children in developing nations, to mother’s breast milk, to their own bodies. If they achieve that level of understanding and then continue to want to carry on with business as usual then they can (how could I stop them?), at least they’re armed with the understanding of what they are doing. They are informed.
I would like to take a moment to point everyone to a fantastic blog, called Hobo Stripper. One of my favourite posts is For the Love of Salmon, an excellent story about Hobo Stripper’s day with Rich Dicks who only like a little bit of the fish, and throw the rest away. Very thought-provoking and wonderful, highlighting the way the police and other authorities are just there to normalise and support the violence which goes down the hierarchy and supress and destroy any question that this is the way things should be. In accordance with Premise Four:
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. — Derrick Jensen, Endgame.
I love reading the stories by Hobo Stripper. She has a refreshing view of the world, especially her job. She writes facinating, detailed and useful things, as well as things which are just wonderful, like the salmon story[1].
The way Hobo Stripper lives is an amazing example of how to live as a non-civilised person while using the master’s tools against him. She keeps herself safe while doing one of the most fundamental of all capitalist endeavours – selling a service, which costs her very little, to people who are willing to pay a premium for it. Best of all? She calls a spade a spade. She doesn’t mince around the edges, if there is a person being violent, stupid, whatever, she tells it as it is.
All in all, I would advise people to go over to her blog and take a look around. Her posts are clearly marked so it’s not hard to see when a post has content you might not appreciate, such as her vibrator posts. However, I like reading all of the posts she makes since each one has in it the core of her personality, and that is the thing I like most of all.
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[1] I am not using the word story to belittle or diminish her writing. Stories are the most important part of life. Our entire society, civilisation as we know it, is built on stories which are told and re-told, enacted and re-enacted, all the time and in many different ways. Stories have power and we need different stories, such as those by Hobo Stripper, if we are to break the hold of civilisation’s stories.
Broadly speaking I subscribe to Derrick Jensen’s 20 premises as laid out in his two volume book, Endgame.
The premises in order can be found here.
A somewhat naieve, and perfectly ‘normal’, commentary can be found here.
Why is this a normal and naieve commentary? Basically it does what so many people do when confronted by the fact that a system which is designed to grow (cultures based on agriculture, or ‘civilisation’) isn’t sustainable. It says “you can’t prove that” and “we could transform this system into a sustainable one”.
Economic models such as we use need growth. Without growth our version of economics, the civilised person’s economics, fails. This has been true ever since we developed the concept to describe what was happening within our agricultural societies. A system that needs growth isn’t sustainable.
If you read Endgame, which I highly recommend you do, he lays out a very workable definition of civilisation. Jensen defines civilisation as “a way of life characterised by the growth of cities.”[1] As he points out, civilisation is often directly linked to the appearence of cities. With this definition and with the subsequent definition of cities, it is impossible to argue that civilisation is redeemable. If you change the fundamental nature of either cities (impossible realistically at current densities, thus impossible without making them not be cities as we would have any chance of recognising) then civilisation might be redeemable, but by changing the nature of what a city is you stop it being a city and thus you’re no longer in a civilisation. You might be in a tribe or a small community, but you aren’t in a civilisation.
The end may not come in my life time. I think it will. However, this is an area I would love to be wrong about. I think what Ran Prieur says in this short clip is actually spot on. As a blob of people, we like disaster movies because they give us the escapism that we would do something if there was a massive disaster and our way of life were threatened. The truth is that we will sit in our air-conditioned, centrally-heated houses complaining about the cost of petrol[2] or gas[3] and demanding that the very ‘free market’ system we were lauding just a mere month or so ago should not charge us what it can for goods we have to buy[4]. If we wanted to control the cost of petrol, gas, whatever, we should have kept nationalised industries in those areas. We didn’t. We invited the devil of free market economics to supper and got pissed that he actually burnt us. I’m not suggesting that we re-nationalise those industries (well, I wouldn’t ‘nationalise’ them so much as ‘localise’ them), but I am questioning the sense of giving those areas to private, profit seeking companies and then being shocked and dismayed when those same companies turn out to be seeking profit for private individuals rather than the good of the community.
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[1] http://www.kewego.co.uk/video/iLyROoafYKjY.html
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7527679.stm
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7533389.stm
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7534421.stm
