Endgame Vol.1 (23 page)

Kill every buffalo you can, for every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

I’VE LONG UNDERSTOOD THAT CIVILIZATION REQUIRES LAND OWNERSHIP to be concentrated in the hands of the rulers, by force when necessary and tradition when possible. More basically, it requires that people be inculcated to believe land can be bought and sold. Ultimately, of course, it requires that people be inculcated to believe
everything
can be bought and sold, and requires also that ownership of everything be concentrated as completely as possible in the hands of the rulers.

Those in charge have always understood—and have often been explicit about it—that it’s difficult to control people who have access to land. Depriving them of this access puts them at your mercy. Without access to land there can be no self-sufficiency: land provides food, shelter, clothing. Without access to land people obviously have no place to stay. If you can force people to pay just so they can be alive on this earth—nowadays these payments are usually called
rent
or
mortgage
—you’ve forced them into the wage economy. The same holds true for forcing them to pay for materials the earth gives freely: the salmon, bison, huckleberries, willows, and so on that are central to the lives, cultures, and communities not only of indigenous peoples but to all of us, even if we make believe this isn’t the case. To force people to pay for things they need to survive is an atrocity: a community- and nature-destroying atrocity. To convince us to pay willingly is a scam. It also, as we see around us—or would see had we not been so thoroughly convinced—causes us to forget that communities are even possible.

Those in power have rarely hidden their intentions. Indeed, as I’ve written elsewhere, the need to separate the majority of people from their food supplies—thus separating them also from their freedom—was central to the design of civilization’s early cities.
¹⁴⁷
I’ve written, too, how slave owners described the land-ownership conditions under which chattel slavery was the optimal means to control a workforce, and described also the conditions under which not chattel but wage slavery was the owners’/capitalists’ best option. If there’s a lot of land and not many people, you’ll need to use force in order to convert free human beings into laborers. If, on the other hand, there’s a lot of people and not much land, or if those in power otherwise control access to land, those who do not own the land have no choice but to work for those in power. Under these conditions there’s no reason for owners to go to the
expense of buying or enslaving people, then paying for their slaves’ food, clothing, and shelter: it’s much cheaper to simply hire them.
¹⁴⁸
As one pro-slavery philosopher put it: “In all countries where the denseness of the population has reduced it to a matter of perfect certainty, that labor can be obtained, whenever wanted, and that the laborer can be forced, by sheer necessity, to hire for the smallest pittance that will keep soul and body together, and rags upon his back while in actual employment—dependent at all other times on alms or poor rates—in all such countries it is found cheaper to pay this pittance, than to clothe, feed, nurse, support through childhood, and pension in old age, a race of slaves.”
¹⁴⁹

Today, of course, we have so internalized the ideology of centralized control, of civilization, that most of us do not consider it absurd that people have to pay someone simply so they may exist on the planet, except perhaps to grumble that without rent or mortgage (or second mortgage) payments we wouldn’t have to work so hard at jobs we don’t like, and could spend more time with people we love, doing things we enjoy.

Although I have understood all of the above for a long time, it was only last week that I realized—and my indigenous friends are wondering where I’ve been these last six thousand years—that just as those in power must control access to land, the same logic dictates they must destroy all stocks of wild foodstuffs. Wild salmon, for example, cannot be allowed to live. Why would I go to Safeway if I could catch coho in the stream outside my door? I wouldn’t. So how do those in power make certain I lack food self-sufficiency? Simple. Eliminate free food sources. Eliminate wild nature. For the same is true, obviously, for everything that is wild and free, for everything else that can meet our needs without us having to pay those in power. The push to privatize the world’s water helps make sense of official apathy surrounding the pollution of (free) water sources. You just watch: air will soon be privatized: I don’t know how they’ll do it, but they’ll certainly find a way.

This destruction of wild foodstuffs has sometimes been accomplished explicitly to enslave a people, as when great herds of buffalo were destroyed to bring the Lakota and other Plains Indians to terms, or as when one stated reason for building dams on the Columbia River was that dams kill salmon. The hope was that this extirpation would break the cultural backs of the region’s Indians. But the destruction of wild foodstocks doesn’t require some fiendishly clever plot on the part of those in power. Far worse, it merely requires the reward and logic systems of civilization to remain in place. Eliminating wild foodstocks is just one of many ways those in power increase control. And so long
as the rest of us continue to buy into the system that values the centralization of control over life, that values the production of things over life, that values cities and all they represent over life, that values civilization over life, so long will the world that is our real and only home continue to be destroyed, and so long will the noose that is civilization continue to tighten around our throats.

Once again I had dinner with my friend who used to date the philosopher. We sat down. She jumped right in. “What is the relationship between drinkable quantities of clean water being good, and rape being bad?” In the days after our dinner conversation, her enthusiasm had run up against the clear leap of logic—her ex-boyfriend would have said faith—in my argument.

“We’re animals,” I said.

“I know that. So?”

“So we have needs.”

“I’ve heard some people—men, mainly—say that’s one reason for rape.”

“No. Needs to survive, to develop into who we really are.”

“Who are we?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“I’ve read science-based analyses suggesting rape is a demonstration of power—”

“No arguments from me there.”

“—and serves the evolutionary purpose of getting women to bond with powerful men,” she said.

“Lemme guess,” I responded, “the scientists were males, right?”

“They also say rape serves to pass on the genes of more aggressive men—”

“Which might seem to make superficial sense if you presume life is based on competition, not cooperation.”

“Right, and if you presume relationships don’t exist, and presume also that sperm is way, way more important than love, joy, or peace.”

“Very odd presumptions, aren’t they? Makes you wonder about the sanity—and social lives—of those who make them,” I said, then continued, “Scientists and economists can’t measure or control love, joy, or peace . . .”

“So love, joy, and peace must not exist,” she said. “It’s all pretty fucked up.”

“It also projects the presumptions of industrial production onto women, and to a lesser degree, men.”

“That women are here to make babies . . .”

“To manufacture them, as it were.”

“Pop them out like Model-Ts on an assembly line.”

“Or buns in a factory oven.”

“So why are we here?” she asked.

“It presumes the same for sex. That the purpose is reproduction.”

“Is it?”

“Maybe the purpose of both—sex and life—is to have fun, and to enter into relationships with those around us, and to become who we are.”

“So who are we?” she pressed.

“Humans, and this is just as true for rocks and trees and stars and catfish, have a natural mode of development, or many natural modes. And there are commonalities across all humans, just as there are commonalities across all mammals, all animals, all ‘living beings,’ all rocks, what have you. Humans start out physically small, we grow, we stop growing, eventually our bodies wear out, and we die. Emotionally we follow certain patterns as well: we live for a long time with those who nurture us, we learn from them what it means to be human, and what it means to be human within our communities (or in the case of the civilized, how to be inhuman, and how to live in cities). There exist normal patterns for how humans grow. Joseph Chilton Pearce, for example, has done as fine a job as anyone describing patterns of human cognitive and emotional development.”

“What does this have to do with rape?”

“I think we can say, or at least those of us with any sense at all can say,” and she knew I was taking a dig at her philosopher ex-boyfriend, “that just as we have physical needs that, if they’re not met, cause us to end up malnourished or our bodies to not develop to their full potential, to not work very well, so, too, we have emotional needs. Failure to meet these needs can stunt us emotionally, leave us emotionally undeveloped, leave us incapable of experiencing, expressing—
participating in
—the full range of human emotions. I think it’s safe to say that all other things being equal, it’s better to not be emotionally stunted than to be so.”

“And rape?”

“It can stunt you. Impede your emotional development. Let’s take this even on a fairly basic level. It’s one thing to be abstinent by choice. That’s a fine choice. But what of those people—women, mainly, but some men—who’ve been deprived of their capacity to take pleasure in sexuality because they’ve been raped? Their choice to participate in sexuality was taken away from them. Their ability to fully express and experience the emotions associated with that has been stunted.”

She thought a moment, then said, “Not only that, but they’ve been deprived
of their capacity to simply
be
in the world without being terrified. If any woman, anywhere in the world, hears footfalls behind her on a darkened street, she has reason to be afraid. Robin Morgan called that the democracy of fear under patriarchy.”

I responded, “It doesn’t matter what stories anybody tells anyone else: these are all bad things. And of course I’m not just talking about rape, nor am I just talking about sex. I’m saying that just as we can say that drinkable quantities of clean water are good—once again, no matter the stories we tell ourselves—we can similarly say that actions causing us to move away from the development of the full range of human emotions are not good. Certainly an action that causes an entire gender to live their lives in fear is a very bad thing.”

“But isn’t it possible for trauma to open people out? You wouldn’t be the person you are had your father not abused you.”

“I’ve heard people say that. There were even a few who suggested I should have put him in the acknowledgments of
A Language Older Than Words
.” That’s the book where I describe his abuse, and my response. “But what do I have to thank him for? Insomnia? Nightmares and feelings of terror that lasted through my late thirties, until I exorcised them through writing that book? Fractured relationships with my siblings? Messed up relationships with other people?”

“But you’ve also gained wisdom and insight you might not otherwise have gained.”

“Yes.
I’ve
gained it. And this is true for anyone who survives abuse. The perpetrator isn’t responsible if the survivor is able to metabolize the horrors into gifts for the community. The survivor, and the humans and nonhumans who’ve supported the survivor, are responsible. I’ve not accomplished
any
thing because I was raped. I’ve accomplished it
through
and despite the rapes. The rapes did not help me develop. They were not and could never be good. My response can be and has been good. But the rapes? No.”