Read Online A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen - Free Book Online

merely to point out that even the simplest of our actions— one, two, three—is fraught with cultural assumptions. Nor is this to say—and here is one place where Descartes and our entire culture have gone wrong—that there is no physical reality, or that physical reality is somehow less important than our preconceptions. The fact that Descartes' views—like yours, like mine— are clouded by projection and delusion doesn't mean that nothing exists, or that, as Descartes put it, "nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me." It simply means we don't see clearly.
    The truth is that the physical cannot be separated from the nonphysical. Although it's certainly true that cultural eyeglasses worn by death camp attendants made it seem to them that Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Russians, homosexuals, communists, intellectuals, and others were killable, it is also true that no matter how strong our social imperatives, physical reality cannot be denied. Perception is connected to preconception. Conception is connected to perception. This was one reason for widespread alcoholism among members of Einsatzgruppen —Nazi mobile killing units—and one reason many death camp attendants got drunk before the selections. Not even the lens of Nazism was distorted grossly enough to entirely eradicate the truth.
    No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus "mass murder" becomes "the final solution," "world domination" becomes "defending the free world," the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and "ecocide" becomes "developing natural resources." No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves—and to make our own decisions.
    Let me put this another way. Had Descartes been in the hold of a ship tossing violently in a storm, the contents of his stomach lurching toward his throat with every swell, his famous dictum may not have come out the same. By the same token, had he shared his room not with a stove but a beloved, he may not in that moment have believed that thoughts alone verify his existence, nor that "body, figure, extension, movement and place [were] but the fictions" of his mind.
    The point is that physical reality does exist, and it's up to us to detect its patterns. And it is our job to determine whether the patterns we perceive are really there, or whether they're the result of some combination of projection and chance. It's also up to us to determine for ourselves how closely the patterns we've been handed by our culture fit our experience of the world.
    A frenetic monotony describes our culture’s eradication of every in digenous culture it encounters, and an even more frenetic monotony cloaks our inability to recognize this. Throw a dart at a map of the world, and no matter the territory it strikes, you will find the story of cruelty and genocide perpetrated by our culture. I throw a dart. It lands low and to the right. Tasmania. A little research reveals that our culture arrived in 1803, and the massacres began soon after. In early 1804, weaponless Tasmanians, waving green boughs in a gesture of peace, approached a regiment of British soldiers at Oyster Bay. As the commanding officer later stated, the Tasmanians would be of no use to the British. The soldiers opened fire, killing fifty, including women and children. British encroachment on the island continued through the decades, leading to the Black War, which lasted from 1824 to 1831. One of the many weapons used to civilize these savages was the penis. Rape of Aboriginal women was widespread among settlers and soldiers. There was not a single instance of rape committed by an