The Tyranny of Entitlement
A lesson in limits
by Derrick Jensen
Published in the January/February 2011
<http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/6037/> issue of
/Orion/ magazine
From: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6052
I'M CONTINUALLY stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you
can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic
growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so
deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely
unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are
somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human:
perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what
we /do/.
Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs,
like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who
said, "We have in our hands now---actually in our libraries----the
technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing
population for the next 7 billion years." And showing that, when it
comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are
yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief
economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president
of Harvard, and as President Obama's director of the National Economic
Council, and who said, "There are no . . . limits to the carrying
capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the
foreseeable future. . . . The idea that we should put limits on growth
because of some natural limit is a profound error."
Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge
that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe
that if you just slap the word /sustainable/ in front of the phrase
"economic growth," then you can still somehow have continued growth on a
finite planet, perhaps through so-called "soft" or "service" or
"high-tech" economies, or through nifty "green" innovations like a
really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when
you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring
the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot
carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world,
and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining,
industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally
unsustainable.
Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably
just don't think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the
newscasters who say, "Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad."
And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on
the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the
economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system
must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is
production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the
conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into
stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish
sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross
national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to
the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead
products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by
the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the
world is getting killed.
Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth
economy, they've pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war
economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to
continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its
inhabitants. I'm sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite
planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to
a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by
converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees
to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over
those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and
overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose
land you've stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered
peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into
your growth economy. Usually it's some combination of all three. The
massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to
destroy the Plains Indians' traditional way of life and force them to at
least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy
instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those
committed to a growth economy is that it's essentially a dead-end
street: once you've overshot your home's carrying capacity, you have
only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your
culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you
gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.
A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is
also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it's based on the
same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the
macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of
abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by
limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former
codirector of Emerge, the nation's first therapeutic program for abusive
men, writes, "/Entitlement/ is the abuser's belief that he has a special
status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges
that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can
largely be summarized by this one word."
The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course
humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has
granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet
that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the
religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special
intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges
to work our will on the world that is /still/ here for us to use. Growth
economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries
set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that
indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground
has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is
the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating
of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of
the dispossessed.
And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior.
Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all
who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United
Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men
guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and
other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft
also says this: "An abuser doesn't change because he feels guilty or
gets sober or finds God. He doesn't change after seeing the fear in his
children's eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn't suddenly
dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his
self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you,
an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important
element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in
a situation where he has no other choice."
How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy?
Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won't move them to stop.
Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can't stop them by making
them feel guilty. We can't stop them by appealing to them to do the
right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no
other choice.
http://www.derrickjensen.org/
Jensen authored two /End Game books, What We Leave Behind, A Language
Older Than Words, /and /The Culture of Make Believe. /On this website he
says :If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away
from the isolation.
*Natalia*
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