Endgame is a two-volume work by Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen

Derrick Jensen is an American author and environmental activist living in Crescent City, California. Jensen has published several books questioning and critiquing modern civilization and its values, including A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He holds a B.S...

, published in 2006, which argues that civilization

Civilization

Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...

 is inherently unsustainable and addresses the resulting question of what to do about it. Volume 1, The Problem of Civilization, spells out the need to immediately and systematically destroy civilization. Volume 2, Resistance, is about the challenging physical task that dismantling civilization presents.

Style and structure

Jensen begins with a list of 20 premises, the most concise encapsulation of his ideas published to date (see them in their entirety below).

However, the bulk of the work is not written in such a highly structured, academic style. As in his previous books, A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words is a non-fiction book by Derrick Jensen, first published in 2000. The author uses his own personal experience of abuse as a springboard for looking at civilization as a culture of abuse, exploring the connections between various atrocities...

and The Culture of Make Believe

The Culture of Make Believe

The Culture of Make Believe is a non-fiction book by Derrick Jensen, first published in 2002. In the book the author explores the origins of human destructiveness, primarily through the lens of racism, using historical psychological, sociological, anthropological, and personal anecdotes as tools...

, Jensen uses the first-person

First-person narrative

First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

, interweaving personal experiences with cited facts to construct his arguments. His books are written like narratives, lacking a linear, hierarchical structure. They are not divided into distinct sections devoted to an individual argument. Instead his writing is conversational, leaving one line of thought incomplete to move on to another and returning to it later on. Jensen uses this creative non-fiction style to combine his artistic voice with logical argument.

The books are addressed not to "fence-sitters," but to people who "already know how horrible civilization is, and who want to do something about it." The focus is on the urgency of action, not on convincing the audience of basic axioms like "natural processes are good." Nevertheless, Endgame includes many arguments for the validity of the book's premises.

The two volumes were not written as separate and distinct parts of a work, but were separated for practical reasons after the text was written. In Volume 1, Jensen argues for premises 1 through 17, and he argues for the remaining three premises and their variations in the first chapters of Volume 2.

Key arguments

Because civilization is not sustainable (premise one) and because civilization will not undergo a voluntary transformation (premise six), activists should change the ways they think about and work toward social change.

Because every living thing is inextricably dependent upon the rest of the natural world for survival, sustaining the natural world is good.

Because civilization depends on widespread violence (premise three), all civilized people (even dogmatic pacifists) are complicit in violence simply by their own participation in the industrial economy.

Because civilization is not sustainable (premise one) and sustaining the natural world is good, an act is good insofar as it decreases the ability of civilization to do violence.

Because the global economy is killing the planet before our eyes (premise one) and because it is not redeemable (premise six), it is wrong to think that personal lifestyle changes we make within the current system can save the planet. While we are not responsible for existing in the current system because we did not create it, we are responsible for doing our part to destroy the system, as this is the only way to stop the destruction of the planet.

Volume 2

Throughout much of Volume 2, Jensen recounts numerous conversations with experts in various fields. He asks fisheries biologists to weigh the positive versus negative effects of catastrophic dam failure. He talks to former members of the military about the vulnerability of the modern industrial infrastructure. He talks to hackers about the dependence of industrial civilization upon unsecured computer systems.

Pacifism

He also analyzes each of the following arguments for pacifism, finding them invalid:

"Love leads to pacifism, and any use of violence implies a failure to love. You can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. It’s far easier to make war than to make peace. We must visualize world peace. To even talk about winning and losing (much less to talk about violence, much much less to actually do it) perpetuates the destructive dominator mindset that is killing the planet. If we just visualize peace hard enough, we may find it, because, as Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller tells us, 'Peace is rarely denied to the peaceful.' Ends never justify means, which leads to Erasmus saying, and pacifists quoting, 'The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.' Gandhi gives us some absolutism, as well as absolution for our inability to stop oppressors, when he says, 'Humankind has to get out of violence only through nonviolence. Hatred can be overcome only by love.' Gandhi again, with more magical thinking, 'When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall—Think of it, ALWAYS.' Violence only begets violence. Gandhi again, 'We must be the change we wish to see.' If you use violence against exploiters, you become like they are. Related to that is the notion that violence destroys your soul. If violence is used, the mass media will distort our message. Every act of violence sets back the movement ten years. If we commit an act of violence, the state will come down hard on us. Because the state has more capacity to inflict violence than we do, we can never win using that tactic, and so must never use it. And finally, violence never accomplishes anything."

Other arguments of Volume 2

The civilized, like all abusers, rarely stop their destructive behavior, so they will not change because we talk to them. They will only change when they have no other choice.

A truly anthropocentric environmental ethic is necessarily biocentric as well because, ultimately, humans are utterly dependent on the environment to live. If one group of humans can live in a place for a thousand years, it doesn't matter which perspective enabled them to do so.

Premises

• Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

• Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

• Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

• 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.

• Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

• Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

• Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

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

• Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

• Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

• Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

• Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

• Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

• Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

• Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

• Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

• Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

• Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

• Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

• Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

• Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

• Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

• Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

• Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

• Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

Awards

Jensen was named "Person of the Year" by Press Action for publishing Endgame, which they called "the most important book of the decade."

External links

• The official website for Endgame, which includes numerous online excerpts