I’ve never heard of an abuser saying, “I hit you because I wanted to terrorize you into submission.” Instead he might say,“I wouldn’t have hit you if you wouldn’t have kept yelling and yelling and yelling at me about coming in so late.” The framing conditions caused his violence. If we move this to a larger scale, how often have we heard politicians speak of the necessity of preemptive attacks on other countries (which just happen to sit atop coveted resources)? They rarely say,“I choose to invade this country.” Instead they say they’ve been forced into this regrettable action by those they are about to subjugate, er, liberate. The Nazis played this same card—everybody plays this same card—they only invaded Poland because they had no choice; they only invaded the Soviet Union because they had no choice; they only killed untermenschen because they had no choice. Sigh. It’s a terribly dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.
CEOs follow the same logic. If it were up to them, they would keep factories open (not that this is a good thing from the perspective of the planet, but within the confines of this culture most people consider it good), pay workers livable wages, maintain solid retirement programs, and so on. But you know how things are. They have no choice but to lay off workers and move the factories to Bangladesh, where they have no choice but to pay Bangladeshis eight cents per hour (as they themselves pull down a cool million per year, which converts to about five hundred dollars per hour, or more in one minute than they pay a Bangladeshi for a hundred hours). And if the Bangladeshis complain, the CEOs will have no choice but to move the factory on to Vietnam. Market pressures, you know. And these same market pressures force them to pollute, to clearcut, to overfish.
I’m sorry, each and every one of us can say, we have no choice but to destroy the planet. It’s really not our fault.
Bullshit.
We may as well acknowledge that our entire culture—from top to bottom, inside out, personally and socially—is founded on, motivated by, and requires a systematic and absolute avoidance of responsibility. This is true both for our actions and our failures to act. What, ultimately, is environmental degradation? Any and all environmental degradation is a manifestation and a consequence of avoidance of responsibility. What is pollution? It is a manifestation and a consequence of avoidance of responsibility. What is overfishing? Deforestation? They are manifestations and consequences of avoidance of responsibility.
And what is our failure to stop each of these things? It’s just as much an avoidance of responsibility.
(Source: solitaryforager, via solitaryforager)
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