Tag: Derrick Jensen

Dystopia 18: Greek Revival

A world divided by nationalist struggles and vain fantasies  of dominating the earth’s resources is a world that grows increasingly  insane and self-destructive. Yet many decent and moral people accept the  current construction of politics as a ” given.” They end up  participating in this insanity and calling it “realistic.”

Today,  what people call realistic or common sense, is nothing more than  “inside-the-beltway” assumptions created and maintained by  corporate-dominated media. Only by throwing off those assumptions and  thinking outside the box, can people see the Strategy of Generosity for  what it is – a method to stop insane people who have power from  continuing their disastrous path of destruction.

It is a  delusion to imagine that only one political party or set of candidates  frames our foreign policy in terms of narrowly conceived American  interests. Instead, we must realize that this behavior is a shared  insanity that must be challenged in every part of our political  thinking.  It is just as likely to be articulated by people with whom we  agree, as by people who are overtly reactionary or  ultra-nationalistic.–Rabbi Michael Lerner Tikkun  Magazine Speaking about  the Global Marshal Plan

The McKibben-Hedges “Debate” — a thought

The point of this diary is to alert the Orange-reading public to the “McKibben-Hedges debate,” from a recent piece in Alternet.  Yeah, I know, it’s not really a debate.  The Alternet piece makes some important connections and I think you should all read it carefully.  What this core contention between the two writers is really about, I argue, is power.  

The history of power is a record of how various forms of power consolidated themselves into the current global state of domination.  The outcome which the history of power has been preparing up until now will be a sort of massive humanity-wide global murder-suicide.  The fundamental leap which will make the drama of human self-extinction possible, I argue, was capitalism.  Capitalism made capitalist discipline possible as a form of power, and capitalist discipline will bring power to a point of confrontation between the global complex of control and the simplification of the biosphere which will signal our failure as a species at the art of taking care of nature.  Thus it’s time to end capitalist discipline.  Capitalism will take care of itself.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)