Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance

this book really changed my perception. read it in just a day or two. didnt want it to end. . a down-er tho. Ingorance is bliss, this book makes it clear as day.

Derrick Jensen is one of those authors that people love or hate. As for myself, I have mixed feelings about the guy and his message. Despite these mixed feelings, though, I never fail to read his books when they come out - and Endgame was by far an away the most anticipated and climactic one yet due to its highly controversial subject: taking down civilization. That's right, taking down civilization. But why would anyone want to take down civilization, you might ask? At this point, I should say that if you have not already had the pleasure of receiving a formal introduction to the man and his work, you might want to start with one of his earlier publications, such as Listening to the Land, A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Strangely Like War and Welcome or the Machine. In fact, I would recommend reading them all. They lay the groundwork from which Endgame both springs and builds upon: specifically, that civilization is F-U-B-A-R and doomed to collapse in the near but not too distant future, if not from climate change, then from resource depletion, soil erosion, toxic buildup or any other of the common environmental factors outlined in Jared Diamond's Collapse or the Worldwatch Institute's annual State of the World reports. Or you might want to just dive right in, since in Volume I of Endgame Jensen outlines many of the fundamental flaws of our cherished civilization. And although each page reads with the power and relevance of an anarcho-primitiveist manifesto, Endgame, the two-volume summation of Jensen's writing career, amounts to nearly 1,000 pages in total - a lot of lumber for a strident call to arms. In fact, under the right circumstances, the book itself is large enough to be used as a blunt instrument to aid the deconstruction of civilization. All jokes aside, though, the net result is a rather awkward flow: a seemingly never-ending concatenation of ideas that, although related by theme, often contradict each other - by the author's own admission: "Why do you think I laid out the premises explicitly for you, put you in a position of actively choosing to agree or disagree with them? Whey do you think I've approached this form so many directions? Why do you think I've expressed my own fears, expressed my own confusion? Why do you think I've made points, undercut or contradicted them, and then made them again? ... The point is the process I am trying to model. The point is that you puzzle your own way through, and figure out for yourself what, if anything, you need to do." (p 886) Although I enjoyed the book thoroughly, and often recommend it to friends, Jensen does not come off as being genuine here. By this, I don't mean that he is purposefully deceiving the readers so much as himself. Along with all the interesting environmental science, psychology and poetry the book contains, the underlying current of rage and despair that makes his writing so profound reaches an all time high in Endgame - to the point whe

This seems to be Jensen's ultimate manifesto. It is basically a declaration of war against agricultural and industrial civilization. But Jensen's point is not only that ultimately humans will have to surrender all their jazzy tech toys (including indoor plumbing) due to inevitable general collapse of industrial civilization, but that we should be glad to surrender them, and we should do so as early as possible to prevent what bit of species extinction we still can. But even more important than any individual "personal lifestyle" type of remediation is to actively fight industrial civilization's more destructive artifacts with explosives. What's really interesting and surprising about Jensen is his essential optimism! Yes, despite 2,000 pages or so of griping and groaning about how bad it all is, Jensen still seems to think that some small number of humans, living in just the right way (as originally exemplified by North American indigenous peoples) are compatible with the survival of the rest of the biosphere. But I do have to wonder whether humans in the long term are genetically programmed to destroy as much as they can whenever they get the chance. Or at least, some humans will have this tendency, and then the bad will drive out the good - as we have seen with the 500 year European domination of the planet. So I tend to think that long term, humans and the earth biosphere are incompatible. It is a deadend species, and as long as we are building castles in the air, and wishing on a star, I guess I'd throw in my lot more with the Voluntary Human Extinction crowd. But Jensen would VEHEMENTLY disagree with the above paragraph, and say that any such talk of genetic programming is at best nothing but scientistic gooblygook serving the master power Matrix, and at worst just one more excuse to put off the work that is crying out to be done (blowing up Columbia river dams to restore naturally spawning salmon). In any case, once you have read this or any other Jensen book, you'll be in the mental grip of his moral absolutism - forever. (Of course, in Jensen's view, you already are in its grip, as you need clean water, don't you?) I don't mean his moral absolutism is necessarily bad or good. I'm still pondering that question. Nor do I mean that you'll necessarily accept his unrelenting assertion that the triumvirate of naturally clean water, freely spawning salmon, and reciprocally sustained landbase trump all other conceivable human values. I mean it literally - in that Jensen poses a moral and practical absolute principle that is so starkly opposed to every other activity, relationship, possession, plan, "hope", or value in your "normal" human life as you conceive it within the existent Matrix of industrial civilization - the Culture of Empire - that you will be unable to mentally reconcile the two. If Jensen is right, your whole "live long and prosper" mindset - as conceived and instantiated within the current paradigm - is flat wrong and must b

Endgame is a book for our time. It is an important contribution to radial environmentalism, direct action and understanding the underlying subterranean currents that transpire to make up western culture as we know it today. Endgame asks the question and then attempts to solve it: Do you believe that our culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living? If the answer is no what then is to be done about it? Willing or not, ready or not the human species is involved in an all-out, no holds barred war against the dominant culture, western culture. Most people are not competitors, they are the stakes. The spoils, no less, is every living, beating heart and every soul of sentient life upon the planet. The effects of the dominant culture are obvious in every polluted river, the devastation of wildlife, destruction of habitat, the loss of the Coho salmon, dioxin in every mother's breast milk and the habitat of great grizzly bear to name but a few examples from the book. Derrick Jensen wants that turned around. No one can be exempted from the dominant cultures effects. No sector of our lives remains untouched. No sector of any non-humans life remains untouched. Endgame invites us to fight back. From the standpoint of the traditional left, the vices of contemporary culture - the Machine - what Derrick Jensen uncovers might be all too easily explained away to that old devil capitalism. Another mundane interpretation might centre around the evils stemming from the unrestricted pursuit of profit and the manipulative deceptions of the few profiteers as a major corrupting influence. Endgame isn't like that thankfully. Sure, Jensen recognises that to ensure the bone and marrow of the dominant cultures value system, the central mechanism must exclusively fixate on human worth and human values exclusively and to achieve this end, indoctrination or "education" from womb to tomb is mandatory. On one hand there must be a constant reinforcement of the dominant cultures ideals with an emphasis on each individuals total dependence on a system that has a death urge and is killing us, the land, the non-human animal kingdom and sentient life all at once. Endgame's piece de resistance is in exploring this death urge and then finding ways to resist it. The author has gone there before us and saw that mid-wifed by the entrepreneur, the banker, the technocrat, the scientists and ultimately the lawyer of the dominant culture, this sane and sustainable way of living can not, will not, be born from between the printed sheets of pacts and agreements; joint ventures and mergers; contracts and covenants and international treatises signed and countersigned by the political bureaucrat. Endgame neither lacks cultural resonance or political closure. It engulfs both. In the Abolitionist's interview with the author, Derrick Jensen notes that even when our best efforts are applied, both eco and animal activists always seem to lose. Alth