Welcome To The Machine:
Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 1

Interviewed by eco-prisoner Chris ‘Dirt Blackcrow' McIntosh and Claudette Vaughan

  Welcome To The Machine: Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 2

Chris McIntosh: What form of technology do you see as the most malevolent? For me at least it's the machines use of advanced medical science to usurp the “laws” of balance and natural selection.

Derrick Jensen: If I had to choose one piece of technology it would have to be automobiles because there's been so much conversion of land to roads and they are changing the climate. Or how about internal combustion engines because without internal combustion engines we wouldn't have global warming or maybe it's computers because without computers you couldn't have this whole global economy or maybe it is the Cross because how many millions and millions of indigenous people have been killed under the sign of the Cross? Why don't we just go to the root and say the problem is the Machine itself which is this social system. I mean machines are physical manifestations of the social system and what a machine does is convert raw materials to power as opposed to living beings convert raw materials to life and what a machine does is converts raw materials to power and that's what this entire culture does. This is why this culture has over-whelmed other cultures. If you live in a way that doesn't give back to your surroundings then you obviously have a lot of extra energy that you can use for destruction. That's what this culture does for power and that's one of the reasons why this culture has over-whelmed basically every culture it has encountered. I would say the most malevolent technology is the culture itself.

Chris McIntosh: As a Green Anarchist I am all for returning to the balance and communion with my brothers and sisters of all species. Do you see the return of hymns to the cycle of life coming from a mass awakening within our culture or more realistically or for having an apocalyptic event such as the mass spread of bird flu culling the population and in turn destroying the infrastructure of the Machine?

Derrick Jensen: Endgame, my latest book, is really predicated on the question: Do you believe the culture will under-go a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living? I ask people from all over the country when I do talks and nobody ever says, yes. A lot of people just laugh. One guy at one of my talks raised his hand and everyone just looked at him and he said “Voluntary? Oh no, of course not”. Because what that means is yes eventually we will be living sustainably, we won't be living at all but will that transition be voluntary? No. Okay then the next question is if you don't believe the cultures going to under-go that voluntary transformation what does that mean for your strategy and your tactics and the answer is we don't know. The reason we don't know is because we don't talk about it. One of the reasons we don't talk about it is because we are all so busy pretending that we have hope and there's going to be a magical transformation. Once again, if you don't believe there's going to be a voluntary transformation and you care about the places that you live, you care about wild nature, you care about non-humans, you care about humans for that matter, then that's going to dramatically shift what you feel is important and appropriate to do. You will begin to defend the places where you live with your life because your life depends on it. As opposed to, if we believe there's going to be a voluntary transformation then we can go ahead and trust and continue to work within the system a lot more easier because the system will transform but if you don't believe it's going to transform then, yes, you can still work within the system but be not of the system. You divorce yourself from the system now and you recognise that it's appropriate sometimes to use the tools of the system and sometimes it's appropriate to use the tools outside the system. The short answer to the question is no there is not going to be a mass awakening.

Chris McIntosh: When I was growing up in the eighties it seems like the main activity was catching turtles, snakes, riding bicycles and all of that. As I have gotten older and the internet and video games have become more advanced with every new year, kids don't seem to have the same drive to experience the outdoors. I don't know if this is the right term but they seem weaker, coupled with the fact that the Snack Industry has advanced as well they are more obese. Do you believe that direct action should be applied to these targeters of our children? It seems while earth and animal exploiters are being targeted for actions, we are totally over-looking the cropping of this next generation and every other successive generation. Could we hope to slow the flood using SHAC style tactics?

Derrick Jensen: I don't think that earth and animal exploiters are being sufficiently targeted obviously because they still exist.

Claudette Vaughan: Is that because the numbers aren't there or is that because the quality of the direct actions aren't good enough yet?

Derrick Jensen: I would say all of the above. I think we need our seriousness called into question and I think so do many other people. To the other part of the question I think Yes. I can't see why those who target children should not be targeted themselves. In fact I'm going to guess that a lot of times it's the same corporation anyway. I'm guessing that a big snack producer such as RGR Nabisco also do tobacco and I'm guessing that for tobacco and the snacks there's also some animal testing involved. That's one-stop shopping.

CV: Perhaps the question should be asked then: Is there a deliberate ploy in the world to destroy it? I mean can we really keep putting the destruction of the symbiosis of life, not only in nature but in our own being as well, down to human stupidity all of the time ?

Derrick Jensen: It's not human nature. I live on Tolowa land here. They are an Indian tribe and they lived here for 12,500 years if you believe the myths of science. If you believe the myths of the Tolowa they lived here since the beginning of time. They didn't destroy the place. The Shawnee didn't destroy the place and the Lakota didn't destroy the place so it's not human nature to destroy one's land base. If that was the case we would have killed ourselves a long time ago.

CV: So if it is not “human nature” to foul its own nest is there a deliberate plan in the world today to take the human outside of its own experience of what it means to be “human” in order for that destruction to occur?

Derrick Jensen: I've written 9 books about this now and I think a lot of it hinges on our definition of the word “deliberate” because what is a father who rapes his daughter hoping to accomplish? Is he deliberately destroying her soul? On one level yes. One of the reasons my father was so violent was because when we were free and happy children we reminded him of who he was before his parents destroyed him. On an unconscious level he couldn't allow that because then he would have to revisit the drama that he never was able to metabolise himself. You see that all the time when white people go into an area where there's indigenous people and immediately they have to destroy, on one level of rationalization or another, the wild in which they are encountering. On one level yes, it's deliberate. On another level it's not consciously deliberate. On another level it's fully rational. There's this great idea by Robert Jay Lifton in “Claims To Virtue”. He said “Before you commit any mass atrocity you have to convince yourself and others that what you are doing is not in fact an atrocity but instead is really good”, so instead of vivisectors torturing countless individual non-humans that are living horribly tormented lives they think they aren't torturing anyone. They are advancing medical science and saving human lives. Members of this culture are not destroying the planet, they are developing natural resources. That Hitler wasn't killing Jews. He was purifying the Aryan race. This is true on a personal level too. I don't know about you but I have never in my life been a jerk. I've always had whatever jerkish actions fully rationalised. So on a personal level this is really true and on a social level it's also absolutely true.

I don't think that consciously George Bush is rubbing his hands together and saying “Ha-ha-ha. I'm getting to murder Iraqi children”. Instead he is bringing freedom and democracy to them. He really believes this shit on some level. On another level I was talking to a corporate lawyer who got a conscience and came over to the good side. She was saying that for years she sat in those corporate boardrooms and she said those executives know exactly what they are doing. I've seen the hand-written note where they worked out the calculations saying it would be cheaper go ahead with production and simply keep running the thing and let all this lead from this process directly out in the air to poison the local kids and the local children have had the highest blood levels ever recorded. They actually have the notes where they are saying it is cheaper so on that level is it deliberate? Yes. They deliberately poisoned the children. On another level. No. They were maximizing profits. So it's all hinging on this word ‘deliberate'. This is very unconscionable. This culture has a death urge. This killing the planet and it unconscionably wants to destroy everything that's wild because they want to control everything. On another level is it deliberate? On a conscious level, much of it. You would confront them and they would say, “Oh no, Here's another part of it”. There's a great line by Upton Sinclair when he says, “It's hard to make a man understand something when his job depends on him not understanding it”. And so we could talk till we are blue in the face about non-human sentience or anything else and the vivisectors wouldn't get it. They will not get it. There's a great line about this. It's so horrible. Recently scientists have figured out that birds are really smart which of course anybody who has every seen a bird knows that anyway. There's this amazing line by this scientist who said this recognition that birds are so smart (but he didn't say smart though because that would be too much like humans and humans of course are the one's that could be smart) and that this recognition is going to lead to a scientific revolution. I was thinking, “Hey, that's great” until I got to his next sentence which is birds will soon replace lab rats as the primary subjects of cognitive studies. It's like fuck, the first thing you do when you finally realise this creature can think is think about ways to torture them.

CV: Perhaps the question for activists then is how can they to be stopped?

Derrick Jensen: By stopping them. It's like if space aliens came down from outer space and systematically started to deforest the planet and they were vacuuming the oceans where 90% of the large fish are gone, if they put dioxin in every mother's breast milk to cause cancer…when I give talks I say how many people present have had someone they love die of cancer? 70 to 80% of the people say, yes . If space aliens came down and they were destroying our planet we would know exactly what to do. We would grap our camo outfits, we would head off to the woods and we would start fighting them.

There are 2 million dams in the United States . There are 60,000 dams over like 13 feet tall and there are 70,000 dams like 6 feet tall. If we only take out one dam a day it will still take us 200 years to take out all those dams over 6 feet tall. If they were fascists or pinko commies or whoever invading the United States we would know how to stop them. According to the US Geological survey there are carcinogens in every stream in the United States . It's like what do salmon need to survive? What salmon need to survive are six things. They need for dams to be removed. They need for industrial forestry to stop. They need for industrial fishing to stop. They need for the oceans not to be murdered. They need for industrial agriculture to stop and they need for global warming to stop which means for the industrial economy to stop. Each one of those is a technically durable task. So okay then, you want salmon to survive, you need to remove dams. How are you going to remove dams? This immediately moves into the technical level. How are you going to stop industrial forestry? That's a technical question. The problem comes when we say how are we going to save salmon and maintain this system that is killing the planet. It's the same thing with vivisection. How can we stop vivisection yet maintain this system that inevitably leads to vivisection. How do we stop, fuck, circuses when you have this system that's based on the exploitation of non-humans? Let me be very clear on this. I am not saying that we shouldn't attempt to stop or mitigate or ameliorate any of these individual atrocities. The whole reform versus revolution question is just bullshit because if we all sit around and wait and plan and get ready for the great warrior's revolution there's going to be nothing left once we get there. At the same time, if all we do is reform work there's nothing going to be left anyway.

The place where this fell apart for me was I used to teach creative writing at Pelican State Prison. Every time I went in I knew I was doing the most reformist of the reformist work. I'm walking into the most horrible biggest, basest gulag on the planet – a supermax - you can't get much more reformist than that. Yet on the other hand I also knew a lot of my students said the only think keeping them sane were our classes together. So at that moment the whole reform versus revolution question fell apart. If somebody liberates one beagle from a lab or one rabbit from a lab or one chicken from a factory farm that's not going to stop factory-farming or vivisection but it is going to help that chicken or animal.

CV: Certainly it appears to be equally the systems fault as well as an existential problem and not one versus the other.

Derrick Jensen: That's one of the great things about our culture being so fucked up that no matter where you look there's great work to be done. (laughter)

Chris McIntosh: How, if at all, is the info you detailed in “Welcome To The Machine” affected your daily life? For me it feels like the clock is ticking in my heart and that it's now or never. Your book “Welcome To The Machine” increased that feeling or writhing anger and a burning hatred and mistrust for all the so-called “achievements” of this steel jawed monster. Apart from the obvious, writing books, what is your outlet for this same anger I'm sure you feel?

Derrick Jensen: As a writer it's my job to articulate the things I know in my heart to be true but to which I have not yet put words and to help others to then do the same. I'm sure obviously he was feeling that rage and I'm glad I was able to help him more fully realise it.

Years ago somebody asked me how my anger at the dominant culture affects my sex life and that question is predicated on the idea that anger is a shotgun and if I am angry at the dominant culture then that anger would spill over to my friend's too. And it doesn't. The truth is I feel a million different things. I feel tremendous rage. I feel tremendous joy. Then there's sorrow, happiness, contentment, upheaval. I'm angry at the things that make me angry and I'm not angry at the things that don't make me angry.

There's this idea that if you recognise how bad things are that you have to walk around being miserable all of the time. The truth is I am very, very happy and I'm also very sad etc etc. I don't take the dominant culture personally.

I actually have been sick these past 10 months. I have been having the worse flare up of Crohn's disease in my life. I'm pretty sure that part of the reason is I've been, in terms of writing and giving talks, pretty much working myself to death. I've just finished EndGame which is 1400 pages. I finished that in November 2004 and then over the next month I wrote an anti-zoo book then over the next thirteen months I wrote two novels. I'm feeling pretty bad as I've only written 30 pages since but it's like fucking exhaustion, you know? So what I don't do with the anger is I don't push it away. That's a really, really important thing. About 15 years ago I was undergoing this sort of collapse where I just bursting into sobs all the time over the death of the salmon or just over how horrible this culture is. I called up this American Indian friend of mine, a writer and activist, and I said to her that this thing being an activist is breaking my heart. She said, “Yeah. It'll do that”. I said, “The dominant culture just hates everything, doesn't it?” and she said “Yeah it hates even itself”. I said, “It has a death urge, doesn't it?” and she said, “Yeah, it does”. I said, “ Unless it's stopped it's going to kill everything on the planet. We're not going to make it to some great new glorious tomorrow, are we?” and her response was the best response she could give and it was, “I've been waiting for you to say that”. The reason why that was just a perfect response was because it let me know that it normalised my despair and that despair is an appropriate response to a desperate situation. It let me know that my sorrow is just sorrow and my pain is just pain and that I can feel it. It's not so much my sorrow or my pain that hurts, it's my resistance to it. The other thing is it lets me feel all of these things and I knew it wouldn't kill me. There's this fear that if I recognise how bad things are then I'll just die. Well no. There's even a better thing that happens. When you recognise how bad things are, it does kill you and there's a wonderful thing about being dead and that's once your dead they can't touch you any more. They can't touch you with threats, they can't touch you with promises and one of the smartest things the Nazi's did was they made it every step of the way so appear it was in the Jews best interests not to resist. Do you want to get an ID card or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to move to a ghetto or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to get on a cattle car or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Do you want to take a shower or do you want to resist and possibly get killed? Every step of the way it was in their national best interest not to resist. What's very, very, very important is that the Jews that participated in the Warsaw ghetto up rising had a higher rate of survival than those that went along with it. We need to keep that in mind over the next 10 years. The point is that once that rage and sorrow really started to crystallize and once it started to go through me like I said, it killed me. The “me” it killed wasn't the animal me, wasn't the human me. The “me” it killed was the socially created me. What emerged was someone who no longer relies on hope and someone who is simply an animal who is going to defend those I love.

CV: Are you talking about the breakdown of what has been acquired by life – false idealism - up until that time of transformation?

Derrick Jensen: I'm talking about the one who relies on the system that is killing us. I'm talking about the one who sat through 19 to 20 years of school the whole time being taught to never question authority. Someone once said, “Unquestioned assumptions are the real authorities of any culture”. I am talking about the one who accepts those unquestioned assumptions.

CV: It almost sounds like the essence of an epiphany. Do you see it in terms of a metaphysical realm?

Derrick Jensen: John A. Livingston just died early this year. He was a great, great writer who wrote, “The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation” and in that book he goes through all the arguments for preserving wildlife and preserving wild nature. He shows how, from the perspective of the dominant culture that it can all be shot down. In the end what he comes to is it's a state of being. It comes from a connection with the natural world. Either you have it or you don't.

CV: So we and the land are one?

Derrick Jensen: The land is everything. The only measure by which we are going to be judged by those who come after is going to be the health of the land base. They are not going to give a shit whether we voted. They are not going to give a shit as to whether we re-cycled. They are not going to give a shit as to whether we were pacifists or violent. They are not going to give a shit to whether we blew up dams or wrote books or worked at Wal-Mart. They are not going to give a shit if we were vegan. They are not going to give a shit whether we were nice people or whether we were shits. What they are going to care about is whether the land is living enough to provide them with food and whether they can drink the water or whether they can breathe the air. We can talk all we want about some great groovy eco socialist utopia with free love and blah, blah, blah but it doesn't fucking matter if you can't breathe the air. It's embarrassing to do nine books and god knows how many words to come to the conclusion that the land is the source of life.

It extraordinary that we have to even say that. It shows the whole pathology of the culture. Not just pathology in terms of philosophical pathology. Another thing that is really important is that if your experience, not your philosophy, not anything you talk about, if your experience is that your water comes from the tap then you will defend to the death the system that brings that water to you because your life depends on it. If your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store, then you will defend to the death the system that brings that to you because your life depends on it. If one the other hand your experience is water comes from a river then you will defend to the death that river because your life depends on it. If your experience is your food comes from a land base then you will defend to the death that land base that brings that food to you because your life depends on it. That's one of the problems we face. We have become dependant upon this system that is killing us. It's killing everything.

CV: In “Welcome To The Machine” you spoke about the nature of the dominant culture being sado/masochistic. In this slave/master culture I make connections between Abu Graib, a gay mans dungeon and the ritual happening inside every vivisection laboratory. What are some of the connections you make Derrick?

Derrick Jensen: This culture is all about power over. Within this culture that's what all relationships are based on is power and perceived entitlement to exploit. That's what you get in any prison, that's what you get with vivisection, that's what you get in standard patriarchal relationships. I read this great book this past year, “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Mind's Of Angry and Controlling Men” by Lundy Bancroft. Having grown up in an abusive family and having written about abuse I thought I had understood it but, man, he blew me away with his stuff. He throws out some of the lies that are told about abusers and very quickly shoots them down. For example, the idea that the abusers lose their temper and he asks Huh! So does an abusive father beat up his boss? I guess they don't really lose control, do they? They know who to target. If they are breaking stuff do they break their own things? I guess not. So while they are raging around and breaking stuff I guess they are not really out of control, are they? His whole point is that the problem with abusers is not that they have a violent temper, the problem is they have the perceived entitlement to do what they want and they will do whatever it takes to get there. Sounds a lot like the culture. The point is that when you have this power dyad like that of master/slave that's the exact same dyad as vivisector/rabbit and the same dyad as racist/victim and it's exactly the same dyad as timber company/forest. All down the line it's exactly the same thing. When you have that perceived ability to exploit you will do whatever it takes to achieve whatever it is you want to achieve. That's part of it.

I think Foucault talks about excess repression which is necessary to maintain the system. It also goes beyond that. Let's take vivisectors at their word and let's say for a second, and I don't believe this myself, that they have to do a certain amount of testing to achieve some medical end. Yeah but when you look at the reality of it, the reality is those sorts of experiments what 5%, 10%, 20% of those experiments are simply tormenting for the sake of tormenting. This ties back to the question about how much is this “deliberate”?

The world's governments subsidize the worlds commercial fishing fleet to a greater value than the entire value of the catch so the governments pay commercial fishing fleets more than all the fish they catch and sell. The world would be better off if they just handed them the fucking money and just said, “Stay home and sleep”. It's the same with when they put in these big dams to make cheap electricity. They say they are doing this for jobs but it ends up that the amount that they spend on aluminum smelters is like $120,000 per job and they get this guy who's making $40,000 a year, we could do a lot better. Everybody would just be a lot better off if the government just paid the guy $60,000 and said, “Go take out a dam”. None of this makes any rational or economic sense. Like fucking duh! Killing the planet doesn't make any sense but it doesn't even on their own terms. In the United States , the United States Forest Service sell trees to timber companies. They actually sell them below cost. They actually are handing over money to timber companies so they can de-forest. The point of this is this is a death urge. Within this culture, especially, there's no other way to put it, rape makes no fucking sense on one level. One another level of course it does. Chris [McIntosh] is a great example of what I'm saying here. How much economic damage did he do? $5000. How much does it cost to hole up a prisoner? Say, $120,000 a year. He's in for 8 years. So he's actually costing the State, and I'm not saying he should be in prison, $960,000 by being in prison. Obviously it's a lot more than the damage. I mean if they could have forced him to do it they could have said you need to repay the damage. That would have made more economic sense. I mean none of this stuff makes any economic sense. What it does is it's the spectacle of terror that one will, one hopes, from their perspective, get others to not follow the same path.

CV: Would you agree there is no heart and no authentic move to rehabilitate prisoners in maximum security prisons around the US today?

Derrick Jensen: The reason I stopped teaching at Pelican Bay was the State got into financial problems, supposingly, but then they gave guards a pay increase that same year! I worked in the Arts and Corrections Program. Every study has shown, where they had writing classes, teaching classes, they had a rock band, drawing classes, painting classes all that stuff, every study has shown that arts and corrections was great at reducing recidivism for what ever reasons. Nobody knows why. If you have them in there doing creative writing or drawing it lowered their rate of going back to prison afterwards.

Most of my students were in prison, one way or another, because of drugs not because of possession. It was more like a drug deal went bad so they killed somebody but the point is that every study has shown that drug treatment programs makes much more sense on every level yet they gut the program. I've written 9 fucking books and I still can't figure it out. It makes no sense. None of it makes any sense to me.

There's this great book by Jack Forbe's called “Columbus and Other Cannibals”. The thesis in his book is the problem is not the culture as such, obviously it is, is that there is a spiritual illness with a physical vector on what he calls the “cannibal sickness”. Forbe's is an native American Indian by the way and he's taking this from an Indian perspective. If I had the flu and I cough and we are in the same room and you get the germs then you can end up with the flu symptoms. On the other hand, if I have the cannibal sickness and I cough, this is a highly contagious spiritual illness, he says, I cough and you can get the cannibal sickness. You are then going to have to consume the flu from others in order to live. That is so clear to me. That helps me to understand. I don't think that that is a metaphor. I think the problem is a spiritual illness and the people who are running this are sick. They are psychopaths, absolutely and they are also vampires. They have this spiritual illness. I mean how else do you explain killing the planet? How else do you explain tormenting rabbits for cosmetic reasons?

  Welcome To The Machine: Derrick Jensen Interviewed Part 2