Endgame Vol.2

THOSE IN POWER DO NOT SO OFTEN WIN ONLY BECAUSE CIVILIZATION’S social order is organized around converting living landbases into raw materials and raw materials into weapons which are used to conquer further landbases. They do not so often win only because civilization’s social order is organized around not giving back. They do not so often win only because within civilization’s value structure the acquisition, accumulation, and mass exploitation of resources is more important than morality or community: worse, the acquisition, accumulation, and mass exploitation of resources has within this social structure been converted into a virtue, probably the highest. They do not so often win only because we so often do not fight back. They do not so often win only because they have more soldiers than we do.

No, one reason they win is because they’re so very single-minded. Destroying the planet—the current euphemisms for this include “developing natural resources” and “making money”—is the most important thing in the world to these people (by whom I mean those who make the primary decisions for this culture, the mass of the civilized, and civilization taken as a whole). They are psychotically driven, with an energy far beyond the rational. Destroying the world—called, once again, “developing natural resources” or “making money” or “Manifest Destiny” or “making the world safe for democracy” or “fighting terrorism” or “expanding free markets” or any other claim to virtue—is not an avocation nor even a vocation. You could say it’s a passion, if you use the dictionary’s fourth definition: “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction.” ³⁰¹ But it’s beyond that. It is their obsession, their compulsion, their necessity. It is their conscience and their compass. It is their master and they are its slave. It is their God and their king, their spur and their whip. It is their subjection, their burden, and their source of strength to carry that burden. It is their crisis and their obligation, their desire and their demand. It is the demand made upon them. It is their ultimatum and the ultimatum given to them. It is their charge, their mandate, their command and the command made to them. It is their food and water (indeed, it is obviously more important to them than their food or water). It is their air. It is their life. It is their reason for living. It is their raison d’être. It is their essence. It is who they are.

The American Indian activist John Trudell, whose wife, young children, and mother-in-law were burned to death in a house fire almost undoubtedly set by agents or allies of the federal government,³⁰² said, “We must never underestimate our enemy. Our enemy is committed against us twenty-four hours a day. They use one hundred percent of their effort to maintain their materialistic status quo. One hundred percent of their effort goes into deceiving us and manipulating us against each other. We have to devote our lives, we have to make our commitment, we have to follow a way of life that says that we are going to resist that forever.”³⁰³

Have you known many abusers? I mean really known many people who really are abusers. If so, did you notice how quickly and completely and seemingly effortlessly they spin manipulative webs, how they so often say precisely the things that will make you feel the absolute worst, how they so often so perfectly know where to strike at your weakest point? It’s uncanny. To argue with an abuser sometimes feels like playing chess with some grand master who plays out every possibility ten moves in advance, and anticipates your every response. And who cheats.

I want to tell you four stories. The first: Years ago I got into an argument with someone in Nevada over a pending wilderness bill for the state. The other person argued that Nevada already had more wilderness than the rest of the United States combined. I’d heard this argument from anti-environmentalists before, and so I’d recently checked out a book from the library listing all of this country’s wilderness areas. Not only did Nevada not have more than the rest of the U.S. combined, it had less than any single state west of Nebraska. I told the person this. He said he didn’t believe me. I told him again. He said he still didn’t believe me. I said I had a book in the car that would prove it. He said he still didn’t believe me. I went to the car, brought in the book, showed him the figures. Without hesitating he said, “That’s what I’ve been saying all along: there’s too much wilderness in this country already.” What impressed and appalled me most about this exchange was not that he was cheating—when facts proved him wrong he pretended he’d been making a different argument all along, just so he could be right—but that he’d changed tack immediately. Not quickly. Not after a moment to think. Immediately. It had been essentially a reflexive response.

The second: Also when I lived in Nevada, I often went with my then-brother-in-law to the dump. We’d pile all their trash in the back of his ancient white pickup, and then we’d all pile in the front. Al would drive, I’d ride shotgun, and his two older daughters, aged seven and four, would either sit between us or on my lap. We’d drive the few miles to the dump, and then have a great time throwing the overfull bags from the back and watching them explode on contact with the ground. One day my oldest niece brought a friend. The cab was full, with the four-year-old near the gearshift, the seven-year-old on my left leg, and her friend on my right. Even before Al pulled out of his driveway, I knew something was very wrong. My niece’s friend slightly spread her legs and squared her labia through her shorts against my lower thigh. She twined her fingers in mine, then forced each hard against the crotch of each of my fingers. She slid them up and down. I was naïve enough to not understand what was going on, but also experienced enough with little girls to know how they’re supposed to sit on your leg, and how they’re supposed to play with your fingers. I was extremely uncomfortable and confused. All became clear a few weeks later when the news broke around this very small town that this little girl’s older brother was raping her. I suddenly at least slightly understood her inappropriately sexual behavior. She was not, I don’t think, consciously attempting to express herself sexually. Instead her behavior came from two primary sources. The first is that she was acting as she had been trained. The second is that she was unconsciously trying to tell the story of her trauma: she could not speak it verbally but she could speak it with her body.

The third story is that many years ago I for a time became close friends with a self-described sociopath. I admired Lauren’s brilliance and wit. She was an extraordinary sculptor and a tireless activist. Her politics matched mine. But I quickly discovered that any personal information I shared with Lauren she stored and used against me in startlingly creative ways. I introduced her to my friends, and it took me several weeks to see the pattern that soon after each introduction the old friend and I would get into terrible arguments, always in some way about Lauren. Sometimes I’d find myself defending some inappropriate behavior on Lauren’s part, sometimes I’d find myself defending myself against something—often some lie—Lauren had said about me to my old friend, and sometimes it would be something trivial between my old friend and me that somehow got blown out of proportion through some strange connection to Lauren. She came on to every one of my male friends, whether or not they were involved with someone, and continued to do this even after I pointed out how inappropriate it was. As with the incident with the little girl, I was very disturbed and confused by all of this until the pieces started coming together. When I saw the common denominator in all the arguments was Lauren, I confronted her. She told me about the abuse—physical and sexual—she had suffered as a child, and tearfully told me she would never do any of this again. But the next time she saw a male friend of mine, she once again made suggestive comments. And the time after. And the time after that. She couldn’t help herself. But there were no more arguments with my friends, because seeing the pattern had immunized us against her manipulations. I was no longer particularly upset by her behavior. I may as well have gotten upset at the little girl on my lap. One was chronologically an adult, but both were acting as they had been trained to act. And both were trying to tell their trauma stories, stories they could not speak with their voices but only with their actions.

The fourth story: A friend of mine with a doctorate in psychology worked for a time at a psychiatric outpatient clinic. Although the clinic served a great variety of patients, she primarily worked with low-functioning psychotics. In plain English this means the people she worked with had below average intelligence as well as impaired mental health but were with some assistance still able to live on their own, to marginally function in society. She did not mention if her clients included the forty-third president of the United States.³⁰⁴ The thing that most struck her about some of her more disturbed clients, she often told me, was their capacity to spontaneously manipulate those in their surroundings, pitting each against the others, now sucking up to one, now cajoling another, now giving seductive vibes to a third, and now giving off an air of innocence to a fourth. These actions seemed almost like autonomic body functions, like breathing, like digesting and defecating, like pulling back from pain. The manipulations would pile one atop the other, with small lies covering big lies, big lies covering small lies, just enough specks of truth sprinkled in to cause confusion. So long as one wasn’t sucked into the manipulations, my friend said, watching the clients was like watching jugglers or prestidigitators, as these psychotic people moved without thinking faster and faster to maintain their multiple webs of manipulation. All this from people who didn’t have the cognitive ability to read a bus schedule or set an alarm clock.

My friend and I talked often about the implications of all this. Clearly the clients were cognitively incapable of consciously perceiving the weak points of every person in the room, consciously creating plans of attack, consciously creating simple declarative sentences that would most effectively pit three or four people per sentence against each other, consciously anticipating each person’s response to the attempted manipulations, consciously planning counterresponses, and consciously keeping track of all this. To do all of this consciously would require a lot of cognitive facility and energy. Just listing it out gives me a headache and makes me tired.

My friend and I soon began to talk about the psychoses somehow having intelligences and energies all their own, almost independent of the individual’s native intelligence and energy. Ted Bundy spoke about this. He was asked by police to help them profile the Green River Killer. He said that many serial killers in some ways have a certain clarity and awareness, an ability to read people and situations instantly, “not in an analytical way but in an intuitive way.”

I recently called another friend with a Ph.D. in psychology to ask her what’s behind all this. She said, “You have to go to the neurological literature, but basically what you’ve got is someone whose brain has been trained to live and operate in trauma. In order to survive trauma you have to have an extraordinary ability to read and respond to others. Not in the soft way lovers read and respond to each other but in a fear-based way: if you don’t read the others accurately you could be beaten, raped, or killed. If those are the conditions under which you’re living, those are the rules you must live by. If you’re living in a place where you’re constantly under threat of attack you have to learn to out-stalk or outfox your attacker. It’s not about morals. It’s about what works. Their behavior looks and is perfectly normal and functional when they’re in a room full of people who actually could attack at any moment, but when you put them elsewhere, their behavior looks and is really odd. You can tell them that they’re no longer under threat of attack but their brain is wired for threat. And to actually retrain the brain is very difficult.”³⁰⁵

I thought about Lauren, and how her behavior was adaptive to the circumstances of her childhood. Her father often beat her mother, her siblings, and her. He often raped her. Her mother often beat her and her siblings. Her brother often raped her and her sister. A neighbor raped her and her sister. And she was raped by others. It’s no wonder she came on to every man she met: not only is that how one interacts with men, but if they’re going to take it anyway, you may as well maintain control by giving it first. It’s no wonder as well that she became brilliant at pitting people against each other: If Father is mad, better his anger is directed at Sister or Brother than me. Within that context her behavior not only made sense but was inspired. Out of that context, it drove me and her other friends away.

Let me tell you another story. My old friend the forest activist John Osborn has long said, “The reason we always lose is that the other side knows what it wants, and we have only the faintest clue what we want. They want every last tree, every last stick, and they want it now.³⁰⁶ We don’t know if we want smaller clearcuts, fewer clearcuts, better clearcuts, or what. They are driven to deforest, and are rewarded financially for doing it. Most of us are not driven in the same way. For most of us it’s a sideline to our main career, and certainly doesn’t pay our bills.”

John Osborn was right, and he was wrong. The truth is that those in the timber industry only think they know what they want. But they don’t really want what they want. They want something else. They don’t really want trees. They don’t really want money. They don’t even really want power. Lauren didn’t really want to sexualize every relationship. She didn’t want to pit me and my friends against each other. She didn’t even see the men she sexualized, and she didn’t see me and my friends. We existed no more than trees do to deforesters. The little girl on my lap didn’t really want to sexualize a trip to the dump and the antienvironmental person I talked to in Nevada didn’t really want to talk about wilderness areas.

These kids could kill all the mirror images of themselves they find, and they would still not find what they are seeking. Timber corporation CEOs could deforest all the continents they could find, and they would still not find what they are seeking. My sociopath friend—sociopath former friend—could destroy all the relationships she could find, could come on to all the men she could find, and she would still not find what she is seeking. We can talk to them all we want, and it will not make any difference because we are never talking about what we are talking about.³⁰⁷ It’s as my friend wrote me so long ago: “The point is that I strongly believe that unmetabolized childhood patterns will always trump adult-onset intellectualizations.”

If they don’t really want to deforest, if they don’t really want to destroy relationships, if they don’t really want power, if they don’t really want to kill the planet, what do they really want? They want their fear to go away. Normally fear comes either from outside (e.g., someone pointing a gun at you) or inside (e.g., seeing someone whose looks remind you of someone who long ago shot you). The former sort of fear can be diminished or eliminated by changing one’s circumstances. The latter kind of fear requires exploring and coming to understand how you got that fear in the first place. But because abusers and psychopaths both blame others for their actions, they cannot acknowledge that this current fear could originate inside, not out. This means the fear can never be abated, which means in practice that their desire to make their fear go away manifests as a desire to control. They want to control everything around them, so that everything around them does not hurt them. Raised in a culture of trauma, the rules of trauma are those they must live by. But the only way to control everything in this way is to kill everything.

I hesitated before writing down what they really want, because at this stage I don’t think it so much matters. Remember the monkeys made permanently psychopathological. Remember the rates of recidivism among abusers. Remember the civilized who time and again have met the indigenous and who have not learned from but killed them. The psychopathology is permanent because the void they feel can never be filled, the fear they feel (or sometimes don’t even acknowledge they feel, yet nonetheless drives their lives) can never be resolved or even sated. What matters at this point is stopping them from killing all we hold dear.

The other day I was out with my machete hacking away at blackberries, when I realized that so long as I approach this task the way I do I will never get rid of the berries. I cut them out only when I feel like it, which isn’t all that often. And even when I do, I only take out the blackberries at the edges, where they’re encroaching into territory now held by other plants. I never do get all of them, which means they’re constantly expanding. And since I never go after the roots even the plants I hack come right back. It seems for every vine I take out, ten more vines pop up to take its place. Further, I’m conflicted about taking out even the vines I do. What right do I have to kill these others who are merely trying to live, even as I am trying to live? I feel bad each time I take on the responsibility of killing one, even though I know that when I don’t kill them they kill native plants. So far as I can tell, the blackberries aren’t quite so conflicted about crowding out these others.

Standing here sweating, machete in hand, I think of a few more reasons the Indians were unable to stop the whites from stealing their land. The first is that for most of the Indians fighting and war were not a way of life, but rather avocations. Fighting was something you did for fun, in your spare time. Wars in their cultures were the equivalent of sports in this culture, exciting, scary, strenuous, and not all that dangerous. And when you no longer felt like playing, you went home.³⁰⁸ If one side is psychotically driven to war, and the other fights for fun, guess which side is ultimately going to win? The second is that like me with the blackberries, the Indians did not strike at the root. Their wars were strictly defensive, in that they killed settlers and armies moving onto their landbases. The Shawnee, for example, killed whites moving into what is now Ohio and Kentucky, respectively where the Shawnee lived and hunted. They burned forts on the frontier, but they did not sack Philadelphia. They did not strike at the infrastructure that allowed civilization to expand. If one side is always invading the other’s territory, and the other is forced to fight only defensively, guess which side is ultimately going to win? The third is that the Indians did not fight wars of extermination. If one side fights a war of extermination, and the other does not, guess, once again, which side is going to win?