itibaren Giribandha, Odisha 754219, India
Another amazing book, or should I say manifesto, from our modern-day Thoreau. An investigation into American industrial civilization and education, and the repercussions thereof. Of the many highlights I could share, here is a few: "Here is what I do know: I hate industrial civilization, for what it does to the planet, for what it does to communities, for what it does to individual nonhumans (both wild and domesticated), and for what it does to individual humans (both wild and domesticated). I hate the wage economy, because it causes – forces is probably more accurate – people to sell their lives doing things they do not love, and because it rewards people for harming each other and destroying their landbases. I hate industrial schooling because it commits one of the only unforgivable sins there is: it leads people away from themselves, training them to be workers and convincing them it’s in their best interest to be ever more loyal slaves, rowing the galley that is industrial civilization ever more fervently – enthusiastically, orgiastically – to hell, compelling them to take everything and everyone they encounter down with them. And I participate in the process. I help make school a little more palatable, a little more fun, as students are trained to do their part in the ongoing destruction of the planet, as they enter the final phases of trading away their birthright as the free and happy humans they were born to be for their roles as cogs in the giant industrial machine, or worse, as overseers of the giant factory/enslavement camp we once recognized as a living earth. Doesn’t that make me, in essence, a collaborator? Hell, drop the in essence." - Derrick Jensen - "Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just as deeply and necessarily political. To believe they’re not – to believe, for example, that science (or mathematics, economics, history, religion, and so forth: choose your poison) describes the world as it is, rather than acting as a filter that removes all information that does not fit the model and colors the information that remains – is in itself to take a position, one that is all the more powerful and dangerous because it is invisible to the one who holds it." - Derrick Jensen -