Excerpt from Endgame

Single-Minded (p. 787)

From chapter "Like a Bunch of Machines"

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.”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.

But it is deeper even than that.

***

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, 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.”