Although it seems clear to me that … hot showers,...

“
Although it seems clear to me that … hot showers, computers, vaccinations, major league baseball games, and compact disks of Mozart … are tied inextricably to global warming, evolutionary meltdown, ubiquitous genocide, institutionalized cruelty to nonhumans, immiseration of the majority, high rates of incarcerations, and NASA space probes.. - it doesn’t really matter whether they are or not. Pretend for a moment that they are. Are you going to argue that compact disks are worth genocide? Or to take a “more difficult” dilemma, are you going to suggest that the wonders of modern medicine (available to few) are worth the immiseration of the majority? To state these trade-offs are fair… would immediately show that one is not fit to be a member of a functioning community. It would suggest that one has become deafened to the sufferings of others and to one’s conscience.

Now pretend that they are not linked. We can have hot showers and email and a computer that plays chess without having any of the negative characteristics of our culture. This leads immediately to an even more difficult question: in that case, why the hell the ubiquitous genocide, the mass rapes, the biological meltdown?
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Derrick Jensen in A Language Older Than Words, p. 282

(via tribalsaurusrex)