Derrick Jensen (right), author of "Endgame: The Collapse of Civilization and the Rebirth of Community" is one of my all time favorite authors and currently occupies four of the 10 available spaces on my "Books to Help Heal Whiteness".John Zerzan (Left), author of "Future Primitive & Other Essays", has inspired a generation of activists to think deeply about our modern way of life and what it means to be human in this world.
"I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize--make seem natural--the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God's Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?"
- John Zerzan (from the Interview)
- John Zerzan (from the Interview)
To read the full interview:
http://www.derrickjensen.org/zerzan.html
