The Culture of Make Believe

by Derrick Jensen

Book Overview

Derrick Jensen takes no prisoners in "The Culture of Make Believe," his brilliant and eagerly awaited follow-up to his powerful and lyrical "A Language Older Than Words," What begins as an exploration... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1931498571
• ISBN13: 9781931498579
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
• Length: 720 Pages
• Weight: 2.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 5.9" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

One of the Most Important Books Ever Written!

I have purchased this book twice to give away as presents to people whom I believed would benefit from reading it. I plan to purchase a third copy just to have but I think everyone needs to read this book. This book changed my whole outlook on life but the information, truth and knowledge therein is emotionally hard to swallow. I mean to say that it's "deep" is the understatement of the year. Being in the military, I am doing my little part to keep this mad spectacle of civilization going. Jensen points out that it's kinda hopeless to change the world at this point. And I've tried my best even though I am cynical, to believe that we can still turn things around and save ourselves but it's pretty hopeless. I would rate this book as being more important than the Bible. I say this not to be sacreligious or crass, but as an honest heartfelt statement. Jenson attempted to discover the origin of hate, to analyze the condition of hatred as manisfested throughout American History. I really can't describe the impact of this book. It's highly recommended.

The Culture of Make Believe

Derrick Jensen continues his deep examination of our dysfunctional civilization from his previous two beautifully powerful works, A Language Older Than Words and Listening to the Land, delving deeper still into the horror of man's (yes, gender specific) inhumanity to man. In this compelling mammoth volume, The Culture of Make Believe, Jensen bombards the reader with historical and contemporary accounts of atrocity after atrocity of our own destructive culture, until we can no longer look away with a blind eye or deaf ear. We can no longer "make believe" that the American Dream comes without cost to our own shared humanity and the planet.Starting by exploring and defining the hate crimes of racism and rape, Jensen continues, chapter after chapter, to prove that the ultimate hate crime is towards ourselves. He successfully weaves meticulously-researched historical accounts, statistics and interviews, with his own personal deep ecological commentary. Jensen delves deeply, sociologically and psychologically, into the perpetuation of violence, hatred, exploitation and domination of non-white cultures from the beginnings of colonial America, through the slavery and genocide of African slaves, Native Americans and immigrants, to other crimes of power and exploitation by early American capitalists, and now, modern globalizing corporations.He follows by lacing together the hate legacy of African slavery and the KKK with the modern capitalistic economics of the modern judicial and prison system. (and asks- aren't we incarcerating the wrong people?) In reflective commentary, Jensen consciously self-examines the abstract meaning of his own white privilege.Jensen continues relentlessly to confront capitalism as The System of exploitation -- the conversion of humans into machines and ecosystems into waste -- questioning the basis for the objectification of all Life forms -- human and non-human. He asks passionately, how have we come to value economic production over the process of living, and of Life itself? And who is benefiting? Jensen continues on by exposing the U.S. military system and the war at hand. He asks, who is profiting from these economic wars (hate crimes) of past and present, resulting in our civilization's continued legacy of genocide? After chapters and chapters of unquestionable and painful evidence, Jensen asks the reader to question Western Industrial Civilization itself and our own participation in it. He asks us boldly to confront these painful truths of how and why have we as a civilization have come to conquer the world, and how we can stop wanting it.The power of this book is not in the facts themselves (as convincing and important as they are), but rather, in Jensen's courage to not be afraid to point out the obviously insane state of the world that we continually deny: that Western Industrial Civilization is causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. He reminds us that the Holocaust by the Nazis in the la

Eyes Wide Open

If you read your morning newspaper, if you watch the nightly news, if you cruise the Internet, or if you only see the world as you commute to work each morning, it's easy to see that we live in a world full of problems. Vehicles pack our streets. Smog hangs in a thick blanket over our cities. Wildlife is scarce and often is seen by the urban commuter only as roadkill. If you're happy in your job, you're the exception. Most of us change jobs as often as we change residences, restless, constantly moving, looking for -- something. Violence seems to be as American as a chicken in every pot. It dominates the headlines and insinuates itself into our entertainment. Often, it can be found in our homes, and it's easy enough to see it on the streets, in the apparel and, more tellingly, in the eyes of our homeless. We buy and discard aluminum, plastic, and cardboard products as though the sources from which they are derived will never dry up. The person who drinks water from the tap is rare. Most filter it or avoid it altogether, choosing to purchase water in large bottles or small because, quite simply, we can't trust the water that bubbles underground. Why should we? We cover the land with pesticides and exhaust and effluents. We hide our trash underground. The crimes committed in the name of nuclear energy -- well, let's not even go there.When I was young -- and this was not so long ago, the early 1960s -- I lived in a suburban town in Connecticut. I remember lying on my lawn in the spring and fall and watching flocks of birds numbering in the hundreds fly over my house. Within a half block there was a tiny bridge, and under the bridge flowed a brook that could almost be called a stream, especially in certain seasons. Frogs and snakes and minnows and, sometimes, tiny trout could be found in abundance in the clean, sparkling water. Just beneath the bridge, on the downstream side, the brook formed a small pond -- small in name only because, during the winter, it formed a sheet of ice large enough to skate upon. Beyond were huge fields that stretched for acres, one of them containing a steep hill that, during the winter, was perfect for sledding.A couple of years ago, I returned to that town. The bridge is still there, but no water runs beneath it. None. Not a trace. No frogs, no snakes, no trout. The hills I played on are filled with houses, large ones, owned by the conspicuously wealthy.And the birds -- well, just look in the sky. Look for a long, long time. Or don't. Perhaps you can recall without looking the last time you saw a flock of a hundred, or even a few dozen.My point -- and I do have one -- is this: We all know these problems exist. We see them every day. We may not acknowledge them, but we see them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we are aware of their existence, but we don't see them, or at least don't acknowledge them. Perhaps it would be even more accurate to say that to acknowledge them, to see

Can you read this book?

Can you read this book and not cry? Can you read it and not feel the smoke coming out your ears? Can you read it and not look up gaping in awe as Jensen forces you to see things you've never looked at (or turned your eyes away from)? That's what THE CULTURE OF MAKE BELIEVE is all about-- seeing. Most of the time all we let ourselves see is our make believe fairy tale. Jensen digs up the fairy tale and exposes it as the fraud that it is. If we're to turn away from our world-devouring, life degrading culture, we first have to see it for what it is. This book is the definitive tale of our culture's steady progression towards the creation of hell on earth. It goes through detail after detail of the insanity that pervades the past and present of our civilization. But, it's also the first step to a new direction. You can't begin walking another way until you see another way is possible. And you won't have the motivation to change if you think there's nothing wrong with the path you're on. This book accomplishes both tasks. And it makes you ache to get up and do something. It makes you ache to get out there and get active. It makes you want to save the world!So read this book and tell me, can you read it without crying, without steaming? Can you read it without running outside and saying, ENOUGH, we need new directions and we need them now?!!This book is a must read. You can't afford NOT to read it. It's a 700 page horror story. But it's not fiction. Neither is it fun. But it's amazing. And it helps you realize you're not alone. And you're not crazy. You're not crazy for thinking things around you are awful. You're not crazy for wanting something different. Even though this book is full of horrors, Jensen gives hope and inspiration. We cannot ever have a real hope and a real future if we continue to ignore reality. We can't get back to the heaven that is our natural birthright as living members of the earth until we look at the hell that we've forced upon ourselves and our neighbors. Let's leave hell behind and rediscover heaven.

A language other than make believe.

"Something . . . happened to me during the late 1980s," Derrick Jensen reflects in his new book, "I thought I was insane. Then, as now, so much of what I saw around me made no sense. Our culture is killing the planet, yet most of us don't seem to care . . . What seemed profoundly important to me seemed of no importance whatsoever to most people, and what seemed important to so many people seemed trivial to me. I couldn't wrap my mind around it" (pp. 139; 141). Although Jensen is a familiar name to readers of The Sun magazine, where his interviews frequently appear, I discovered Jensen through his last book, A LANGUAGE OLDER THAN WORDS, in which he takes his reader on "a deeply intimate exploration of, among many other things, the complex relationship between domestic violence and how violence tricks out on a grander social scale" (p. xi). Although THE CULTURE OF MAKE BELIEVE is a less personal book, it offers an equally compelling look at how racism and hatred manifest in our Western world (p. xi).In Jensen's May, 2002 Sun magazine interview with Father Thomas Berry, the deep ecologist tells Jensen that the West is in decline, and "the mission of our times is to reinvent what it means to be human." Jensen asks Berry, "Should we just get rid of Western civilization?" "Not at all," the 88-year-old Catholic monk replies. "Because the problem is within the Western world, the solution must be there also . . . humans need to be taught how to be human." This is also the basic premise of Jensen's 701-page manifesto on racism and hate, that it is time to "return to our humanity" (p. 602). "If we are to do that," he writes, "the first thing we must do is to see the inhumanity of our current system for what it is, and we must speak about it" (p. 602). And speaking out is exactly what Jensen does best in this highly researched book.From the 1918 mob murder of a pregnant black woman in Georgia, to the 2001 death squad chainsaw murder of a seventeen-year-old Columbian girl, and to the economic and social activities that are "killing the planet" (p. xi), Jensen cuts through all the make believe of our culture to the reality which we normally ignore. Along the way, he covers a lot of ground, examining such subjects as hate groups, rape statistics, slavery, African diamond mines, racism, pornography, television, crime, the Union Carbide gas leak, and the Holocaust. Jensen's insights are compelling, and his publisher, Context, deserves recognition for publishing this sharp critique of our culture. "This book is a weapon," Jensen warns his reader. "It is a gun to be put into the hands of all of us who wish to oppose these atrocities, and a manual on how to use it. It is a knife to cut the ropes that bind us to our ways of perceiving and being in the world. It is a match to light a fuse" (p. xii). Through the CULTURE OF MAKE BELIEVE, Jensen made a believer out of me.G. Merritt