IT’S NOT POSSIBLE to commit deforestation, or any other mass atrocity—mass murder, genocide, mass rape, the pervasive abuse of women or children, institutionalized animal abuse, imprisonment, wage slavery, systematic impoverishment, ecocide—without first convincing yourself and others that what you’re doing is beneficial. You must have, as Dr. Robert Jay Lifton has put it, a “claim to virtue.” You must be convinced—as the Nazis were convinced that the elimination of Jews […]
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Dana Visalli | Brian Willson and the problem of obedience
ONE OF THE MORE MYSTERIOUS and problematic elements of human nature is our tendency to be obedient; to look for external authorities to tell us what to do with our lives. The Latin root of the word is obediere, “to obey, to be submissive.” When soldiers are told to by some purported authority to march off to war, they almost invariably obey. When taxpayers are told to stuff money into […]
Erich Fromm | Obedience as a psychological and moral problem
FOR CENTURIES kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice. In order to introduce another point of view, let us set against this position the following statement: human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be, terminated by an act of obedience. Human history was ushered in by an […]
Joel Salatin | Folks, this ain’t normal
NO CIVILIZATION has ever been in this state of environmental ignorance. In previous eras, people who lived in an area had to be intimately aware of their surroundings and viscerally involved in rearing and preparing food for the table. But in recent decades, in our culture, putting food on the table has not required any knowledge or involvement except how to scan a credit card, open a plastic bag, and […]
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