Derrick Jensen appears in episodes 168 and 169 of the C-Realm Podcast.

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Product Description

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 of the lines of thought and experience that run between the massive lynchings in early twentieth-century America to today’s death squads in South America soon explodes into an examination of the very heart of our civilization. The Culture of Make Believe is a book that is as impeccably researched as it is moving, with conclusions as far-reaching as they are shocking.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88843 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Released on: 2004-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781931498579
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Writing with the same driven passion and intense intelligence as his critically acclaimed A Language Older Than Words, which examined the interconnections between personal and social violence, Jensen says this book "is more about racism and far more broadly hate as it manifests itself in our Western world." As in the earlier work, Jensen paints on a huge canvas he details American racism from the genocidal slave trade through lynchings to the 2000 murder of Amadou Diallo by NYC police, and covers a wide range of other cultural horrors as well: the massacres of Native American people, the Holocaust, the 8,000 deaths from the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in India, and the deaths of 500,000 children in Iraq. The book is packed full of startling details South African apartheid laws were enacted at the direct request of the De Beers diamond company to facilitate business; aspects of Christian doctrine supported slavery until about 100 years ago. But the uniqueness and enormous power of Jensen's work is his ability to forge these events into an emotionally compelling and devastating critique of the intellectual, psychological, emotional and social structures of Western culture. Along with greed and globalization he says that the valuing of production over life and the abstract over the particular have set Western culture on a course that will end "really, with the end of the planet." While some readers might take umbrage at his more unsettling associations he compares Hitler's political language to Teddy Roosevelt's Jensen's intricate weaving together of history, philosophy, environmentalism, economics, literature and psychology has produced a powerful argument that demands attention in the tradition of such important books as Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Brigid Brophy's Black Ship to Hell.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This passionate book chronicles the violent hatreds that have been overwhelming our planet, tracing them back through their sources in imperialism, slavery, the rise of global capitalism, and the ideologies of possessiveness and consumerism. Jensen's previous book, A Language Older Than Words, a reflection on family violence and childhood abuse, attracted a wide audience. Here he puts together statistics, bits of history, and reflective interviews with friends and acquaintances to examine a world in which hatred and destruction come all too easily. As in his previous book, his intent is to recall victims as individuals. His focus is on the dangers of abstraction and the economics that result from our viewing people and things as sources of profit and elements in systems. What he intends is not a systematic picture but a stunning collection of horrific close-ups. Africans and Indians are most often in view, and women are never far from his mind. Our disdain for the environment also intrudes frequently. Jensen's solution is a return to the simple life, perhaps much like that of the hunter-gatherers, yet he knows that such a turn must be "the end of civilization." Readers will be moved by his argument, though more likely they will be inspired to look for solutions that let us keep art, science, and the great treasures that go with complex communal life. Surely not all abstract thought is bad, but Jensen's aim is to shock us awake and let us stew in the world's injustices, and at that he duly succeeds. Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa, ON
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Journalist Jensen's A Language Older Than Words (2000), a memoir about surviving a brutally abusive childhood that evolves into a paradigm-dissecting rumination on violence, garnered a large and devoted following. Jensen now offers his second courageous, clear-sighted, and bracing critique, a frank and unsparing inquiry into hate and "the root of our culture's destructiveness." His range is suitably epic, embracing everything from lynchings to television, rape to corporate crimes against humanity and the planet, on to genocide, American prisons, pollution, hunger, child prostitution, international trade, and deforestation. Racism, hatred of women, and contempt for nature are so enmeshed in our society that they're invisible, Jensen writes, citing shocking examples from sources as diverse as documentation of the war against Native Americans to a harrowing talk-radio transcript. Wordy but never dull, horrified but never shrill, simplistic, or smug, Jensen poses the sort of jarring but essential questions children ask. Heroic in his forthrightness and willingness to grapple with confounding and deeply disturbing topics in an effort to understand civilization's maladies, Jensen has composed an intense and far-reaching treatise invaluable for its coverage of appalling realities that are almost never examined in mainstream media. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Customer Reviews

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

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 last century was not the only holocaust; we must wake up to the current holocausts against the forests, the salmon, the soil, the water, the Earth -- of Life itself.

But most poignantly and effectively, what Jensen emphasizes is the meaning of Ecocide -- that this hatred and distruction, this ongoing Holocaust, this annihilation of Life itself, is ultimately against ourselves. And the question is: whether the cultural urge to convert living things to dollars is stronger than the will to survive. This question dangles precariously over our conscience like a rope left tied for hanging ourselves, as we blindly and deafly go about our daily lives of consumption and alienation from the Other.

Ultimately, Jensen asks us to question our own obedience to this cultural dysfunctionality, to speak out vehemently against it. And the reader cannot ignore this call. By the end, at the thirty-first chapter, we sit convinced, exhausted, and yet, motivated to stand up and revolt.

What solution does he offer us? Caught up in a tangled web of our own enslavement of a system that rewards the conversion of the living to the dead, our only hope, he implores, is a return to our humanity. He asks us to bravely tell our own stories, to simply tell the truth, and simply not to fight the reality of the despair. We must question, question, question; we must dismantle this civilization and rebuild one based on the power of interconnectedness, not alienation.

Jensen's passionate words are powerful weapons themselves, and it is about time that they were fired. He is not afraid to speak the truth; this book is a brilliantly articulate incantation of revolution of not only thought but action that is so desperately needed in this time of wasted power, fear, illusion, fascist censorship and paramount distruction. The audience of this book is not just historians, economists or sociologists of slavery and racism, war and politics. Neither is it just for social and environmental activists, but rather it is for all of us, because ultimately, we are all interconnected partners (knowingly or unknowingly) in this hate crime of Ecocide.