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137 pages

English

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From Derrick Jensen, acclaimed author of Endgame and The Culture of Make Believe, comes a prescient, thought-provoking collection of interviews with ten leading writers, philosophers, teachers, and activists.

To function in this society, we are asked to live by lies: that humans have the right to take what they want from the earth without giving back, that knowledge is limited to that which can be quantified, that corporations and governments know what is best for our future. Our instinctive outrage at environmental collapse, political conspiracy, and corporate corruption is stifled by the double-speak of popular opinion telling us that the “progress” of civilization demands unquestioning allegiance to those in power. But the brave voices in Truths Among Us seek to help us acknowledge the values we know in our hearts are right—and inspire within us the courage to act on them.

Among those who share their wisdom here is acclaimed sociologist Stanley Aronowitz, who shows us that science is but one lens through which we can discover knowledge. Luis Rodriguez, poet and peacemaker, asks us to embrace gang members as people instead of stereotypes, while the brilliant Judith Herman helps us gain a deeper understanding of the psychology of abusers in whatever form they may take. Paul Stamets reveals the power of fungi, whose intelligence, like that of so many nonhumans, is often ignored. And writer Richard Drinnon reminds us that our spiritual paths need not be narrowed by the limiting mythologies of Western civilization.

Following How Shall I Live My Life? and Resistance Against Empire, Jensen's third collection of interviews reinforces a simple premise with which he has long challenged his readers: if we shut our ears and eyes to the cacophony of consumption-oriented distractions and pause to listen to the wisdom of our own hearts, the truths among us will reveal themselves.

Interviewees include: George Gerbner, Stanley Aronowitz, Luis Rodriguez, Judith Herman, John Keeble, Richard Drinnon, Paul Stamets, Marc Ian Barasch, Martín Prechtel, and Jane Caputi.

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Publié par	PM Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781604866193
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

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ALSO BY DERRICK JENSEN
Dreams
Deep Green Resistance (with Lierre Keith and Aric McBay)
Resistance Against Empire
Mischief in the Forest: A Yarn Yarn (with Stephanie McMillan)
Lives Less Valuable
Songs of the Dead
What We Leave Behind (with Aric McBay)
How Shall I Live My Life?: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization
Now This War Has Two Sides (live CD)
As the World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial
(with Stephanie McMillan)
Thought to Exist in the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos
(with Karen Tweedy-Holmes)
Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization
Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance
Standup Tragedy (live CD)
The Other Side of Darkness (live CD)
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control
(with George Draffan)
Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution
Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests (with George Draffan)
The Culture of Make Believe
A Language Older than Words
Listening to the Land: Conversations about Nature, Culture, and Eros
Railroads and Clearcuts: Legacy of Congress’s 1864 Northern Pacific
Railroad Land Grant (with George Draffan and John Osborn)

The following interviews appeared in slightly different form in The Sun:
George Gerbner, Luis Rodriguez, Judith Herman, Marc Ian Barasch,
Paul Stamets, and Martín Prechtel.
Truths Among Us
© Derrick Jensen 2011
This edition © PM Press 2011
All rights reserved.
Back cover photograph by Derrick Jensen
Cover and interior design by Stephanie McMillan
Edited by Theresa Noll
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 978-1-60486-299-7
LCCN 2011927943
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the
Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
CONTENTS
George Gerbner
Stanley Aronowitz
John Keeble
Luis Rodriguez
Richard Drinnon
Judith Herman
Marc Ian Barasch
Jane Caputi
Paul Stamets
Martín Prechtel
INTRODUCTION
G eorge Orwell wrote that in times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. In that and many other senses, the people interviewed in this book are revolutionaries. In these interviews and in their other work, they individually and collectively peel back layer after layer of the lies that are this culture to reveal some of the foundational lies essential to and inherent in capitalism, conquest, land theft, genocide, ecocide, racism, sexism, rape culture, and so on.
George Gerbner describes some of the ways that television socializes men to be men and women to be women that is, within a patriarchal society, teaches men to be dominant and women to be submissive and how TV socializes us all to be fearful. Stanley Aronowitz details some of the parallels between science and fundamentalist religions, and lays bare the desire for control and the fear of death that underlies so much of science. Richard Drinnon talks about the inherent relationship between racism and empire-building. Judith Herman discusses the effects of trauma and captivity, including domestic violence, on our psyches and our social relations. Jane Caputi explores the personal, political and mythological ramifications of living in a rape culture, and what we can do about it.
A doctor friend of mine often says that the first stop toward cure is proper diagnosis. This is as true of social ills as it is for medical ones. The authors interviewed in this book provide that first step diagnosis and also lead us to action.
Another way to say this is that in order for us to act, we must first perceive the atrocities, and to do that we must peel back this culture’s lies that mask the atrocities. These authors do that, and point to ways we can join them in active opposition to this culture.

G eorge Gerbner fought fascism for a long time. Born in Hungary, he emigrated to the United States in the 1930s to get away from the Fascists, then returned to Europe during World War II to fight against them. A member of the U.S. Army, he parachuted behind German lines and fought alongside the partisans.
Through much of the twentieth century he fought another sort of fascism, the totalitarianism of corporate conglomerates that effectively govern our country and control our media. He no longer parachuted behind enemy lines. He counted murders and analyzed the stories told on television.
By the time children turn eighteen they have witnessed more than forty thousand murders and two hundred thousand other violent acts on television. They have also seen approximately four hundred thousand advertisements, each delivering essentially the same message: Buy now and you will feel better.
What are the effects of taking in this volume of violence? How do advertisements affect our perception of the world? George Gerbner’s analysis moves far beyond facile descriptions of violence begetting violence. The effects are far more subtle and insidious, and they are infinitely more dangerous.

Gerbner was a founder of the Cultural Indicators Project, an organization formed to study the relationship between violence in the media and society at large, and the Cultural Environment Movement, an umbrella of organizations dedicated to democratizing the media. He edited nine books, including Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Media Control Means for America and the World; Triumph of the Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf, An International Perspective; and The Information Gap: How Computers and Other Communication Technologies Affect the Distribution of Power. He wrote extensively on the relationship between human behavior and the stories that help to form us.
I met George Gerbner in San Francisco on January 20, 1998, while he was on a whirlwind speaking tour. We talked in the corner of a small cafeteria, focusing on the question Gerbner studied for decades: what does it mean to each of us when corporations tell all the stories?
George Gerbner: A few centuries ago, the Scottish patriot Andrew Fletcher wrote, "If I were permitted to write all the ballads, I need not care who makes the laws of the nation." He was right. Ballads, or more broadly stories, socialize us into our roles as men and women and affect our identities. Our parents, schools, communities, churches, nations, and others used to be our society’s storytellers, but over the past fifty years this role has been taken over by marketing conglomerates and people who have a great deal to sell. This transformation has profoundly changed the way our children are socialized. It has made a significant contribution to the way our societies are governed. It has changed the way we live.
In the average American household the television is on for seven hours and forty-one minutes per day. That’s a lot of time, but that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that the stories we see and hear on TV are very limited, despite the deceptive proliferation of cable channels. Shows may vary in style or even plot, but the elements I consider to be the building blocks of storytelling, casting and fate, are strikingly similar across the board. Think about the characters that animate the world of prime-time drama, which is where most of the action and most of the viewing time is. What is their demography? What is the fate of the different groups men and women, young and old, rich and poor, and so on? The studies I have conducted with the Cultural Indicators Project show that character casting and fate follows stable patterns over time.
Derrick Jensen: What types of patterns?
GG: Men outnumber women in prime-time television two to one, children, elderly people, and nonwhite people are underrepresented, and poor people are virtually absent.
DJ: Please explain why this is important.
GG: Socialization the telling of all the stories is what makes us develop into who we are; stories teach us our social roles. People who are well-represented in stories see many opportunities, many choices. The opposite is true for those who are underrepresented, or are represented only in a particular way. For example, women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five are generally cast only for romantic roles. What message does that impart to young girls growing up? We have a contract with the Screen Actors Guild to study why so many of its female members stop getting calls when they’re thirty-five, and only start getting them again when they’re old enough to play grandmothers. What does that invisibility teach women about their roles in society? Men play romantic leads until they totter into their graves. How does that affect people’s perception of their opportunities for love, sex, and human companionship?
Casting dictates the demography of the symbolic world. Think about the ratios of success to failure and victimizer to victimized experienced by various demographic groups in the world of television. If you look at who is consistently doing what to whom, you see a great homogeneity. It’s a strictly regulated and relatively inflexible system.
The over- or underrepresentation of demographic groups in these stories leads to a skewing of the types of stories that can be told. Because most scripts are written by and for men, they project a world in which men rule, and in which men play most of the roles. Scripts are constructed to satisfy the demands of a market which is not, by the way, the same as the demands of an audience. Because a film or television producer cannot really hope to make money solely in the United States, most produc