The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Derrick JensenRead
So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how blind faith in state justice allows those in power to exploit others.
Derrick Jensen emphasizes that placing unwavering trust in the justice system, which is crafted by those who hold power to benefit themselves, will perpetuate the cycle of exploitation. It suggests that critical examination of laws and the motives behind them is essential to liberate oneself from the control of the powerful elite.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about social justice reform.
The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.
So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.
When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.
The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.
By deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence... converting an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality.
No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.
There is no separation between mind and body... Self and other co-arise and fall away all the time.
God will never reject you. Whether you accept Him is your decision.
The covenant of your servanthood is that you be a servant to God, not to someone else, and that you know that everything except God is a servant to God, as He Most High has said, "There is none in the heaven and the earth but cometh unto the Compassionate as a servant."
But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.
Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all the spiritual striving of man, insofar as he is conscious of such striving. The workings of common sense, as well as the most complicated scientific researches, rest on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.