Goodbye Blue Monday

Gold, silver, slavery and murder: The legacy of Columbus

In light of the government's recent "apology" for its own complicity in the murderous residential school system that killed upwards of 50,000 aboriginal children and amounted to an official program of cultural genocide, I consider it wise to reflect upon how this continent was taken in the first place, and to what ends.

Gold, silver, slavery and murder: The legacy of Columbus

In the fall of 2001, a great brouhaha was raised in the media about a handbook produced by the student union at Concordia University in Montreal. A number of organizations came together in a press conference to denounce the publication, while incensed right-wing editorialists denounced the student union as, among other things, "anti-globalization zealots" guilty of "sullying the university's name." Among the features of the handbook singled out for condemnation at a press conference was its entry for October 8, 2001 which reads "Thanksgiving — Colonialist Holiday."

But what is it to which the right-wingers object? After all, native peoples certainly didn't initiate Thanksgiving Day, nor do they celebrate it. As Ward Churchill of the American Indian Movement has asked about the annual celebrations on this day:

Should we be thankful for the scalp bounties paid by every English colony — as well as every US state and territory in the lower 48 – for proof of the deaths of individual Indians, including women and children? How might we best show our appreciation for the order issued by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763, requiring smallpox-infested items be given as gifts to the Ottawas so that 'we might extirpate this execrable race?'... It's no mystery why Indians don't observe Thanksgiving Day. The real question is why do you feast rather than fast on what should be a national day of mourning and atonement.

Given that it is not a day of mourning and atonement, what is the holiday if not a celebration of European colonization of North America? Here the outraged conservatives turn evasive. And for good reason. For the legacy of European colonization of the Americans, beginning with the "voyages" of Christopher Columbus, is not quite the uplifting affair they choose to celebrate.

As a number of commentators have pointed out, Columbus was less interested in discovery and adventure than he was in gold. In fact, his preoccupation with the metal could be described as obsessive. One expert points out that the word gold appears in his diary 140 times on his first trip to the Americas: "It was the one constant of his Journal, the one recurring goal, and on some days he seemed hardly able to get it out of his mind." Alas, the great discoverer came up empty on his first two trips to the "New World" (1492 and 1493). Five years later, however, his luck turned: gold was discovered in the new colony of Espanola (what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). As extensive mining began, the colony turned out from one to three tons of the yellow metal every year between 1504 and 1519. "Gold is most precious," exuded Columbus. "Gold is treasure, and with it, whoever has it may do what he wants in the world, and may succeed in taking souls to Paradise."

Paradise is not what would be visited upon the area's indigenous peoples, however. On his first and second voyages, despairing of finding gold, Columbus had hit upon another commodity that he could use to satisfy the king and queen of Spain, who had financed his journeys: slaves. Worried by his failure to locate gold, he sent several dozen natives back during his first voyage. Then, during the second trip, he captured 1,600 Tainos from the interior of Espanola and proposed to the Spanish royals that these men, women and children could be traded for cattle and supplies. With the discovery of gold on his third voyager came the decision that would shape all the early chapters of colonial history in the Americas: the great "discoverer" decreed that indigenous people would be enslaved and forced to mine gold. In time, slavery would become the preferred labour system for every major commodity in the "New World": gold, silver, sugar, tobacco.

Of course, the indigenous peoples were unlikely to submit readily to this new arrangement. In order to conquer their resistance, terror was pursued as a routine part of colonial policy. Gallows were erected in every Spanish town, 340 of them in the valley of the Vega Real alone. And these gallows were used with bloody results. Bartolomé de Las Casas, who came to the Americas as a Catholic missionary, chronicled the savagery of the Spanish. One historian summarizes part of his findings:

De las Casas reports how they made low, wide gallows on which they strung up the Arawaks, their feet almost touching the ground, Then they put burning green wood at their feet. These executions took place in lots of thirteen. Why? This was "in memory of our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles."

De las Casas continues to say that chiefs and nobles were usually not hanged like that, but burned to death on grids of rods. Once, he writes, a captain complained that he couldn't sleep because of the cries and he ordered the victims strangled. But the constable... instead put sticks over their tongues so that they could not make a song, and "roasted them slowly, as he liked." Men, women and children on Columbus' Hispaniola were hacked to pieces, and those pieces were sold from stalls to the Spaniards for feeding their dogs.

Murder, death by overwork, and disease ravaged the indigenous peoples. The scale of the human destruction is staggering. Scholarly research now suggests that there were about eight million Tainos when Columbus first arrived in 1492. Four years later, only three million remained. By the time Columbus left his duties as governor of the colony in 1500, a mere 100,000 of these indigenous peoples had survived. By 1542, perhaps 200 were alive. In short, within 50 years of European conquest, more than 99.9 per cent of the Tainos population had perished. An apocalypse had occurred, bringing in its wake a wave of human annihilation that would reverberate through the Americas.

— Another world is possible: Globalization and anti-capitalism by David McNally

We knew what we were doing all along

While the government is to be commended for offering a long overdue apology to residential school survivors and their families, the wording of the Prime Minister’s apology on June 11, 2008 implied that government officials would have acted sooner if the full extent of the damages inflicted upon First Nations children and their families had been known at the time. By repeating, as he did for rhetorical effect at the least, that “we now recognize” the consequences of residential schooling or that “we now recognize” that it was wrong to apprehend children for school, the Prime Minister cynically deflected full responsibility for a policy that extended for well over a century and that persisted, for decades, in light of all the injustices “we now recognize.”

The written historical record is full of such recognitions. In 1903 the incoming principal of the Red Deer Industrial School reported that his first “glance over the building and the sight of the ragged, unkempt, and sickly-looking children was sufficient to make me sick at heart.” Three years later, Dr. Peter Bryce reported to parliament that one-quarter of the students in residential schools died within a few years of leaving the schools. Many more died while in school and federal officials accepted this as a cost of operating the residential school system. They also assuaged their consciences by recognizing that many of these children had at least been converted to Christianity before their deaths. In 1910, coinciding with one of the earlier attempts to phase out residential facilities in favour of day schools, Frank Oliver, a Liberal Member of Parliament from Edmonton, commented on the contradictions of a church-run school system that taught children to despise their parents. The Liberal government tried, once again, to phase out residential schools in favour of federal day schools and provincial school systems, immediately after the Second World War. Speaking about those efforts in the late 1960s, Robert Davey, Chief of the federal Indian Education Branch, stated that neither the “Government nor the Churches appeared to have had any real understanding of the needs of [Aboriginal] children” prior to the Second World War, but, sadly, he had to acknowledge that efforts to change the system after the War had also failed in most respects. Federal officials acknowledged that they had been reluctant to challenge the power of the churches in the post-war period and had failed to develop adequate policies and oversight to achieve their objectives. The obvious cost of this failure was the continued removal of Aboriginal children from their parents for at least another quarter century.

There is much evidence to indicate that various governments of the day failed to act on the basis of what they recognized at the time, dating back to the 1890s. While I do not wish to diminish, in any way, the importance of the Prime Minister’s apology for First Nations across Canada, and for non-Aboriginal Canadians as well, I believe a full and frank discussion of everything that happened is in order; including a recognition that the full consequences of federal Indian education policy were recognized and accepted, and that these are not recent revelations, as the Prime Minister chose to imply. The residential school system was maintained in spite of the full recognition of its devastating consequences and alongside decades of political and popular indifference. Perhaps this is where the apology needs to begin.

The end of living, the beginning of survival

"When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with...

Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order. In about 1852, the United States Government inquired about buying the tribal lands for the arriving people of the United States, and Chief Seattle wrote a marvelous letter in reply. His letter expresses the moral, really, of our whole discussion." — Joseph Campbell

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know - there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We are all brothers after all.

Quoted in The Power of Myth.

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

Published in 1932, Brave New World is a classic dystopia the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and certainly a novel of comparable literary importance. But whereas Orwell's gritty vision—one of state repression and naked official violence—drew heavily from the twin horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, Aldous Huxley vividly predicted the Information Age.

Huxley's World State is hyper-organized, technocratic, rigidly hierarchical, and highly technological. The rabble is kept stupefied and mindlessly happy with drugs and meaningless entertainment, and molded to state specification through indoctrination, propaganda, and genetic selection. Huxley's dictators, unlike Orwell's, are not obliged to burn books. No one has any desire to read!

In Brave New World Revisited, excerpted here, Huxley, writing twenty-five years later at the dawn of the Television Age, reflected upon his original vision and related it to the troubling trends he observed in contemporary America. Having set his novel several hundred years A.F. (After Ford), Huxley was rather surprised to see his predictions begin to materialize so quickly.

Propaganda in a Democratic Society

There are two kinds of propaganda - rational propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed, and non-rational propaganda that is not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion. Where the actions of individuals are concerned there are motives more exhalted than enlightened self-interest, but where collective action has to be taken in the fields of politics and economics, enlightened self-interest is probably the highest of effective motives. If politicians and their constituents always acted to promote their own or their country's long-range self-interest, this world would be an earthly paradise. As it is, they often act against their own interests, merely to gratify their least credible passions; the world, in consequence, is a place of misery. Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty.

In John Dewey's words, "a renewal of faith in common human nature, in its potentialities in general, and in its power in particular to respond to reason and truth, is a surer bulwark against totalitarianism than a demonstration of material success or a devout worship of special legal and political forms." The power to respond to reason and truth exists in all of us. But so, unfortunately, does the tendency to respond to unreason and falsehood - particularly in those cases where falsehood evokes some enjoyable emotion, or where the appeal to unreason strikes some answering chord in the primitive, subhuman depths of our being. In certain fields of activity men have learned to respond to reason and truth pretty consistently. The authors of learned articles do not appeal to the passions of their fellow scientists and technologists. They set forth what, to the best of their knowledge, is the truth about some particular aspect of reality, they use reason to explain the facts they have observed and they support their point of view with arguments that appeal to reason in other people. All this is fairly easy in the fields of physical science and technology. It is much more difficult in the fields of politics and religion and ethics. Here the relevant facts often elude us. As for the meaning of the facts, that of course depends upon the particular system of ideas, in terms of which you choose to interpret them. And these are not the only difficulties that confront the rational truth-seeker. In public and in private life, it often happens that there is simply no time to collect the relevant facts or to weigh their significance. We are forced to act on insufficient evidence and by a light considerably less steady than that of logic. With the best will in the world, we cannot always be completely truthful or consistently rational. All that is in our power is to be as truthful and rational as circumstances permit us to be, and to respond as well as we can to the limited truth and imperfect reasoning offered for our consideration by others.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free," said Jefferson, "it expects what never was and never will be. . . . The people cannot be safe without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe." Across the Atlantic another passionate believer in reason was thinking about the same time, in almost precisely similar terms. Here is what John Stuart Mill wrote of his father, the utilitarian philosopher, James Mill: "So complete was his reliance upon the influence of reason over the minds of mankind, whenever it is allowed to reach them, that he felt as if all would be gained, if the whole population were able to read, and if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word or in writing, and if by the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they had adopted." All is safe, all would be gained! Once more we hear the note of eighteenth-century optimism. Jefferson , it is true, was a realist as well as an optimist. He knew by bitter experience that the freedom of the press can be shamefully abused. "Nothing," he declared, "can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper." And yet, he insisted (and we can only agree with him), "within the pale of truth, the press is a noble institution, equally the friend of science and civil liberty." Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory. In the field of mass communications as in almost every other field of enterprise, technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man. As lately as fifty years ago, every democratic country could boast a great number of small journals and local newspapers. Thousands of country editors expressed thousands of independent opinions. Somewhere or other almost anybody could get almost anything printed. Today the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

In the past most people never got a chance of fully satisfying this appetite. They might long for distractions, but the distractions were not provided. Christmas came but once a year, feasts were "solemn and rare," there were few readers and very little to read, and the nearest approach to a neighborhood movie theater was the parish church, where the performances, though infrequent, were somewhat monotonous. For conditions even remotely comparable to those now prevailing we must return to imperial Rome, where the populace was kept in good humor by frequent, gratuitous doses of many kinds of entertainment - from poetical dramas to gladitorial fights, from recitations of Virgil to all-out boxing, from concerts to military reviews and public executions. But even in Rome there was nothing like the non-stop distraction now provided by newspapers and magazines, by radio, television and the cinema. In Brave New World non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature (the feelies, orgy-porgy, centrifugal bumblepuppy) are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. The other world of religion is different from the other world of entertainment; but they resemble one another in being most decidedly "not of this world." Both are distractions and, if lived in too continuously, both can become, in Marx's phrase, "the opium of the people" and so a threat to freedom. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metephysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it.

In their propaganda today's dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression and rationalization - the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the suppression of facts which they wish to be ignored, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party or the State. As the art and science of manipulation come to be better understood, the dictators of the future will doubtless learn to combine these techniques with the non-stop distractions which, in the West, are now threatening to drown in a sea of irrelevance the rational propaganda essential to the maintenance of individual liberty and the survival of democratic institutions.

— Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley

100 years of your statesmen have felt it's better this way...

My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying

Now that your big eyes have finally opened
Now that you're wondering how must they feel
Meaning them that you've chased across America's movie screens
Now that you're wondering how can it be real
That the ones you've called colorful, noble and proud
In your school propaganda
They starve in their splendor
You've asked for my comment I simply will render

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Now that the longhouses breed superstition
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they're taught to despise their traditions
You forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, then stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country's birth
Of the preachers who lied, how the Bill of Rights failed
How a nation of patriots returned to their earth
And where will it tell of the Liberty Bell
As it rang with a thud Over Kinzua mud
And of brave Uncle Sam in Alaska this year

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Hear how the bargain was made for the West
With her shivering children in zero degrees
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it's better this way
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived
Their blood runs the redder though genes have paled
From the Gran Canyon's caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York
The white nation fattens while others grow lean
Oh the tricked and evicted they know what I mean

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

The past it just crumbled, the future just threatens
Our life blood shut up in your chemical tanks
And now here you come, bill of sale in your hands
And surprise in your eyes that we're lacking in thanks
For the blessings of civilization you've brought us
The lessons you've taught us, the ruin you've wrought us
Oh see what our trust in America's brought us

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Now that the pride of the sires receives charity
Now that we're harmless and safe behind laws
Now that my life's to be known as your "heritage"
Now that even the graves have been robbed
Now that our own chosen way is a novelty
Hands on our hearts we salute you your victory
Choke on your blue white and scarlet hypocrisy
Pitying the blindness that you've never seen
That the eagles of war whose wings lent you glory
They were never no more than carrion crows
Pushed the wrens from their nest, stole their eggs, changed their story
The mockingbird sings it, it's all that he knows
"Ah what can I do?" say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye

Can't you see that their poverty is profiting you?

My country 'tis of thy people you're dying

Derrick Jensen contrasts aboriginal and Western spirituality

Years ago I asked American Indian writer Vine Deloria, author of God is Red; Custer Died for Your Sins; and Red Earth, White Lies, about the difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being.

He said that the indigenous way is about seeing that “everything humans experience has value and instructs us in some aspect of life. Because everything is alive and making choices that determine the future, the world is constantly creating itself, and because every moment brings something new, we need to always try to not classify things too quickly. All the data must be considered, and we need to try to find how the ordinary and the extraordinary come together, as they must, in one coherent, comprehensive, mysterious story line. With the wisdom and time for reflection that old age brings, we may discover unsuspected relationships that make themselves manifest in our consciousness and so come to be understood.

“In this moral universe, all activities, events and entities are related, and so it doesn’t matter what kind of existence an entity enjoys–whether it is human or otter or star or rock–because the responsibility is always there for it to participate in the continuing creation of reality. Life is not a predatory jungle, “red in tooth and claw,” as Westerners like to pretend, but is better understood as a symphony of mutual respect in which each player has a specific part to play. We must be in our proper place and we must play our role at the proper moment. So far as humans are concerned, because we ame last, we are the ‘younger brothers’ of the other life-forms, and therefore have to learn everything from these other creatures. The real interest of old Indians would then be not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality, but rather to find the proper road down which, for the duration of a person’s life, that person is supposed to walk.”

That all made sense to me.

He continued, “I would also say that one of the major differences between Western and indigenous religions is that aboriginal groups have never had any need for a messiah. Not only is there no need, but in fact there really is no place for one in the cosmos.”

“Why is that?”

“If the world is not a vale of tears, there’s no need for salvation. Indians know nothing of a wholly different world–a heaven–compared to which this world is devoid of value. Indian religion is instead concerned with, as anthropologist Robert N. Bellah noted, ‘the maintenance of personal, social, and cosmic harmony and with attaining specific goods–rain, harvest, children, heath–as men have always been.’

“A commonality among all civilized religions is that of transcendence. But what I’m trying to get at is that in the North American Indian tradition individuals do not transcend themselves; they simply learn additional things about the single reality that confronts them.

“I think there are some very important questions we need to ask about religion in the dominant culture: Why do Western European peoples, and by extension before them the Near Eastern peoples, need a messiah? Why is their appraisal of the physical word a negative one? Why do their societies suffer such perennial and continuing crises? Why do they insist on believing that ultimate reality is contained in another, almost unimaginable realm beyond the sense and beyond the span of human life?

“I don’t understand it. Religion as I have experienced it isn’t the recitation of beliefs but a way of helping us to understand our lives. It must, I think, have an intimate connection with the world in which we live, and any religion that promotes other places–heaven and so on–in favour of what we have in the physical world is a delusion, a mere control device to allow us to be manipulated.”

I asked, “What, then, in the Indian perspective, is the ultimate goal of life?”

He said, “Maturity…”

“By which you mean…”

“The ability to reflect on the ordinary things of life and discover both their real meaning and the proper way to understand them when they appear in our lives.

“Now, I know this sounds as abstract as anything ever said by an Western scientist or philosopher, but within the context of Indian experience, it isn’t abstract at all. Maturity in this context is a reflective situation that suggests a lifetime of experience, as a person travels from information to knowledge to wisdom. A person gathers information, and as it accumulates and achieves a sort of critical mass, patterns of interpretation and explanation begin to appear. This is where Western science aborts the process to derive its ‘laws,’ and assumes that the products of its own mind are inherent to the structure of the universe. But American Indians allow the process to continue, because premature analysis gives incomplete understanding. When we reach a very old age, or have the capacity to reflect and meditate on our experiences, or more often have the goal revealed to us in visions, we begin to understand how the intensity of experience, the particularity of individuality, and the rationality of the cycles of nature all relate to each other. That state is maturity, and it seems to produce wisdom.”

We were both silent a moment.

He concluded, “Because Western society concentrates so heavily on information and theory, its product is youth, not maturity. The existence of thousands of plastic surgeons in America attests to the fact that we haven’t crossed the emotional barriers that keep us from understanding and experiencing maturity.”

— Welcome to the Machine by Derrick Jensen