We’re clearly heading into a period of prolonged emergency, although the crisis will vary between chronic and acute over time. That increases the pro… - Derrick Jensen

One of the theses of A Language Older Than Words is that we have an entire culture suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder. We're incapable of forming relationships on both personal and social levels. If you've been traumatized, you come to believe that you've got to control your surroundings. You come to believe that all relationships are based on power, based on atomized individuals acting selfishly, as our economics would have us believe. Our culture has a fundamental death urge, and unless it's stopped it's going to kill everything on the planet.

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

Perception is of course intimately tied to preconception. I have, as is true for each of us, a pair of cultural eyeglasses that will determine to greater or lesser degree what will be in focus, what will be a blur, what gives me a headache, and what I cannot see. I was raised a Christian — the mythology resides deep in my bones — and I know the story of Jesus nearly as well as I know my own. Until my late teens I couldn’t see some of the darker acts perpetrated in the name of Christ. I still feel a twinge each time I say, “I am not a Christian,” a slight apprehension that I may have gone too far. Sometimes I look up, a small part of my upbringing still telling me that my blasphemy will call forth a bolt of lightning from the sky.