An Interview with Derrick Jensen
On Being Trapped by the Magnificent Bribe
As part of our goal to grow our YouTube channel, we are releasing the video versions of our interviews. We’re excited to share with you this interview we conducted with Derrick Jensen in the summer of 2020, which you may have already listened to in podcast-form.
This was at the very, very beginning of Death in The Garden, when we didn’t even know that this project was going to be anything other than a project to promote regenerative agriculture. This interview was pivotal in helping us realize that we wanted to go deeper into a civilizational/anthropological analysis while discussing the topic of ecocide and stewarding a better world.
In this interview, Jensen helps break down plant intelligence, nonhuman intelligence, the pernicious problem of authoritarian technics, and the ways in which humanity as a global culture has become entrapped by the “magnificent bribe” as Lewis Mumford described it. We talk about the moral complexity of living in a world that requires us to kill other creatures to survive, and the fundamental predator/prey relationship that humans are failing to uphold. We discuss the insanity of saving civilization instead of saving the world, and what makes it so hard for us to conceptualize living without the comforts civilization offers us. We talk about the interconnectedness of supply chains, the global economy, and how we’ve been entangled in the system rather than feeling embedded in a life-giving planet. We talk about the fundamental problem of industrialism regardless of economic structure, and how even a form egalitarian communism cannot be an antidote to the problems created by industrialism. We also talk about the way that civilizations double-down in the face of collapse, rather than willingly simplifying the civilizational structure.
We’re trying to grow our YouTube channel as way to fund this project, so views, likes, and subscribes are free ways that will really help us reach our goals. If you can spare a moment to like and subscribe, it would help us a lot! We are so, so close to our goal of monetization, so thank you to everyone who has already subscribed.
Thank you to our paid subscribers for your continued support and for helping us keep this project going. We’re so grateful. The momentum is building, and we can’t wait to be able to share more with you all.