“Each and everyone of us is both victim and thief whenever we identify not with our own bodies, not with our own humanity, not with our animality (we so often forget that we are animals, that we are primates), not with the landbases that support us, but rather with the very system that exploits us, that is killing us. To lose one’s identity is to say, I am not a human whose body is rotten with the wastes of the industrial system, and whose mind is similarly polluted. I am not a human who loves this person and does not love that person, who has gifts and desires and insecurities and strengths and weaknesses all my own, but rather I am my job. I am a writer. I am an engineer. I am a scientist. I am an American. More simply still, I am my financial transactions. I am bits and bytes on hard drives all over the world. I am both simplified and fragmented. I am someone who lives in the out ring of the Panopticon, hoping and praying that I do not do anything to attract the attention of the all-seeing eye at the center, the all-seeing eye on the back of the dollar bill—the dollar bill with which I have come to identify, the dollar bill that will almost undoubtedly soon have RFID chips in it. I am someone who wants to get through the day—without unduly attracting the attention of those who have the power to punish me. This is how it is in school. This is how it is on the job. This is how it is in the culture at large. This is how it is and must be in the outer ring of the Panopticon.”
Derrick Jensen
