Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 2: Resistance pages 861-862

The endpoint of civilization is assembly-line mass murder. The assembly-line mass murder of the Nazi Holocaust is production stripped of the veneer of economics. It is the very essence of production. It took the living and converted them to the dead. That's what this culture does. It was efficient, it was calculable, it was predictable, and it was controlled through nonhuman technologies. And it was also, as well as being grossly immoral, incredibly stupid. Even from the perspective of pure acquisitiveness and land-hunger, it was self-defeating. As German troops froze and starved on the Eastern Front, valuable railroad cars were used instead to move cargos that fed crematoria. The Nazis performed economic analyses showing that feeding slaves just a bit more increased their productivity more than enough to offset the extra cost of feed. Yet they were starved. Similarly, slaughtering Russians was foolish. Many Ukrainians and Russians greeted the Wehrmacht with kisses, open arms, and flowers, happy to be out from under the tyranny of Stalinism. The Germans quickly began murdering noncombatants to make room for the Germans who would move in after the war, or because they were told to, or because Russians were inferior, or for any of the reasons given for these slaughters since the beginning of civilization's wars of extermination. And so Russian noncombatants fought back. They blew up trains, they killed German officers, they picked off individual soldiers. They hurt the Germans. For all their vaunted rationality, the Germans weren't so very rational, were they?

Of course we're different now. We have rational reasons for the killings. There's no silly talk of master races and lebensraum. Instead, the economy is run along strictly rationalist lines. If something makes money, we do it, and if it doesn't, we don't (ignore for a moment that to divorce economics from morals and humanity is as evil as it is to do the same for science). But the United States economy costs at least five times as much as it's worth. Total annual U.S. corporate profits are about $500 billion, while the direct costs of the activities from which these profits derive are more than $2.5 trillion. These include $51 billion in direct subsidies and $53 billion in tax breaks, $274.7 billion lost because of deaths from workplace cancer, $225.9 billion lost because of the health costs of stationary source air pollution, and so on. This is to speak only of calculable costs, since other values--such as a living planet--do not, because they're not calculable, exist. The fact remains, however, that it is manifestly stupid to destroy your landbase, regardless of the abstract financial reward or esteem you may gain. Yet this culture spends more to build and maintain commercial fishing vessels than the fiscal value of the fish caught. The same is true for the destruction of forests. In the United States the Forest Service loses in a not atypical year $400 million dollars [sic] on its timber sale program, or about seven hundred and seventy-nine dollars per acre deforested.

Philip K. Dick, "How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick page 264

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors that emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds! And perhaps someday even real hippos and lions. Consternation. The park being cunningly transformed from the unreal to the real, by sinister forces. For instance, suppose the Matterhorn turned into a genuine snow-covered mountain? What if the entire place, by a miracle of God's power and wisdom, was changed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, into something incorruptible? They would have to close down.

Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.) pages 209-210

[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:

One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.

To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.

Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish page 594 (in omnibus edition)

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in a moment of reasoned lucidity which is almost unique among is current tally of five million, nine hundred and seventy-three thousand, five hundred and nine pages, says of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation products that "it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all.

"In other words--and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded--their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws."

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization page 395

John Muir is famously noted as saying, "God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools." The thing is, a fool couldn't cut down trees by him or herself. I used to think that we were fighting an incredibly difficult battle in part because it takes a thousand years of living to make an ancient tree, while any fool can come along with a chainsaw and cut it down in an hour or two. I've since realized that's all wrong. The truth is that thriving on a living planet is easy--the whole forest, for example, conspires to grow that tree and every other, and we don't have to do anything special except leave it alone--while cutting down a tree is actually a very difficult process involving the entire global economy. I wouldn't care how many ancient redwoods Charles Hurwitz [CEO of MAXXAM] cut down, if he did it all by himself, scratching pathetically with bloodied nails at bark, gnawing with bloody teeth at heartwood, sometimes picking up rocks to make stone axes. To cut down a big tree you need the entire mining infrastructure for the metals necessary for chainsaws (or a hundred years ago, whipsaws); the entire oil infrastructure for gas to run the chainsaws, and for trucks to transport the dead trees to market where they will be sold and shipped to some distant place (once Charles had downed the tree by himself, I would wish him luck transporting it without the help of the global economy); and so on. It takes a whole lot of fools to cut down a tree, and if we break the infrastructural chain at any point, they won't be able to do it.

Derrick Jensen, Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization pages 284-285

The checkout guy hates his job. Or at least he would if he allowed himself to feel in his body the slipping away of his own precious lifetime. Perhaps, though, it's more accurate to say "his own no-longer-precious lifetime," since if it were really precious he would not--could not--sell it so cheaply, nor even sell it for money at all. But he has been trained never to think of that, and especially to never feel it. If he thought of that--if he felt himself spending the majority of his life doing things he did not want to do--how would he then act? Who would he then be? What would he then do? How would he survive in this awful, unsurvivable system we call civilization? How, too, would we all respond if we fully awoke to the effects of the drip, drip, drip of hour after hour, day after day, year after year sold to jobs we do not love (jobs that are probably destroying our landbase to boot), and how would we respond, too, if we paid attention to the effects of other incessant drippings such as airbrushed photo after airbrushed photo on something so intimate as what--not whom, never whom--we find attractive?

...

A high school student bags the groceries. She's been through the mill. Twelve years of it, not counting her home life, twelve years of sitting in rows wishing she were somewhere else, wishing she were free, wishing it was later in the day, later in the year, later in her life when at long last her time--her life--would be her own. Moment after moment she wishes this. She wishes it day after day, year after year, until--and this was the point all along--she ceases anymore to wish at all (except to wish her body looked like those in the magazines, and to wish she had more money to buy things she hopes will for at least that one sparkling moment of purchase take away the ache she never lets herself feel), until she has become subservient, docile, domestic. Until her will--what's that?--has been broken. Until rebellion against the system comes to consist of yet more purchasing--don't you love those ads conflating alcohol consumption (purchased, of course, from major corporations) and rebelliousness?--or of nothing at all, until rebellion, like will, simply ceases to exist. Until the last vestiges of the wildness and freedom that are her birthright--as they are the birthright of every animal, plant, rock, river, piece of ground, breath of wind--have been worn or torn away.

Free will at this point becomes almost meaningless, because by now victims participate of their own free will--having long since lost touch with what free will might be. Indeed, they can be said to no longer have any meaningful will at all. Their will has been broken. Of course. That's the point. Now, they are workers. They are productive members of this great and benevolent structure of civilization that brings good to all it touches. They are happy, even if this happiness requires routine chemical assistance. There is no longer any need for force, because the people--or more precisely those who were once people--have been fully metabolized into the system, have become self-regulating, self-policing.

Welcome to the end of the world.

Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? pages 89-90

It was during the decade of the 1980s that corporate ties to the punishment system became more extensive and entrenched than ever before. But throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of profit. For example, they have served as valuable subjects in medical research...

During the post-World War II period, for example, medical experimentation on captive populations helped to hasten the development of the pharmaceutical industry...

By the time the experimentation program was shut down in 1974 and new federal regulations prohibited the use of prisoners as subjects for academic and corporate research, numerous cosmetics and skin creams had already been tested. Some of them had caused great harm to these subjects and could not be marketed in their original form. Johnson and Johnson, Ortho Pharmaceutical, and Dow Chemical are only a few of the corporations that reaped great material benefits from these experiments.