GPT

You're referencing Derrick Jensen, aren't you? This is the kind of sharp, unsettling question he poses—the kind that cuts through the fog of justification and avoidance that keeps the machinery of our world running smoothly. The silence surrounding the victims of our way of life—whether human or nonhuman—is both a premise and a necessity for the system to function. The moment we truly see them, not as abstractions or statistics but as beings with inner worlds as rich as our own, the moral weight becomes unbearable.

The silence isn’t just about ignorance; it’s about insulation. It allows us to move through the world without feeling the daily horror of what is done in our name, for our comfort, for the sake of “progress.”

If that silence were broken—if every cow in a factory farm, every person displaced by economic policies, every prisoner locked away and forgotten, every tree felled were given a name, a voice, a history—our discourse would be unrecognizable. Because then, every choice would be made in the full knowledge of its cost. And no system that requires such vast suffering to sustain itself could survive the weight of that awareness.