By: Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York
Times, is the author of severalbooks including the best sellers War Is
a Force That Gives Us Meaning and Empire of Illusion: The End of
Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. .
The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that
grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends
its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd.
It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the
walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark
voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and
betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is
Michael Jackson, Britney Spears or John Edwards, enthralls the country
… despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of
its financial class.
The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from
honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed
each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this
antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors
for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions
of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of
the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman
expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the
screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience,
nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or
bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world
of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and
attention.
Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American
character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We
believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we
have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those
who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be
belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like
Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous
human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and
the soup kitchens.
It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult
has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm,
grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a
penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for
remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the
portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for
new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all
these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations.
It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief
that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for
individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the
nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over
truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when
questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by
selling worthless toxic assets to investors.
We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire.
We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us,
including our friends, to make money, to be happy and to become
famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved, they become their own
justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant.
It is this perverted ethic that gave us investment houses like Goldman
Sachs … that willfully trashed the global economy and stole money from
tens of millions of small shareholders who had bought stock in these
corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these
corporations, like the winners on a reality television program who
lied and manipulated others to succeed, walked away with hundreds of
millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation. The ethic of Wall
Street is the ethic of celebrity. It is fused into one bizarre,
perverted belief system and it has banished the possibility of the
country returning to a reality-based world or avoiding internal
collapse. A society that cannot distinguish reality from illusion dies.
The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture, however,
are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The
ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending
credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone.
The jobs we are shedding are not coming back, as the White House
economist Lawrence Summers tacitly acknowledges when he talks of a
“jobless recovery.” The belief that democracy lies in the choice
between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal
wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no
longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are
rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as
unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under
the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of
prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.
America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and
stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds
a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in
2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day
– and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people
this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious
war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to
dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its
infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to
bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to
parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered
trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans
in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called
“near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children –
depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we
continue to be a country consumed by happy talk and happy thoughts. We
continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal
success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment
to desire.
When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of
permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the
illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being
foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children.
We scream and yell for a savior, someone who promises us revenge,
moral renewal and new glory. It is not a new story. *A furious and
sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared
intellectually, emotionally and psychologically for collapse, will
sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans and will usher
America into a new dark age.* It was the economic collapse in
Yugoslavia that gave us Slobodan Milosevic. It was the Weimar Republic
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic> that vomited up Adolf
Hitler. And it was the breakdown in Tsarist Russia that opened the
door for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits,
from Christian demagogues to *loudmouth talk show hosts*, whom we
naïvely dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of
revenge and moral renewal. And as in all totalitarian societies, those
who do not pay fealty to the illusions imposed by the state become the
outcasts, the persecuted.
The decline of American empire began long before the current economic
meltdown or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It began before the
first Gulf War or Ronald Reagan. *It began when we shifted, in the
words of Harvard historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of
production” to an “empire of consumption.”* By the end of the Vietnam
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War> War, when the costs of the
war ate away at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and domestic oil
production began its steady, inexorable decline, we saw our country
transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily
consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as
well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force,
especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap
oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real
growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous
enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted
ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have
dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17th century
these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government
and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies.
As the pressure mounts, as the despair and desperation reach into
larger and larger segments of the populace, the mechanisms of
corporate and government control are being bolstered to prevent civil
unrest and instability. *The emergence of the corporate state always
means the emergence of the security state. This is why the Bush White
House pushed through the Patriot Act (and its renewal), the suspension
of habeas corpus, the practice of “extraordinary rendition,”
warrantless wiretapping on American citizens and the refusal to ensure
free and fair elections with verifiable ballot-counting. The motive
behind these measures is not to fight terrorism or to bolster national
security. It is to seize and maintain internal control. It is about
controlling us.*
And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, *mass culture continues to
assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if
we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in
miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are
truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be
harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether
peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian
preachers, is magical thinking. It turns worthless mortgages and debt
into wealth. It turns the destruction of our manufacturing base into
an opportunity for growth. It turns alienation and anxiety into a
cheerful conformity. It turns a nation that wages illegal wars and
administers offshore penal colonies where it openly practices torture
into the greatest democracy on earth. And it keeps us from fighting back.*
Resistance movements will have to look now at the long night of
slavery, the decades of oppression in the Soviet Union and the curse
of fascism for models. The goal will no longer be the possibility of
reforming the system but of protecting truth, civility and culture
from mass contamination. It will require the kind of schizophrenic
lifestyle that characterizes all totalitarian societies. Our private
and public demeanors will often have to stand in stark contrast. Acts
of defiance will often be subtle and nuanced. They will be carried out
not for short term gain but the assertion of our integrity. Rebellion
will have an ultimate if not easily definable purpose. *The more we
retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve
out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood
of illusions disseminated by mass culture an**d the more we will
retain sanity in an insane world. The goal will become the ability to
endure….*.