Hedges on American Psychosis

 Chris Hedges just put out a short video about American Psychosis, in which he explains,

We have blissfully checked out. Most people have no concept of how fragile their environment is. . . .  There's an emotional incapacity to understand collapse, even when it's facing you. I have covered, as a foreign correspondent, totalitarian cultures, so I know how totalitarian systems work. I know the dark emotions they evoke.  I know the mechanisms they use to shut down dissent. And, when I came back, it was utterly apparent that the country ha gone collectively insane in a very frightening way. . . . 

The critique will be that you're such a pessimist, that you're such a cynic, that you're not an optimist. Optimism becomes a kind of disease. It's what created the financial meltdown where you have this kind of cheerful optimism in the face of utter catastrophe, and you plow forward based on an optimism that is no longer rooted in reality. If hope becomes something you express through illusion, then it's not hope; it's fantasy. 

The cult of the self is in Biblical terms a form of idolatry. Everything is about you. Whether it's the worship of power or money, it all goes back to the self. It all goes back to creating little monuments to yourself, all investment into a particular goal of self-aggrandizement is a kind of pathetic attempt at self-exaltation, in a kind of maybe even subconscious way, of immortality. . . . 

Civilizations always decay. Their cities go first. We've already done that retreat into illusion. The danger is that this time when we go down, the whole planet's going to go with us. The corporate state has made a war against critical thinking, and in particular the humanities. . . . It creates a very frightening historical amnesia . . . so that people interpret their problems as personal problems rather than political or social problems . . . When you don't understand what's going on . . . the lunatic fringe, which is often laughed at, suddenly seizes power. . . . 

Unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force, as Karl Marx understood. It exploits everything. Everything becomes a commodity . . . and that's why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis. . . . It's insane when societies reach the kind of end stage, the language they use to describe their own economic and political and social and cultural reality. There's no resemblance to that reality, which is where we are. The language of free-market laissez-faire capitalism is what they feed business students and the wider public, but it is an ideology that bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality. . . . 

We live in a kind of bizarre species of corporate socialism, so in the end process of decayed states, you have forces in essence cannibalizing the state itself, which is where we are. A poor person of colour on the streets of Camden, New Jersey are worth nothing to the state. Put them behind bars, and they're worth $40-50,000 a year to prison contractors and food service companies and phone card companies. 

Totalitarian societies seek to funnel all intellectual and emotional energy into spectacle, into the Super Bowl, into celebrity saga. That's why the Nazi Party made sure every single household got a free radio. . . . It's a great kind of pacifier. . . . It's infected everything including spirituality. . . . The whole point of commitment . . . goes back to values, which are largely an anathema to the consumer society. Those are our values that are rooted in self-sacrifice. It's about giving. It's about self-effacement. It's about understanding that a life of fulfillment comes through service, not through the attainment and acquisition of money, wealth, and things. I think that that wisdom, which crosses all religious traditions, is real. I mean creating community brings with it a kind of anxiety and a kind of responsibility. The consumer society plays very well on that, magnifies that anxiety to push people into behaviour which is not only destructive to the community but deeply self-destructive. 

I saw how lonely acts of defiance to totalitarian regimes, which at the moment were considered futile, kept alive another narrative, ironic points of light. That's what acts of conscience, acts of rebellion do. It appears often at the moment that it's meaningless, but when you stand up to decayed systems of power, systems of evil, and you speak a truth, even people within those systems hear your voice. That's why the state is pushing through one draconian law after another. . . . they know what's coming. I've covered uprisings all over the world. You know when the tinder is there. . . . 

One has to begin to make that decision whether they want a life that means something or whether they want to leap from one hedonistic high to another. You can't talk about hope if you can't see reality, and reality is pretty bleak. But that's the starting point.