Sunday, April 23, 2023

Chris Hedges on Our Current State of Paralysis

Hedges writes on Substack now, if you haven't been able to find him lately, and his piece today is excellent. 

He starts by pointing out the growing rich-poor divide that is seeing the top earnings increase by almost 90% in the last decease in the states, while the lowest struggle to find an apartment they can afford. The government is doing nothing about poverty, climate, infrastructure, health care, and violence by police or fearful neighbours. He says, 

Democracies are not slain by reactionary buffoons like Donald Trump, who was routinely sued for failing to pay workers and contractors and whose fictional television persona was sold to a gullible electorate, or shallow politicians like Joe Biden, whose political career has been devoted to serving corporate donors. These politicians provide a false comfort of individualizing our crises, as if removing this public figure or censoring that group swill save us. Democracies are slain when a tiny cabal, in our case corporate, seizes control of the economy, culture and the political system, and distorts them to exclusively serve its own interests.

This analysis helps to explain how many corporations have so easily walked us back to pre-New Deal years, stripping away workers' rights, ignoring environmental regulations, focusing on basic facts while eroding the critical thinking of the humanities in public schools and universities, and removing useful health protections in hospitals. We're already not a democracy, as Hedges has said for years, invoking Wolin's inverted totalitarianism. Today he quotes research from professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, 

"Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

Hedges says we're square in the middle of Durkheim's state of anomie. He defines it as "rulelessness," but I've always used the term "normlessness," a time without clear roles or mores to guide the general public, and a time when suicide rates increase from the lack of solid ground beneath our feet. We're discovering that many things we've been taught, like hard work pays off and the people have a say in political decisions, are all lies, which leads us to be able to participate in society "only through sadness."

I feel that. 

Beyond that is only violence:

"These pathologies of death, diseases of despair, are manifested in the plagues that are sweeping across the country--opioid addiction . . . suicide, sexual sadism, hate groups, and mass shootings. . . . Capitalism is antithetical to creating and sustaining social bonds. Its core attributes--relationships that are transactional and temporary, prioritizing self-advancement through manipulating and exploiting others and the insatiable lust for profit--eliminates democratic space. The obliteration of all restraints on capitalism, from organized labor to government oversight and regulation, has left us at the mercy of predatory forces that, by nature, exploit human beings and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. . . . [Trump] is a product . . . of anomie and social decay."

And then he quotes Arendt's words about the the hatred that was necessary to enact the holocaust, 

"What a temptation to flaunt extreme attitudes in the hypocritical twilight of double moral standards, to wear publicly the mask of cruelty if everybody was patently inconsiderate and pretended to be gentle, to parade wickedness in a world, not of wickedness, but meanness!"

His solution is to restore our social body and re-integrated the suffering back into society before it's too late. He's been saying that for years. I'm not sure any of us know how, but at least this piece might confirm our suspicions as we watch it all unfold.  

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