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by
Chris Hedges
Read between
June 26 - July 6, 2016
Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic. Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully actualized, never fully real in a celebrity culture.
The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self in Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was authenticity, then in postmod ernism it is visibility.
Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.
the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality.
Celebrities humanize commercial commodities. They present the familiar and comforting face of the corporate state.
#celebrities
Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.
As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
Goody had the essential skill required of all who agree to expose their lives and selves to constant surveillance: She appeared to lack any degree of self-consciousness.
This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance. Intellectual or philosophical ideas require too much effort and work to absorb. Classical theater, newspapers, and books are pushed to the margins of cultural life, remnants of a bygone literate age.
Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate—a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book.
The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present.
When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant.
Reporters, especially those on television, no longer ask whether the message is true but rather whether the pseudo-event worked or did not work as political theater. Pseudo-events are judged on how effectively we have been manipulated by illusion.
truth
The advances of technology and science, rather than obliterating the world of myth, have enhanced its power to deceive.
To confront these illusions, to puncture their mendacity by exposing the callousness and cruelty of the corporate state, signals a loss of faith. It is to become an apostate.
The new pornography is left-wing; and the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too. —ANDREA DWORKIN, Pornography: Men Possessing Women
worldwide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the ever-expanding e-sex world, topped $97 billion in 2006. That is more than the revenues of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflix, and EarthLink combined.
Porn destroys intimacy. I can always tell if a man is a porn addict. They’re shut down. They can’t look me in the eyes. They can’t be intimate.”
how she would describe the producers and directors of the porn industry, she answers curtly: “Pimps.” The porn stars make anywhere from $1,500 to $3,000 an hour as prostitutes. Roldan would, along with other porn actresses, be flown into a city, including New York, and stay at a hotel for a week. They would meet clients in their hotel room.
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism.
Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.
“The more society loses touch with reality, especially in relationships, the more people do not know how it is supposed to be, how to react with other people, the more they turn to porn,” she says. “People look at this fantasy and believe it should be their reality. They retreat further and further into their illusion because porn can never be real. It does not work in real life. Porn is a sickness.”
Pornography and the commercial mainstream have fused. The publicity photo for the porn production company Wicked could be lifted from a Victoria’s Secret catalog. The lacy brassieres and thongs, candelabras, stilettos, windswept hair, strings of pearls, and arched backs are staples of mass culture.
Men die, but the plutocracy is immortal; and it is necessary that fresh generations should be trained to its service. —SINCLAIR LEWIS
also with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and, of course, the elitist, thwarts universal understanding.
If we do not grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression.
“Universities, in general, especially following the events of 9/11, were under assault by Christian nationalists, reactionary neoconservatives, and market fundamentalists for allegedly representing the weak link in the war on terrorism.
We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it.
U.C. adores the slogan ‘Excellence Through Diversity,’ but it doesn’t mention multiculturalism’s silent partner—the fragmentation of student society into little markets, segmenting the powerful sea of students into diverse but disarmed droplets.
Berkeley negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for $500 million. BP gets access to the university’s researchers and technological capacity, built by decades of public investment, to investigate biofuels at a new Energy Biosciences Institute. BP can shut down another research center and move into a publicly subsidized one. BP will receive intellectual property rights, which it can use for profit, on scientific breakthroughs expected to come out of the joint project.
Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.
“In a corporatist society there is no serious need for traditional censorship or burning,” Saul writes, “although there are regular cases. It is as if our language itself is responsible for our inability to identify and act upon reality.”
At the elite institution, those on the inside are told they are there because they are better than others. Most believe it. They see their money and their access to power as a natural extension of their talents and abilities, rather than the result of a system that favors the privileged.
To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological, and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals.
Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey.
as universities become glorified vocational schools for the corporations, they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve.
The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative.
Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are in some ways ill. Their attitudes, like those of recalcitrant Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, need correction. Once we adopt a positive mind, positive things will always happen. This belief, like all the other illusions peddled in the culture, encourages people to flee from reality when reality is frightening or depressing.
This flight into self-delusion is no more helpful in solving real problems than alchemy. But it is very effective in keeping people from questioning the structures around them that are responsible for their misery. Positive Psychology gives an academic patina to fantasy.
The government, stripped of any real sovereignty, provides little more than technical expertise for elites and corporations that lack moral restraints and a concept of the common good.
At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real. Our way of life is over.
Speculators in the seventeenth century were hanged. Today they receive billions in taxpayer dollars and huge bonuses.
Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current, and future military operations. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government.
The attempt to create a health-care plan that also conciliates the corporations that profit from the misery and illnesses of tens of millions of Americans is naïve, at best, and probably disingenuous.
Anything that can be put on software—from finance to architecture to engineering—can and is being outsourced to workers in countries such as India or China, who accept pay that is a fraction of their Western counterparts, and without benefits. And both the Republican and Democratic parties, beholden to corporations for money and power, have allowed this to happen.
The economist Charlotte Twight calls this vast corporate system of spectacle and diversion, in which we get to vote on American Idol or be elevated to celebrity status through reality television programs, “participatory fascism.”
The most egregious lie is the pretense that these people function as reporters, that they actually report on our behalf. It is not one or two reporters or television hosts who are corrupt. The media institutions are corrupt.
The Democratic Party refused to impeach Bush and Cheney. It allows the government to spy on us without warrants or cause. It funnels billions in taxpayer dollars to investment firms that committed fraud. And it tells us it cares about the protection of our civil rights and democracy. It is a form of collective abuse.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized this danger. He sent a message to Congress on April 29, 1938, titled “Recommendations to the Congress to Curb Monopolies and the Concentration of Economic Power.” In it he wrote: the first truth is that the liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business
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Individualism is touted as the core value of American culture, and yet most of us meekly submit, as we are supposed to, to the tyranny of the corporate state.
