America: Land of Make-Believe
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
If what happens in courtrooms across the country to poor people of color is
justice, what is happening in the Senate is a trial. If the blood-drenched
debacles and endless quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the war
on terror, our military is the greatest on earth. If the wholesale
government surveillance of the public, the revoking of due process and
having the worlds largest prison population are liberty, we are the land of
the free. If the president, an inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the
leader of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and our enemies hate
us for our values. If Jesus came to make us rich, bless the annihilation of
Muslims by our war machine and condemn homosexuality and abortion, we are a
Christian nation. If formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a peace
plan, we are an honest international mediator. If a meritocracy means that
three American men have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S.
population, we are the land of opportunity. If the torture of kidnapped
victims in black sites and the ripping of children from their parents arms
and their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses, along with the gunning
down of unarmed citizens by militarized police in the streets of our urban
communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar of human rights.
The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so disconnected from reality
that it has induced collective schizophrenia. America, as it is discussed in
public forums by politicians, academics and the media, is a fantasy, a
Disneyfied world of make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat
into illusions. The longer we fail to name and confront our physical and
moral decay, the more demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become
empowered. Those who acknowledge the truthbeginning with the stark fact
that we are no longer a democracywander like ghosts around the edges of
society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for hope works as an
anesthetic. The hope that Donald Trump would moderate his extremism once he
was in office, the hope that the adults in the room would manage the White
House, the hope that the Mueller report would see Trump disgraced, impeached
and removed from office, the hope that Trumps December 2019 impeachment
would lead to his Senate conviction and ouster, the hope that he will be
defeated at the polls in November are psychological exits from the
crisisthe collapse of democratic institutions, including the press, and the
corporate corruption of laws, electoral politics and norms that once made
our imperfect democracy possible.
The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the death spasms of all
civilizations. We are in the terminal stage. We no longer know who we are,
what we have become or how those on the outside see us. It is easier, in the
short term, to retreat inward, to celebrate nonexistent virtues and
strengths and wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But in the end,
this retreat, peddled by the hope industry, guarantees not only despotism
but, given the climate emergency, extinction.
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The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth
is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a
lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real worldand
the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this
endis being destroyed, Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.
This destruction, which cuts across the political divide, leads us to place
our faith in systems, including the electoral process, that are burlesque.
It diverts our energy toward useless debates and sterile political activity.
It calls on us to place our faith for the survival of the human species in
ruling elites who will do nothing to halt the ecocide. It sees us accept
facile explanations for our predicament, whether they involve blaming the
Russians for the election of Trump or blaming undocumented workers for our
economic decline. We live in a culture awash in lies, the most dangerous
being those we tell ourselves.
Lies are emotionally comforting in times of distress, even when we know they
are lies. The worse things get, the more we long to hear the lies. But
cultures that can no longer face reality, that cannot distinguish between
falsehood and truth, retreat into what Sigmund Freud called screen
memories, the merger of fact and fiction. This merger destroys the
mechanisms for puncturing self-delusion. Intellectuals, artists and
dissidents who attempt to address reality and warn about the self-delusion
are ridiculed, silenced and demonized. There are, as Freud noted in
Civilizations and Its Discontents, distressed societies whose difficulties
will not yield at any attempt at reform. But this is too harsh a truth for
most people, especially Americans, to accept.
America, founded on the evils of slavery, genocide and the violent
exploitation of the working class, is a country defined by historical
amnesia. The popular historical narrative is a celebration of the fictional
virtues of white supremacy. The relentless optimism and reveling in supposed
national virtues obscure truth. Nuance, complexity and moral ambiguity,
along with accepting responsibility for the holocausts and genocides carried
out by slaveholders, white settlers and capitalists, have never fit with
Americas triumphalism. The illusions of eternal strength and health, and
of the essential goodness of peoplethey were the illusions of a nation, the
lies of generations of frontier mothers, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote.
In decay, however, these illusions are fatal. Powerful nations have the
luxury of imbibing myth, even if decisions and policies based on the myth
inflict damage and widespread suffering. But nations whose foundations are
rotting have little latitude. The miscalculations they make, based on
fantasy, accelerate their mortality.
Joseph Roth was one of the few writers in the 1930s in Germany who
understood the consequences of the rise of fascism. In his essay The
Auto-da-Fé of the Mind, which addressed the first mass burning of books by
the Nazis, he counseled his fellow Jewish writers to accept that they had
been vanquished: Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the
banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated
warrior: Let us concede our defeat.
Roth knew that the peddling of false hopes in a time of radical evil was
immoral. He had no illusions about his own growing irrelevance. He was
blacklisted in the German press, unable to publish his books in Germany and
his native Austria and thrust into dire poverty and often despair. He was
acutely aware of how most people, even his fellow Jews, found it easier to
blind themselves to radical evil, if only to survive, rather than name and
defy malignant authority and risk annihilation.
What use are my words, Roth asked, against the guns, the loudspeakers,
the murderers, the deranged ministers, the stupid interviewers and
journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow,
via the drums of Nuremberg?
It will become clear to you now that we are heading for a great
catastrophe, Roth, after going into self-exile in France in 1933, wrote to
the author Stefan Zweig about the ascendancy of the Nazis. The barbarians
have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.
But Roth also knew that resistance was a moral if not a practical obligation
in times of radical evil. Defeat might be certain, but dignity and a
determination to live in truth demanded a response. We are required to bear
witness, even if a self-deluded population does not want to hear, even if
that truth makes certain our own marginalization and perhaps obliteration.
One must write, even when one realizes the printed word can no longer
improve anything, Roth explained.
This battle against collective self-delusion is a battle I fear we will not
win. American society is fatally wounded. Its moral and physical corruption
is beyond repair.
Hope, real hope, names the bitter reality before us. But it refuses to
succumb, despite the bleakness, to despair. It cries out to an indifferent
universe with every act carried out to name, cripple and destroy corporate
power. It mocks certain defeat. Whether we can succeed or not is immaterial.
We cannot always choose how we will live. But we can choose how we will die.
Victory is about holding on to our moral autonomy. Victory is about
demanding, no matter the cost, justice. Victory is speaking the truths the
ruling elites seek to silence. A life like this is worth living. And in
times of radical evil these livesironic points of light, as W.H. Auden
wroteimpart not only hope but the power of the sacred.
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a
New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree
program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers
Chris Hedges
