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American Irrationalism
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american_irrationalism_201610305/
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Posted on Oct 30, 2016
By Chris Hedges
The false values of reality TV have been carried over into the current
presidential race. Shown here, Donald Trump on The Apprentice. (NBC)
There is no shortage of signs of impending environmental catastrophe,
including the melting of the polar ice caps and the rise of atmospheric
carbon to above 400 parts per million
(http://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanent
ly-20738 ) . The earths sixth mass extinction
(http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiv
ersity/extinction_crisis/ ) is underway. It is not taking place because of
planetary forces. Homo sapiens is orchestrating it. Americans are at the
same time bankrupting themselves by waging endless and unwinnable wars. We
have allowed our elites to push more than half the U.S. population into
poverty through deindustrialization. We do nothing to halt the waves of
nihilistic violence by enraged citizens who carry out periodic mass
shootings in schools, malls, movie theaters and other public places. The
political and financial elites flaunt their greed and corruption. Donald
Trump appears to pay no federal income taxes. Hillary and Bill Clinton use
their foundation as a tool for legalized bribery. Our largest corporations
have orchestrated a legal tax boycott. The judicial system is a subsidiary
of the corporate state. Militarized police conduct public executions of
unarmed people of color. Our infrastructure, including our schools, roads
and bridges, along with our deindustrialized cities, are in ruins. Decay and
rotphysical and moralare pervasive.
We are blinded to our depressing reality by the avalanche of images
disseminated by mass media. Political, intellectual and cultural discourse
has been replaced with spectacle. Emotionalism and sensationalism are prized
over truth. Highly paid pundits who parrot back the official narrative,
corporate advertisers, inane talk shows, violent or sexually explicit
entertainment and gossip-fueled news have contaminated cultural life.
Reality television, as contrived as every other form of mass
entertainment, has produced a reality presidential candidate.
Mass culture, because it speaks to us in easily digestible clichés and
stereotypes, reinforces ignorance, bigotry and racism. It promotes our
individual and collective self-glorification. It sanctifies nonexistent
national virtues. It takes from us the intellectual and linguistic tools
needed to separate illusion from truth. It is all show business all the
time.
There are hundreds of millions of Americans who know that something is
terribly wrong. A light has gone out. They see this in their own suffering
and hopelessness and the suffering and hopelessness of their neighbors. But
they lack, because of the contamination of our political, cultural and
intellectual discourse, the words and ideas to make sense of what is
happening around them. They are bereft of a vision. Austerity,
globalization, unfettered capitalism, an expansion of the extraction of
fossil fuels, and war are not the prices to be paid for progress and the
advance of civilization. They are part of the savage and deadly exploitation
by corporate capitalism and imperialism. They serve a neoliberal ideology
(http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376 ;) . The elites dare not speak
this truth. It is toxic. They peddle the seductive illusions that saturate
the airwaves. We are left to strike out at shadows. We are led to succumb to
the racism, allure of white supremacy and bigotry that always accompany a
culture in dissolution.
We cannot, for this reason, discount the possibility that Trump will be
elected president. The election outcome will be decided by whatever emotion
Americans feel when they cast their ballots.
Celebrity narratives, manufactured pseudo-drama, sex scandals, natural
disasters, insults and invective, mass shootings and war flash before us in
a constant jumble of images on ubiquitous screens. The sensory assault
obliterates reality. A former congressman who sends a picture
(http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-08-29/anthony-wiener-caught-textin
g-racy-photos-again ) of himself in underwear to a woman is a national news
story. Sober examinations of our economic, foreign, judicial and
environmental policies are dismissed as too complicated and boring. They do
not produce engaging images. The electronic medias sole goal is to attract
viewers and advertising dollars. It has conditioned us to demand a nonstop
vaudeville act.
Because of this mass indoctrination, we have become infected by what Daniel
Boorstin in The Image
(http://www.powells.com/book/image-a-guide-to-pseudo-events-in-america-97806
79741800/1-7 ) : A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America calls social
narcissism. The bottomless narcissism of Trump and the Clintons caters to
this social narcissism. They reflect back to us our desperate longing for,
as well as celebration of, entertainment, celebrity, wealth, power and
self-aggrandizement. It is not only advertising and public relations, as
Boorstin pointed out, that carry out the incessant manufacturing of
illusions that feed social narcissism. Journalists, book publishers,
politicians, athletes, entertainers, positive psychologists, self-help
gurus, the Christian right and talk show hosts all feed the mania for
illusion. They all chant the insane mantra that reality is never an
impediment to what we desire. We can have anything we want if we work hard,
get an education, believe in ourselves, grasp that we are exceptional and
see the impossible as always possible. It is magical thinking. And magical
thinking is the only real commodity the elites have left offer to us. Make
American Great Again. Or American already is great. Take your pick of
idiotic clichés.
We tyrannize and frustrate ourselves by expecting more than the world can
give us or than we can make of the world, Boorstin wrote. We demand that
everyone who talks to us, or writes for us, or takes pictures for us, or
makes merchandise for us, should live in our world of extravagant
expectations. We expect this even of the peoples of foreign countries. We
have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.
We demand them. And we demand that there be always more of them, bigger and
better and more vivid.
The incessant search for instant gratification and the most appealing image,
including the image of ourselves we manufacture for others on social media,
has robbed us of the ability to examine ourselves and our society. It has
extinguished the truth. The terminal decline of the American empire, the
utter inability our elites to manage anything important, the climate crisis,
widespread poverty and despair do not fit with the illusion. So these
realities are blotted from public consciousness. The poor are rendered
invisible. The foreign policy debacles will be fixed with more bombs. Only
the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, along with the medieval Catholic
Church, controlled thought as effectively.
Candidates Trump and Clinton have no plans to halt our slide to oblivion.
They are part of the circus. They, like all of the other elites, profit from
the system that is destroying us. They lack the incentive and probably the
capacity to challenge the structures and assumptions that define corporate
capitalism. They function as high priests. They peddle the illusions. They
laud our ingenuity and strength. They preach the inevitability of human
progress and American exceptionalism. They tell us what we want to hear.
They appeal to our emotions, as does all of mass culture. They do not
acknowledge reality. That would spoil the show.
We vote for slogans, manufactured personalities, perceived sincerity,
personal attractiveness and the crafted personal narratives peddled by
candidates. Office seekers create the illusion of intimacy established
between celebrities and their audiences. We see ourselves in them; admirers
of the winner Trump see themselves as becoming him. No politician succeeds
without such artifice. Todays politics is just one more product of a
diseased culture. Our political leaders are much like the celebrities who,
in Boorstins words, are receptacles into which we pour our own
purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying
mirror.
The incoherent absurdities mouthed for our amusement induce a state of
permanent amnesia. Life is lived in an eternal present. How we got here,
where we came from, what shaped us as a society, in short the continuum of
history that gives us an identity, are eradicated.
The quest for identity through mass culture is self-defeating. We can never
achieve what these illusions tell us we can achieve. We can never be who we
want to be. It is a ceaseless chase from one chimera to the next. And this
is why at the end we fall into despair and rage. It is why huge parts of the
country no longer hold genuine political ideas. It is why people vote
according to how they feel. It is why hatred and fear are a potent political
platform. It is why we are sleepwalking into oblivion.
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