Truthdig: Expert Reporting, Current News, Provocative Columnists
September 04, 2017
Diseases of Despair
Chris Hedges
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best
selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and
ordained Presbyterian minister. He has written 11 books,
Chris Hedges
The opioid crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide,
especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession
with gambling, the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in
tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd
promises of the Christian right to the belief that reality is never an
impediment to our desires, are the pathologies of a diseased culture. They
have risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status,
self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are
expressions of acute desperation and morbidity.
A loss of income causes more than financial distress. It severs, as the
sociologist Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social bonds that give us
meaning. A decline in status and power, an inability to advance, a lack of
education and health care and a loss of hope are crippling forms of
humiliation. This humiliation fuels loneliness, frustration, anger and
feelings of worthlessness. In short, when you are marginalized and rejected
by society, life often has little meaning.
When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding
ourselves of it
, Durkheim wrote. There is a collective mood, as there
is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness.
For individuals
are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without
their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.
White men, more easily seduced by the myth of the American dream than people
of color who understand how the capitalist system is rigged against them,
often suffer feelings of failure and betrayal, in many cases when they are
in their middle years. They expect, because of notions of white supremacy
and capitalist platitudes about hard work leading to advancement, to be
ascendant. They believe in success. When the American dream becomes a
nightmare they are vulnerable to psychological collapse. This collapse, more
than any political agenda, propelled Donald Trump into power. Trump embodies
the decayed soul of America. He, like many of those who support him, has a
childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the gods. This impossibility, as
the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to a dark
alternative: destroying like the gods.
In Hitler and the Germans the political philosopher Eric Voegelin
dismissed the myth that Hitleran uneducated mediocrity whose only strength
was an ability to exploit political opportunitiesmesmerized and seduced the
German people. The Germans, he wrote, voted for Hitler and the grotesque,
marginal figures surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a
diseased society, one beset by economic collapse, hopelessness and violence.
This sickness found its expression in the Nazis, as it has found its
expression in the United States in Trump.
Hannah Arendt said the rise of radical evil is caused by collective
thoughtlessness. Desperate to escape from the prison of a failed society,
willing to do anything and abuse anyone to advance, those who feel trapped
see the people around them as objects to be exploited for self-advancement.
This exploitation mirrors that carried out by corrupt ruling elites. Turning
people into objects to be used to achieve wealth, power or sexual
gratification is the core practice espoused by popular culture, from reality
television to casino capitalism. Trump personifies this practice.
Plato wrote that the moral character of a society is determined by its
members. When the society abandons the common good it unleashes amoral
lustsviolence, greed and sexual exploitationand fosters magical thinking.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus called those who severed themselves from
the moral and reality-based universe idiotes. When these idiotes, whose
worldview is often the product of relentless indoctrination, form a majority
or a powerful minority, the demagogue rises from the morass.
The demagogue is the public face of collective stupidity. Voegelin defined
stupidity as a loss of reality. This loss of reality meant people could
not rightly orient his [or her] action in the world, in which he [or she]
lives. The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or a social
mutation. The demagogue expresses the societys demented zeitgeist. This was
true in Nazi Germany. It is true in the United States.
The fool in Hebrew, the nabal, who because of his folly, nebala, creates
disorder in the society, is the man who is not a believer, in the Israelite
terms of revelation, Voegelin wrote. The amathes, the irrationally
ignorant man, is for Plato the man who just does not have the authority of
reason or who cannot bow to it. The stultus for Thomas [Aquinas] is the
fool, in the same sense as the amathia of Plato and the nebala of the
Israelite prophets. This stultus now has suffered loss of reality and acts
on the basis of a defective image of reality and thereby creates disorder.
If I have lost certain sectors of reality from my range of experience, I
will also be lacking the language for appropriately characterizing them.
That means that parallel to the loss of reality and to stupidity there is
always the phenomenon of illiteracy.
A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin pointed out, elevates
and even celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning,
manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open society these attributes are
despised and criminalized. Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupida
man [or woman] who behaves in this way, Voegelin notes, will be socially
boycotted. But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society
are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open societya concern for the
common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrificeare detrimental to existence
in a diseased society. Today, those who exhibit these attributes are
targeted and silenced.
The deep alienation experienced by most Americans, the loss of self-esteem
and hope, has engendered what Durkheim referred to as a collective state of
anomie. Anomie is a psychological imbalance that leads to prolonged despair,
lethargy and yearnings for self-annihilation. It is caused by a collapse of
societal norms, ideals, values and standards. It is, in short, a loss of
faith in the structures and beliefs that define a functioning democracy. The
result is an obliteration of purpose and direction. It leads to what
Friedrich Nietzsche called an aggressive despiritualized nihilism. As
Durkheim wrote in his book On Suicide:
It is sometimes said that, by virtue of his psychological make-up, man
cannot live unless he attaches himself to an object that is greater than
himself and outlives him, and this necessity has been attributed to a
supposedly common need not to perish entirely. Life, they say, is only
tolerable if one can see some purpose in it, if it has a goal and one that
is worth pursuing. But the individual in himself is not sufficient as an end
for himself. He is too small a thing. Not only is he confined in space, he
is also narrowly limited in time. So when we have no other objective than
ourselves, we cannot escape from the feeling our efforts are finally
destined to vanish into nothing, since that is where we must return. But we
recoil from the idea of annihilation. In such a state, we should not have
the strength to live, that is to say to act and struggle, since nothing is
to remain of all the trouble that we take. In a word, the state of egoism is
in contradiction with human nature and hence too precarious to endure.
Pope John Paul II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled Laborem exercens, or
Through Work. He attacked the idea, fundamental to capitalism, that work
was merely an exchange of money for labor. Work, he wrote, should not be
reduced to the commodification of human beings through wages. Workers were
not impersonal instruments to be manipulated like inanimate objects to
increase profit. Work was essential to human dignity and self-fulfillment.
It gave us a sense of empowerment and identity. It allowed us to build a
relationship with society in which we could feel we contributed to social
harmony and social cohesion, a relationship in which we had purpose.
The pope castigated unemployment, underemployment, inadequate wages,
automation and a lack of job security as violations of human dignity. These
conditions, he wrote, were forces that negated self-esteem, personal
satisfaction, responsibility and creativity. The exaltation of the machine,
he warned, reduced human beings to the status of slaves. He called for full
employment, a minimum wage large enough to support a family, the right of a
parent to stay home with children, and jobs and a living wage for the
disabled. He advocated, in order to sustain strong families, universal
health insurance, pensions, accident insurance and work schedules that
permitted free time and vacations. He wrote that all workers should have the
right to form unions with the ability to strike.
The encyclical said:
[In spite of toil]perhaps, in a sense, because of itwork is a good thing
for man. Even though it bears the mark of a bonum arduum, in the terminology
of Saint Thomas, this does not take away the fact that, as such, it is a
good thing for man. It is not only good in the sense that it is useful or
something to enjoy; it is also good as being something worthy, that is to
say, something that corresponds to mans dignity, that expresses this
dignity and increases it. If one wishes to define more clearly the ethical
meaning of work, it is this truth that one must particularly keep in mind.
Work is a good thing for mana good thing for his humanitybecause through
work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he
also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes
more a human being.
Work, the pope pointed out, constitutes a foundation for the formation of
family life, which is a natural right and something that man is called to.
These two spheres of valuesone linked to work and the other consequent on
the family nature of human lifemust be properly united and must properly
permeate each other. In a way, work is a condition for making it possible to
found a family, since the family requires the means of subsistence which man
normally gains through work. Work and industriousness also influence the
whole process of education in the family, for the very reason that everyone
becomes a human being through, among other things, work, and becoming a
human being is precisely the main purpose of the whole process of education.
Obviously, two aspects of work in a sense come into play here: the one
making family life and its upkeep possible, and the other making possible
the achievement of the purposes of the family, especially education.
Nevertheless, these two aspects of work are linked to one another and are
mutually complementary in various points.
It must be remembered and affirmed that the family constitutes one of the
most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order
of human work, the encyclical continued. The teaching of the Church has
always devoted special attention to this question, and in the present
document we shall have to return to it. In fact, the family is
simultaneously a community made possible by work and the first school of
work, within the home, for every person.
We will not bring those who have fled a reality-based world back into our
fold through argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not
find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party.
Whole segments of American society are bent on self-immolation. They despise
this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political
behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction
leads to death. We must organize our communities to create a new socialist
order and overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil
disobedience. We must achieve full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes,
health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the
natural world and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the
possibility for a life of dignity, purpose and self-esteem. If we do not,
the idiotes will ensure our obliteration.
