Truthdig
The Dance of Death
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312/
Posted on Mar 12, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy.
They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the
country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for
wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military "virtues" are celebrated.
Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded
to patriotic kitsch. Education is designed only to instill technical
proficiency to serve the poisonous engine of corporate capitalism.
Historical amnesia shuts us off from the past, the present and the future.
Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to
struggle in poverty or locked away in cages. State repression is
indiscriminant and brutal. And, presiding over the tawdry Grand Guignol is a
deranged ringmaster tweeting absurdities from the White House.
The graveyard of world empires-Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan,
Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian-followed the same trajectory of moral
and physical collapse. Those who rule at the end of empire are psychopaths,
imbeciles, narcissists and deviants, the equivalents of the depraved Roman
emperors Caligula, Nero, Tiberius and Commodus. The ecosystem that sustains
the empire is degraded and exhausted. Economic growth, concentrated in the
hands of corrupt elites, is dependent on a crippling debt peonage imposed on
the population. The bloated ruling class of oligarchs, priests, courtiers,
mandarins, eunuchs, professional warriors, financial speculators and
corporate managers sucks the marrow out of society.
The elites' myopic response to the looming collapse of the natural world and
the civilization is to make subservient populations work harder for less,
squander capital in grandiose projects such as pyramids, palaces, border
walls and fracking, and wage war. President Trump's decision to increase
military spending
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/us/politics/trump-navy-warship-military-
spending.html?_r=0) by $54 billion and take the needed funds out of the
flesh of domestic programs typifies the behavior of terminally ill
civilizations. When the Roman Empire fell, it was trying to sustain an army
of half a million soldiers that had become a parasitic drain on state
resources.
The complex bureaucratic mechanisms that are created by all civilizations
ultimately doom them. The difference now, as Joseph Tainter points out in
"The Collapse of Complex Societies
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477.The_Collapse_of_Complex_Societies ;)
," is that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global.
No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will
disintegrate as a whole."
Civilizations in decline, despite the palpable signs of decay around them,
remain fixated on restoring their "greatness." Their illusions condemn them.
They cannot see that the forces that gave rise to modern civilization,
namely technology, industrial violence and fossil fuels, are the same forces
that are extinguishing it. Their leaders are trained only to serve the
system, slavishly worshipping the old gods long after these gods begin to
demand millions of sacrificial victims.
"Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in turn create
even more dangerous messes," Ronald Wright writes in "A Short History of
Progress
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/331227.A_Short_History_of_Progress ;) ."
"Hope elects the politician with the biggest empty promise; and as any
stockbroker or lottery seller knows, most of us will take a slim hope over
prudent and predictable frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of
capitalism."
The Trump appointees-Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Steve
Mnuchin, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Rick Perry, Alex Acosta and others-do not
advocate innovation or reform. They are Pavlovian dogs that salivate before
piles of money. They are hard-wired to steal from the poor and loot federal
budgets. Their single-minded obsession with personal enrichment drives them
to dismantle any institution or abolish any law or regulation that gets in
the way of their greed. Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is "a machine for
demolishing limits." There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once
all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly
commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until
exhaustion or collapse. And when the last moments of a civilization arrive,
the degenerate edifices of power appear to crumble overnight.
Sigmund Freud wrote that societies, along with individuals, are driven by
two primary instincts. One is the instinct for life, Eros, the quest to
love, nurture, protect and preserve. The second is the death instinct. The
death instinct, called Thanatos by post-Freudians, is driven by fear, hatred
and violence. It seeks the dissolution of all living things, including our
own beings. One of these two forces, Freud wrote, is always ascendant.
Societies in decline enthusiastically embrace the death instinct, as Freud
observed in "Civilization and Its Discontents
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_and_Its_Discontents ;) ," written
on the eve of the rise of European fascism and World War II.
"It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own
sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge, that we
succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation
to Eros," Freud wrote. "But even where it emerges without any sexual
purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to
recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an
extraordinary high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting
the ego with a fulfillment of the latter's old wishes for omnipotence."
The lust for death, as Freud understood, is not, at first, morbid. It is
exciting and seductive. I saw this in the wars I covered. A god-like power
and adrenaline-driven fury, even euphoria, sweep over armed units and ethnic
or religious groups given the license to destroy anything and anyone around
them. Ernst Juenger captured this "monstrous desire for annihilation" in his
World War I memoir, "Storm of Steel
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/240485.Storm_of_Steel ;) ."
A population alienated and beset by despair and hopelessness finds
empowerment and pleasure in an orgy of annihilation that soon morphs into
self-annihilation. It has no interest in nurturing a world that has betrayed
it and thwarted its dreams. It seeks to eradicate this world and replace it
with a mythical landscape. It turns against institutions, as well as ethnic
and religious groups, that are scapegoated for its misery. It plunders
diminishing natural resources with abandon. It is seduced by the fantastic
promises of demagogues and the magical solutions characteristic of the
Christian right or what anthropologists call "crisis cults
(http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-christianity/
crisis-cult-C1474 ) ."
Norman Cohn, in "The Pursuit of the Millennium
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/191131.Pursuit_of_the_Millennium ;) :
Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing
on Modern Totalitarian Movements," draws a link between that turbulent
period and our own. Millennial movements are a peculiar, collective
psychological response to profound societal despair. They recur throughout
human history. We are not immune.
"These movements have varied in tone from the most violent aggressiveness to
the mildest pacifism and in aim from the most ethereal spirituality to the
most earth-bound materialism; there is no counting the possible ways of
imagining the Millennium and the route to it," Cohen wrote. "But
similarities can present themselves as well as differences; and the more
carefully one compares the outbreaks of militant social chiliasm
(https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/chiliasm ;) during
the later Middle Ages with modern totalitarian movements the more remarkable
the similarities appear. The old symbols and the old slogans have indeed
disappeared, to be replaced by new ones; but the structure of the basic
phantasies seems to have changed scarcely at all."
These movements, Cohen wrote, offered "a coherent social myth which was
capable of taking entire possession of those who believed in it. It
explained their suffering, it promised them recompense, it held their
anxieties at bay, it gave them an illusion of security-even while it drove
them, held together by a common enthusiasm, on a quest which was always vain
and often suicidal.
"So it came about that multitudes of people acted out with fierce energy a
shared phantasy which though delusional yet brought them such intense
emotional relief that they could live only through it and were perfectly
willing to die for it. It is a phenomenon which was to recur many times
between the eleventh century and the sixteenth century, now in one area, now
in another, and which, despite the obvious differences in cultural context
and in scale, is not irrelevant to the growth of totalitarian movements,
with their messianic leaders, their millennial mirages and their
demon-scapegoats, in the present century."
The severance of a society from reality, as ours has been severed from
collective recognition of the severity of climate change and the fatal
consequences of empire and deindustrialization, leaves it without the
intellectual and institutional mechanisms to confront its impending
mortality. It exists in a state of self-induced hypnosis and self-delusion.
It seeks momentary euphoria and meaning in tawdry entertainment and acts of
violence and destruction, including against people who are demonized and
blamed for society's demise. It hastens its self-immolation while holding up
the supposed inevitability of a glorious national resurgence. Idiots and
charlatans, the handmaidens of death, lure us into the abyss.
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