Naturally we feel depressed when reading Chris Hedges prognosis. The
reason is that it is too believable.
His observations run counter to the Empire's propaganda.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/28/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
And he is truly depressing!
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, December 28, 2015 11:34 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: James Jarvis
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Illusion of Freedom
Chris Hedges pulls no punches. He is truly a man worth listening to and
learning from.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/28/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
anti-politics.
The Illusion of Freedom
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_illusion_of_freedom_20151227/
Posted on Dec 27, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential
contest, a frustrated white working class has been receptive to
anti-democracy messages. (Carlos Osorio / AP) The seizure of political
and economic power by corporations is unassailable.
Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws?
Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures?
Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of
Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of
Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of
Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of
entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and
environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while
enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall
Street? Who criminalizes dissent?
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at
Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount
effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally
around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that
the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class
and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not
matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do
not count within the political process.
This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception
of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of
ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the
responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes
from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by
violence. It forces us into a new political radicalism. This truth
reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real change is to be achieved, if
our voices are to be heard, corporate systems of power have to be
destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and political
crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this truth,
leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and
ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk
toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical
thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations
believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force
guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed
repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to
be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared
linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and
reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda
is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not
trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political
campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and
communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of
substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is
No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state.elites.
The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be
diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get
worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized
police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will
accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population
will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil
fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward
ecological collapse. We are “free” only as long as we play our
assigned parts. Once we call out power for what it is, once we assert
our rights and resist, the chimera of freedom will vanish. The iron
fist of the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in
human history will assert itself with a terrifying fury.
The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our
control.
Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state,
whose sole aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased
profit, sinks money into research and development of weapons and state
surveillance systems while it starves technologies that address global
warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense money
but cannot find funds for environmental studies. Our bridges, roads
and levees are crumbling from neglect. Our schools are overcrowded,
decaying and being transformed into for-profit vocational centers. Our
elderly and poor are abandoned and impoverished. Young men and women
are crippled by unemployment or underemployment and debt peonage. Our
for-profit health care drives the sick into bankruptcy. Our wages are
being suppressed and the power of government to regulate corporations
is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade agreements—the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government utilities
and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services
Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to
the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs,
sent overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the
decay to perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving
economy and a glorious empire.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The
ruling elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false
personae and a false sense of intimacy with the public.
The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter.
Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or
positions do not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel.
Those who are skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not
mastered the art of deception become “unreal.” Politics in
totalitarian societies are entertainment. Reality, because it is
complicated, messy and confusing, is banished from the world of mass
entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and uplifting messages that are
comforting and self-congratulatory, along with elaborate spectacles,
replace fact-based discourse.
“Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains
of alleged cultural repression,” Neal Gabler wrote in “Life: The
Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “So too was consumption,
throwing off the chains of the old production-oriented culture and
allowing anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both
entertainment and consumption often provided the same intoxication:
the sheer, endless pleasure of emancipation from reason, from
responsibility, from tradition, from class and from all the other
bonds that restrained the self.”
The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious
and frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak
the truth—whether about climate change or our system of inverted
totalitarianism—will be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They
will be hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is
the danger of a society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he
wrote, “… took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values.
That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion
over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego. …
Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and
enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual
minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”
Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and
intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside
cling to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling
This segment of the population is easily mobilized to “purge” thein the streets.
nation of dissenters and human “contaminants.” Totalitarian systems,
including our own, never lack for willing executioners.
Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels
who rise up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will
endure not only the violence of the state, but the hatred and
vigilante violence meted out by the self-deluded victims of
exploitation. The systems of propaganda will relentlessly demonize
those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented workers,
environmentalists, African-Americans, homosexuals, feminists,
intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems
of propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or
poison it are removed. Donald Trump is following this script.
The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book
“Escape From Freedom” explained the yearning of those who are rendered
insignificant to “surrender their freedom.” Totalitarian systems, he
pointed out, function like messianic religious cults.
“The frightened individual,” Fromm wrote, “seeks for somebody or
something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual
self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel
security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past
used different symbols, different iconography and different fears.
They rose up out of a different historical context. But they too
demonized the weak and persecuted the strong. They too promised the
dispossessed that by subsuming their selves into that of demagogues,
or parties or other organizations that promised unrivaled power, they
would become powerful. It never works. The growing frustration, the
ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression, leads these betrayed
individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak and the
demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient
ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation.
The death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure.
History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature,
after all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who
went before us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the
struggle will be long and difficult. Before it is over there will be
blood
anti-politics.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ The Illusion of
Freedom
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_illusion_of_freedom_20151227/
Posted on Dec 27, 2015
By Chris Hedges
A campaign rally last week in Michigan. In the current presidential
contest, a frustrated white working class has been receptive to
anti-democracy messages. (Carlos Osorio / AP) The seizure of political
and economic power by corporations is unassailable.
Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws?
Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures?
Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of
Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of
Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of
Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of
entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and
environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while
enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall
Street? Who criminalizes dissent?
A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at
Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount
effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally
around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that
the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class
and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not
matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do
not count within the political process.
This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception
of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of
ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the
responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes
from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by
violence. It forces us into a new political radicalism. This truth
reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real change is to be achieved, if
our voices are to be heard, corporate systems of power have to be
destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and political
crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this truth,
leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and
ensures we are crippled by self-delusion.
The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk
toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical
thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations
believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force
guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed
repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to
be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared
linguistically and then literally.
The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and
reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda
is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not
trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political
campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and
communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of
substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is
No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state.elites.
The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be
diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get
worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized
police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will
accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population
will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil
fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward
ecological collapse. We are “free” only as long as we play our
assigned parts. Once we call out power for what it is, once we assert
our rights and resist, the chimera of freedom will vanish. The iron
fist of the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in
human history will assert itself with a terrifying fury.
The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our
control.
Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state,
whose sole aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased
profit, sinks money into research and development of weapons and state
surveillance systems while it starves technologies that address global
warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in defense money
but cannot find funds for environmental studies. Our bridges, roads
and levees are crumbling from neglect. Our schools are overcrowded,
decaying and being transformed into for-profit vocational centers. Our
elderly and poor are abandoned and impoverished. Young men and women
are crippled by unemployment or underemployment and debt peonage. Our
for-profit health care drives the sick into bankruptcy. Our wages are
being suppressed and the power of government to regulate corporations
is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade agreements—the
Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment
Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government utilities
and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services
Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to
the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs,
sent overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the
decay to perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving
economy and a glorious empire.
The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The
ruling elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false
personae and a false sense of intimacy with the public.
The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter.
Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or
positions do not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel.
Those who are skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not
mastered the art of deception become “unreal.” Politics in
totalitarian societies are entertainment. Reality, because it is
complicated, messy and confusing, is banished from the world of mass
entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and uplifting messages that are
comforting and self-congratulatory, along with elaborate spectacles,
replace fact-based discourse.
“Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains
of alleged cultural repression,” Neal Gabler wrote in “Life: The
Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “So too was consumption,
throwing off the chains of the old production-oriented culture and
allowing anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both
entertainment and consumption often provided the same intoxication:
the sheer, endless pleasure of emancipation from reason, from
responsibility, from tradition, from class and from all the other
bonds that restrained the self.”
The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious
and frightened people will retreat into self-delusion. Those who speak
the truth—whether about climate change or our system of inverted
totalitarianism—will be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They
will be hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is
the danger of a society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he
wrote, “… took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values.
That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion
over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego. …
Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and
enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual
minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”
Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and
intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside
cling to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling
This segment of the population is easily mobilized to “purge” thein the streets.
nation of dissenters and human “contaminants.” Totalitarian systems,
including our own, never lack for willing executioners.
Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels
who rise up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will
endure not only the violence of the state, but the hatred and
vigilante violence meted out by the self-deluded victims of
exploitation. The systems of propaganda will relentlessly demonize
those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented workers,
environmentalists, African-Americans, homosexuals, feminists,
intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems
of propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or
poison it are removed. Donald Trump is following this script.
The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book
“Escape From Freedom” explained the yearning of those who are rendered
insignificant to “surrender their freedom.” Totalitarian systems, he
pointed out, function like messianic religious cults.
“The frightened individual,” Fromm wrote, “seeks for somebody or
something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual
self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel
security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past
used different symbols, different iconography and different fears.
They rose up out of a different historical context. But they too
demonized the weak and persecuted the strong. They too promised the
dispossessed that by subsuming their selves into that of demagogues,
or parties or other organizations that promised unrivaled power, they
would become powerful. It never works. The growing frustration, the
ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression, leads these betrayed
individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak and the
demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient
ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation.
The death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure.
History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature,
after all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who
went before us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the
struggle will be long and difficult. Before it is over there will be
blood
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