Subject: Re: Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
I swear, Chris Hedges gets inside my head and steals my thoughts, cleans them up and makes better sense out of them than I do.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----From: Miriam VieniSent: Monday, May 14, 2012 1:09 PMSubject: Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on April 30, 2012, Printed on May 14, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/hedges%3A_how_our_demented_capitalist_s
ystem_made_america_insane
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the
Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be
poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one
useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme
poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism,
accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft.
Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of
Snooki's pregnancy, Hulk Hogan's sex tape and Kim Kardashian's denial that
she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet.
Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do
gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. "At times
when the page is turning," Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in "Castle to
Castle," "when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance
Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!"
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate
greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society's
version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to
exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse
of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded,
those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and
inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will
ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence,
success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in
four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood
disorder or depression-which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our
march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash
product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of "primitive"
societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that
celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the
human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a
self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs,
such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life
and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be
accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the
self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the
allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet's ecosystem we
must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around
the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic.
The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to
capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of
empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. "The
Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx" is a series of observations derived
from Marx's reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took
notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems
and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx
noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but
also that "lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses
[were] owned jointly by their occupants." He wrote of the Aztecs, "Commune
tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related
families." He went on, ". reasons for believing they practiced communism in
living in the household." Native Americans, especially the Iroquois,
provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and
also proved vital to Marx and Engel's vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his
workers' utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside
of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity
and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies.
The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as
ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a "democratic assembly where every
adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before
it." Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs,
writing, "The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions
through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council.
Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois." European
women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather
than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our
patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on
fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse-although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty
including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives-did not
subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were
not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile,
exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also
embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern
cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society
of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation.Descartes argued, for
example, that the fullest exploitation of matter toany use was the duty of
humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans,
satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the
technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in "Regeneration Through
Violence," in the primacy of "the western man-on-the-make, the speculator,
and the wildcat banker." Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer,
Slotkin notes, became "national heroes by defining national aspiration in
terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees
hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust."
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate
consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding.
Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their
self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad
magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered
the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout
the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil
and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and
misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit
as handing over authority to the "beast."
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to
self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and
technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not
connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for
the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice
empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans
understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor.
They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of
the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for
ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Prospero is stranded on an island
where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive
"monster" Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the
spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island's
wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity
for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous
evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed
and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire,
also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was "adopted" by the
Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in
"Ancient Society" about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted
approvingly, in his "Ethnological Notebooks," Morgan's insistence on the
historical and social importance of "imagination, that great faculty so
largely contributing to the elevation of mankind." Imagination, as the
Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, "is neither the
language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of
communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all
senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets."
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have
the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate
state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry.
Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in
the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that,
even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only
through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination,
that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the
collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the
sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the
elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of
creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older
language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, "as a looking glass
does his face." And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism,
business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation "conditioned
by religion," but is an "essentially religious phenomenon," albeit one that
no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life.
Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a
ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned,
perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and
self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages,
subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering
visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon
endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad
experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer
reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We
profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and
silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and
now that the game is up we all go down together.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the
Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His
latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle.
C 2012 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/
Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on April 30, 2012, Printed on May 14, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/hedges%3A_how_our_demented_capitalist_s
ystem_made_america_insane
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the
Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be
poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one
useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme
poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism,
accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft.
Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of
Snooki's pregnancy, Hulk Hogan's sex tape and Kim Kardashian's denial that
she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet.
Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do
gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. "At times
when the page is turning," Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in "Castle to
Castle," "when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance
Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!"
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate
greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society's
version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to
exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse
of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded,
those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and
inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will
ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence,
success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in
four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood
disorder or depression-which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our
march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash
product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of "primitive"
societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that
celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the
human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a
self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs,
such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life
and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be
accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the
self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the
allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet's ecosystem we
must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around
the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic.
The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to
capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of
empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. "The
Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx" is a series of observations derived
from Marx's reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took
notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems
and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx
noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but
also that "lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses
[were] owned jointly by their occupants." He wrote of the Aztecs, "Commune
tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related
families." He went on, ". reasons for believing they practiced communism in
living in the household." Native Americans, especially the Iroquois,
provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and
also proved vital to Marx and Engel's vision of communism.
Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his
workers' utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside
of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity
and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies.
The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as
ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a "democratic assembly where every
adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before
it." Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs,
writing, "The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions
through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council.
Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois." European
women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather
than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our
patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on
fossil fuels. The pre-modern societies of Sitting Bull and Crazy
Horse-although they were not always idyllic and performed acts of cruelty
including the mutilation, torture and execution of captives-did not
subordinate the sacred to the technical. The deities they worshipped were
not outside of or separate from nature.
Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile,
exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also
embraced by the Bible. The natural world, along with those pre-modern
cultures that lived in harmony with it, was seen by the industrial society
of the Enlightenment as worthy only of exploitation.Descartes argued, for
example, that the fullest exploitation of matter toany use was the duty of
humankind. The wilderness became, in the religious language of the Puritans,
satanic. It had to be Christianized and subdued. The implantation of the
technical order resulted, as Richard Slotkin writes in "Regeneration Through
Violence," in the primacy of "the western man-on-the-make, the speculator,
and the wildcat banker." Davy Crockett and, later, George Armstrong Custer,
Slotkin notes, became "national heroes by defining national aspiration in
terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees
hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust."
The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate
consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding.
Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their
self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad
magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered
the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout
the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil
and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and
misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit
as handing over authority to the "beast."
The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to
self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and
technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not
connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for
the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice
empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction. The Native Americans
understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor.
They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of
the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for
ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
In William Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Prospero is stranded on an island
where he becomes the undisputed lord and master. He enslaves the primitive
"monster" Caliban. He employs the magical sources of power embodied in the
spirit Ariel, who is of fire and air. The forces unleashed in the island's
wilderness, Shakespeare knew, could prompt us to good if we had the capacity
for self-control and reverence. But it also could push us toward monstrous
evil since there are few constraints to thwart plunder, rape, murder, greed
and power. Later, Joseph Conrad, in his portraits of the outposts of empire,
also would expose the same intoxication with barbarity.
The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was "adopted" by the
Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in
"Ancient Society" about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted
approvingly, in his "Ethnological Notebooks," Morgan's insistence on the
historical and social importance of "imagination, that great faculty so
largely contributing to the elevation of mankind." Imagination, as the
Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, "is neither the
language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of
communion between the two. ... Imagination is the elemental speech in all
senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets."
All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have
the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate
state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry.
Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in
the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that,
even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only
through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination,
that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the
collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the
sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the
elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of
creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older
language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, "as a looking glass
does his face." And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism,
business and technology seeks to crush.
Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation "conditioned
by religion," but is an "essentially religious phenomenon," albeit one that
no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life.
Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a
ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned,
perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and
self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages,
subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage. The suffering
visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon
endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad
experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer
reaches of empire were sacrificed. There is a kind of justice to this. We
profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and
silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and
now that the game is up we all go down together.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the
Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His
latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle.
C 2012 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/155213/
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