The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Chris Hedges: The Politics of Cultural Despair Archived Message

    Posted by sashimi on October 19, 2020, 6:15 pm

    (quote)
    It is despair that is killing us, eating into the social fabric,
    rupturing social bonds, and manifesting in self-destructive
    pathologies.


    A Talk by Chris Hedges / Video and Text

    The physical and moral decay of the United States and the malaise it
    has spawned have predictable results. We have seen in varying forms
    the consequences of social and political collapse during the twilight
    of the Greek and Roman empires, the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires,
    Tsarist Russia, Weimar Germany and the former Yugoslavia. Voices from
    the past, Aristotle, Cicero, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Roth and
    Milovan Djilas, warned us. But blinded by self-delusion and hubris, as
    if we are somehow exempt from human experience and human nature, we
    refuse to listen.

    The United States is a shadow of itself. It squanders its resources in
    futile military adventurism, a symptom of all empires in decay as they
    attempt to restore a lost hegemony by
    force. Vietnam. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. Tens of millions of
    lives wrecked. Failed states. Enraged fanatics. There are 1.8 billion
    Muslims in the world, 24 percent of the global population, and we have
    turned virtually all of them into our enemies.

    We are piling up massive deficits and neglecting our basic
    infrastructure, including electrical grids, roads, bridges and public
    transportation, to spend more on our military that all the other major
    powers on Earth combined. We are the world's largest producer and
    exporter of arms and munitions. The virtues we argue we have a right
    to impose by force on others - human rights, democracy, the free
    market, the rule of law and personal freedoms - are mocked at home
    where grotesque levels of social inequality and austerity programs
    have impoverished most of the public, destroyed democratic
    institutions, including Congress, the courts and the press, and
    created militarized forces of internal occupation that carry out
    wholesale surveillance of the public, run the largest prison system in
    the world and gun down unarmed citizens in the streets with impunity.

    The American burlesque, darkly humorous with its absurdities of Donald
    Trump, fake ballot boxes, conspiracy theorists who believe the deep
    state and Hollywood run a massive child sex trafficking ring,
    Christian fascists that place their faith in magic Jesus and teach
    creationism as science in our schools, ten hour long voting lines in
    states such as Georgia, militia members planning to kidnap the
    governors of Michigan and Virginia and start a civil war, is also
    ominous, especially as we ignore the accelerating ecocide.

    All of our activism, protests, lobbying, petitions, appeals to the
    United Nations, the work of NGOs and misguided trust in liberal
    politicians such as Barack Obama have been accompanied by a 60 percent
    rise in global carbon emissions since 1990. Estimates predict another
    40 percent rise in global emissions in the next decade. We are less
    than a decade away from carbon dioxide levels reaching 450 parts per
    million, the equivalent to a 2 degree Celsius average temperature
    rise, a global catastrophe that will make parts of the earth
    uninhabitable, flood coastal cities, dramatically reduce crop yields
    and result in suffering and death for billions of people. This is what
    is coming, and we can't wish it away.

    I speak to you in Troy, New York, once the second largest producer of
    iron in the country after Pittsburgh. It was an industrial hub for the
    garment industry, a center for the production of shirts, shirtwaists,
    collars, and cuffs, and was once home to foundries that made bells to
    firms that crafted precision instruments. All that is gone, of course,
    leaving behind the post-industrial decay, the urban blight and the
    shattered lives and despair that are sadly familiar in most cities in
    the United States.

    It is this despair that is killing us. It eats into the social fabric,
    rupturing social bonds, and manifests itself in an array of
    self-destructive and aggressive pathologies. It fosters what the
    anthropologist Roger Lancaster calls "poisoned solidarity," the
    communal intoxication forged from the negative energies of fear,
    suspicion, envy and the lust for vengeance and violence. Nations in
    terminal decline embrace, as Sigmund Freud understood, the death
    instinct. No longer sustained by the comforting illusion of inevitable
    human progress, they lose the only antidote to nihilism. No longer
    able to build, they confuse destruction with creation. They descend
    into an atavistic savagery, something not only Freud but Joseph Conrad
    and Primo Levi knew lurks beneath the thin veneer of civilized
    society. Reason does not guide our lives. Reason, as Schopenhauer puts
    it, echoing Hume, is the hard-pressed servant of the will.

    "Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the
    most can defend themselves if they are attacked," Freud wrote. "They
    are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is
    to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their
    neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but
    also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him,
    to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him
    sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate
    him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini
    lupus. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and history,
    will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule, this cruel
    aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the
    service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached
    by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when
    the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of
    action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a
    savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something
    alien."

    Freud, like Primo Levi, got it. The moral life is a matter of
    circumstances. Moral consideration, as I saw in the wars I covered,
    largely disappears in moments of extremity. It is the luxury of the
    privileged. "Ten percent of any population is cruel, no matter what,
    and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80
    percent can be moved in either direction," Susan Sontag said.

    To survive, it was necessary, Levi wrote of life in the death camps,
    "to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into
    the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by
    those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and
    individuals in cruel times. "It was, he wrote, "a Hobbesian life," "a
    continuous war of everyone against everyone." Varlam Shalamov,
    imprisoned for 25 years in Stalin's gulags, was equally pessimistic:
    "All human emotions-of love, friendship, envy, concern for one's
    fellowman, compassion, a longing for fame, honesty-had left us with
    the flesh that had melted from our bodies during our long fasts. The
    camp was a great test of our moral strength, of our everyday morality,
    and 99% of us failed it... Conditions in the camps do not permit men
    to remain men; that is not what camps were created for."

    Social collapse will bring these latent pathologies to the surface.

    But the fact that circumstances can reduce us to savagery does not
    negate the moral life. As our empire implodes, and with it social
    cohesion, as the earth increasingly punishes us for our refusal to
    honor and protect the systems that give us life, triggering a scramble
    for diminishing natural resources and huge climate migrations, we must
    face this darkness, not only around us, but within us.
    (/quote)
    -- Cont'd at https://scheerpost.com/2020/10/19/chris-hedges-the-politics-of-cultural-despair/

    Message Thread:

    • Chris Hedges: The Politics of Cultural Despair - sashimi October 19, 2020, 6:15 pm