Uncategorized « shoqvalue.com

Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

by Chris Hedges

I cannot stress how important this book is. Dark, yes.. but then so is the cultural calamity we're in. What people want to blame on Obama, Democrats, or Republicans, is nothing less than a full-blown smack down from the corporatist, oligarchical, monopolistic juggernaut that is our brand of capitalism run amok.

And the very fact that this is NOT what we are all talking about, is proof-positive of the very kinds of profitable denialism that Hedges chronicles so well. Whether the analogy is pro wrestling, or our celebrity obsessed blogosphere, the image of success and happiness has replaced the need or want for the reality version of life. The pursuit of hedonistic pleasure is not just a ruinous way of life, it's also a perfect way to keep the masses docile, and accepting of the miserable state of decline we are now in.

I urge every American to read this book and to focus on the core diagnosis it offers. It's important that we start admitting that we have a very big problem, or we will never find our way to any solutions. I've linked two free chapters below, courtesy of Google Books.

If you really don't have the time or patient to read them, at the very least read this very respectable synopsis of the book.

If you insist on reading no further on this page, just skip down to the Neil Postman quote comparing Orwell with Huxley. Which do you think comes closest to where we are now? It may prompt you to read all the rest.

Note: As I write in other places, I fundamentally disagree with Hedges on many things, especially on his annoying habit of focusing on Obama and Democrats, when they are but a symptom of the disease he has detailed so brilliantly. Hedges is a diagnostician, and that's very valuable. But he is definitely not a physician. He isn't even that interested in remedies. That's why many find him so dark. But it doesn't matter. Whether we have a remedy or not, we still must understand the problem, and that, he helps us do quite well.

An Amazon Review

Hedges suggests possible future scenarios where most Americans are virtual corporate slaves, controlled and monitored by the ever expanding power of law enforcement. He fears that the biggest contrast in this country will be between a marginalized literate minority on the one hand and on the other a barely functionally literate or functionally illiterate majority enchanted by corporate entertainment and the vacuous PR spectacles and slogans of politicians. He fears that as social conditions worsen, right wing demagogues will make great headway. He is very worried about future environmental catastrophes. However he ends his book with the hope that decent human values can be utilized to confront our growing corporate tyranny.

Read all the reviews

Read These Two Key Chapters—Right Now

Reading them will only make the entire work read better. Take my word for it.

An Excerpt

See below for 60 free pages of excerpts

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojeck calls celebrity culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity culture.” He goes further:

Capitalism originally sought to police play and pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the central life interest threatened the economic survival of the system. The family, the state and religion engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation to control desire and ensure compliance with the system of production. However, as capitalism developed, consumer culture and leisure time expanded. The principles that operated to repress the individual in the workplace and the home were extended to the shopping mall and recreational activity. The entertainment industry and consumer culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive desublimation.’ Through this process individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded version of humanity.

This cult of distraction, as Rojeck points out, masks the real disintegration of culture. It conceals the meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, and economic collapse and political corruption. The wild pursuit of status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami, shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American workers are ground down by corporations who have disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded them.

Celebrities have fame free of responsibility. The fame of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an economic and political morass, we are still controlled, manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books," Neil Postman wrote:

What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”

Thanks to Truthdig and Alternet, you can read the first 60 pages of this important work below. I am not sure just how complete each is, but it shouldn't take you long to learn. The wrestling stuff may not grab you at first, but his setup is important. Stay with it.

Excerpts

Chris Hedges speaking at the New School on Empire of Illusion

Dear friends:

As some know, I am alway hesitant to make charitable appeals, because the Internet is rife with cases of scams, phony dramas, or attention whores claiming some fender bender caused them serious trauma and need your dollars to survive (or more likely, buy more Spaghettios for their dinner). Few ever try to confirm these things, or confirm them well, and many get stung. Even if they don't know they were stung, it happens far too often.

And almost as irksome, is the fact that it's so hard to decide who is deserving of Internet appeals for charity. We can't help everyone, but that shouldn't mean helping someone is out of the question. In the end, like much in this life, it's the luck of the draw. My own rule of thumb is that for someone to really warrant broad-based Internet appeals, the beneficiary must have extended their own life or generosity to others in some measurable way. I feel this case passes that smell test and deserves our generosity.

Since I never accept Internet appeals at face value, I have personally spoken with @chrisWiggins (at his Google number) and confirmed all of this. I hope my word is good, and you can rely on this being completely legitimate. His mother has a marvelous record of human kindness and generosity, and deserves all the life we can buy for her.

I hope you will help with whatever you can afford. Even a single dollar will count.

Thank you so much.

The story: Please help Karen Wiggins

The donation page: http://karenwiggins.eventbrite.com/

@chriswiggin's Linked-in Page: http://linkd.in/9vqNsF

Yes, Chris is a recent hire at Google. But they have working stiffs, too.(They're not all Googleaires). He's no more able to save his mother alone than most of us would be in a similar circumstance.

This legendary rant is even better when read. The transcripts I could find always sucked. So I’ve made what i hope is a more readable version below, so this classic piece of polemical gold can be shared and understood more widely. I’ve read it dozens of times. I still can’t find a flaw in it, or anything even exaggerated. He’s right. We’re fucked. Unless we think of some way to fight back. I have my ideas. Do you?

Read it first. Then watch the video. Then read it again. Then share it far and wide with the little green button. Retweets do count.

Transcript

But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.

It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners, the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.

Forget the politicians. They are irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice! You have OWNERS! They OWN YOU. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want:

They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.

Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

It’s called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.

George Carlin’s daughter, @kelly_carlin, on her first radio show with guest Paul Provenza, talking about this routine.

shoqvalue.com

I believe in the semantic web. I just don't know what that means.

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion; Not For The Squeamish