Source: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312
Posted on Mar 12, 2017
By Chris Hedges
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 indiscriminate 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 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,” 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.” “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,” 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.”
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.”
Norman
Cohn, in “The 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 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.
