Chris Hedges
Thomas
Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt
civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to
us.
The last days of dying empires
are dominated by idiots.
The Roman, Mayan, French,
Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the
stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality,
plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction
were indistinguishable.
Donald Trump, and the sycophantic
buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman
emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers;
the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a
mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal
life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and
attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two
million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.
In Hitler and the Germans, the
political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in
oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized
and seduced the German people.
The Germans, he writes, supported
Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he
embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse
and hopelessness.
Voegelin defines stupidity as a
“loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly
orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is
always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses
the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of
verifiable fact.
These idiots, who promise to
recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They
accelerate the collapse.
Limited in intellectual ability,
lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at
established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they
remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs.
They make war on universities,
banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext
to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their
rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity.
Reality, whether the climate
crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their
fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.
Hannah Arendt blames a society
that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.”
Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are
trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to
exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance.
People are objects to be used,
mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.
‘Celebrating the Degenerate’
A society convulsed by disorder
and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who
are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic
society, these attributes are despised and criminalized.
Those who exhibit them are
condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin
notes, “will be socially boycotted.”
But the social, cultural and
moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an
open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice
— are ridiculed.
They are detrimental to existence
in a diseased society.
When a society, as Plato notes,
abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed
and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book
Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
The only thing these dying
regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circuses acts — like Trump’s $40
million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 — keep a distressed
population entertained.
The Disneyfication of America,
the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where
everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation
and social inequality.
The population is conditioned by
mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless
entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.
Søren Kierkegaard in The Present
Age warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and
manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public
is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an
all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.”
In short, we became part of a
herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual
situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who
question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are
dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the
Greek definition of the polis, can be considered citizens.
Thomas Paine writes that a
despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This
is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.
It is tempting to personalize the
decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety.
But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which
function in form, not in content.
The consent of the governed is a
cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations.
The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo
chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom
advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism.
It is about how we dress up
despotism, not despotism itself.
Collective Retreat From Reality
The historian Ramsay MacMullen,
in Corruption and the Decline of Rome, writes that what destroyed the Roman
Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.”
Power became about enriching
private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as
an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the
citizenry.
The U.S. government, in this
sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and
oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.
“[T]he decline of Rome was the
natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes.
“Prosperity
ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with
the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the
artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own
weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring
why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had
subsisted for so long.”
The Roman emperor Commodus, like
Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as
Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of
the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and
killing lions with a bow and arrow.
The empire — he renamed Rome the
Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) — was a vehicle to satiate his
bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump
sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate
to his inauguration committee or presidential library.
Finally, the emperor’s advisors
arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler
after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator.
But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by
the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later.
The Praetorian Guards auctioned
off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days.
There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of
Commodus.
Like the late Roman Empire, our
republic is dead.
Our constitutional rights — due
process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and
dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These
rights exist only in name.
The vast disconnect between the
purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political
discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are
absurd.
Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940
amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:
“A
Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about
to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring,
his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But
a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Our decay, our illiteracy and
collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of
our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs
of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and
middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public
education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the
collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires.
Trump the pyromaniac entertains
us as we go down.
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