Chris Hedges on the Zero Point of Systemic Collapse

Must read of today, by Chris Hedges - Adbusters.org - 08 Feb 2010

Aleksandr Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of anarchists about how
to overthrow the czar, reminded his listeners that it was not their job to
save a dying system but to replace it: "We think we are the doctors. We are
the disease." All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global
capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or
appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean
very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward
building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will
be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.
These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without
linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the
state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the
corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the
monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual
and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common
good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We
will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the
larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to
retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. Resistance
will be reduced to small, often imperceptible acts of defiance, as those who
retained their integrity discovered in the long night of 20th-century
fascism and communism.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when
the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for
decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully
convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed
truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by
economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered
and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually
hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike
out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty
and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to
challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of
widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the
corporate state is just that - a fantasy.

My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a
crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence.
They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions,
they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely
believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts
of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement - such as those
on the destruction of property - but once you start using plastic
explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to
disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts,
however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts
of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the
dispossessed.

I am not a pacifist. I know there are times, and even concede that this may
eventually be one of them, when human beings are forced to respond to
mounting repression with violence. I was in Sarajevo during the war in
Bosnia. We knew precisely what the Serbian forces ringing the city would do
to us if they broke through the defenses and trench system around the
besieged city. We had the examples of the Drina Valley or the city of
Vukovar, where about a third of the Muslim inhabitants had been killed and
the rest herded into refugee or displacement camps. There are times when the
only choice left is to pick up a weapon to defend your family, neighborhood
and city. But those who proved most adept at defending Sarajevo invariably
came from the criminal class. When they were not shooting at Serbian
soldiers they were looting the apartments of ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo and
often executing them, as well as terrorizing their fellow Muslims. When you
ingest the poison of violence, even in a just cause, it corrupts, deforms
and perverts you. Violence is a drug, indeed it is the most potent narcotic
known to humankind. Those most addicted to violence are those who have
access to weapons and a penchant for force. And these killers rise to the
surface of any armed movement and contaminate it with the intoxicating and
seductive power that comes with the ability to destroy. I have seen it in
war after war. When you go down that road you end up pitting your monsters
against their monsters. And the sensitive, the humane and the gentle, those
who have a propensity to nurture and protect life, are marginalized and
often killed. The romantic vision of war and violence is as prevalent among
anarchists and the hard left as it is in the mainstream culture. Those who
resist with force will not defeat the corporate state or sustain the
cultural values that must be sustained if we are to have a future worth
living. From my many years as a war correspondent in El Salvador, Guatemala,
Gaza and Bosnia, I have seen that armed resistance movements are always
mutations of the violence that spawned them. I am not naïve enough to think
I could have avoided these armed movements had I been a landless Salvadoran
or Guatemalan peasant, a Palestinian in Gaza or a Muslim in Sarajevo, but
this violent response to repression is and always will be tragic. It must be
avoided, although not at the expense of our own survival.

Democracy, a system ideally designed to challenge the status quo, has been
corrupted and tamed to slavishly serve the status quo. We have undergone, as
John Ralston Saul writes, a coup d'état in slow motion. And the coup is
over. They won. We lost. The abject failure of activists to push corporate,
industrialized states toward serious environmental reform, to thwart
imperial adventurism or to build a humane policy toward the masses of the
world's poor stems from an inability to recognize the new realities of
power. The paradigm of power has irrevocably altered and so must the
paradigm of resistance alter.

Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral
politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the
appearance of a rational economy. The levers of power have become so
contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant.
The election of Barack Obama was yet another triumph of propaganda over
substance and a skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by the mass
media. We mistook style and ethnicity - an advertising tactic pioneered by
the United Colors of Benetton and Calvin Klein - for progressive politics
and genuine change. We confused how we were made to feel with knowledge. But
the goal, as with all brands, was to make passive consumers mistake a brand
for an experience. Obama, now a global celebrity, is a brand. He had almost
no experience besides two years in the senate, lacked any moral core and was
sold as all things to all people. The Obama campaign was named Advertising
Age's marketer of the year for 2008 and edged out runners-up Apple and
Zappos.com. Take it from the professionals. Brand Obama is a marketer's
dream. President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe
another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what
the advertisers want because of how they can make you feel.

We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called "junk
politics." Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of
rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It
eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and
spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral
strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The
result of junk politics is that nothing changes, "meaning zero interruption
in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking
systems of socioeconomic advantage."

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by
visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by
understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can
always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance
our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us
across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood,
self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our
economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming
was dismissed as "negative." This belief, which allows men and women to
behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and
anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of
self-delusion. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporate state are
never seriously questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the
corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. And it has
perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world. The
new paradigm of power, coupled with its bizarre ideology of limitless
progress and impossible happiness, has turned whole nations, including the
United States, into monsters.

We can march in Copenhagen. We can join Bill McKibben's worldwide day of
climate protests. We can compost in our backyards and hang our laundry out
to dry. We can write letters to our elected officials and vote for Barack
Obama, but the power elite is impervious to the charade of democratic
participation. Power is in the hands of moral and intellectual trolls who
are ruthlessly creating a system of neo-feudalism and killing the ecosystem
that sustains the human species. And appealing to their better nature, or
seeking to influence the internal levers of power, will no longer work.
We will not, especially in the United States, avoid our Götterdämmerung.
Obama, like Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the other heads of
the industrialized nations, has proven as craven a tool of the corporate
state as George W. Bush. Our democratic system has been transformed into
what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin labels inverted
totalitarianism. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism,
does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds
expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish
democracy, patriotism, a free press, parliamentary systems and constitutions
while manipulating and corrupting internal levers to subvert and thwart
democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes
by citizens but are ruled by armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington,
Ottawa or other state capitals who author the legislation and get the
legislators to pass it. A corporate media controls nearly everything we
read, watch or hear and imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. Mass culture,
owned and disseminated by corporations, diverts us with trivia, spectacles
and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi
fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. "Under
inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true," Wolin writes. "Economics
dominates politics - and with that domination comes different forms of
ruthlessness."

Inverted totalitarianism wields total power without resorting to cruder
forms of control such as gulags, concentration camps or mass terror. It
harnesses science and technology for its dark ends. It enforces ideological
uniformity by using mass communication systems to instill profligate
consumption as an inner compulsion and to substitute our illusions of
ourselves for reality. It does not forcibly suppress dissidents, as long as
those dissidents remain ineffectual. And as it diverts us it dismantles
manufacturing bases, devastates communities, unleashes waves of human misery
and ships jobs to countries where fascists and communists know how to keep
workers in line. It does all this while waving the flag and mouthing
patriotic slogans. "The United States has become the showcase of how
democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed," Wolin writes.
The practice and psychology of advertising, the rule of "market forces" in
many arenas other than markets, the continuous technological advances that
encourage elaborate fantasies (computer games, virtual avatars, space
travel), the saturation by mass media and propaganda of every household and
the takeover of the universities have rendered most of us hostages. The rot
of imperialism, which is always incompatible with democracy, has seen the
military and arms manufacturers monopolize $1 trillion a year in
defense-related spending in the United States even as the nation faces
economic collapse. Imperialism always militarizes domestic politics. And
this militarization, as Wolin notes, combines with the cultural fantasies of
hero worship and tales of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty
through surgery, action measured in nanoseconds and a dream-laden culture of
ever-expanding control and possibility to sever huge segments of the
population from reality. Those who control the images control us. And while
we have been entranced by the celluloid shadows on the walls of Plato's
cave, these corporate forces, extolling the benefits of privatization, have
effectively dismantled the institutions of social democracy (Social
Security, unions, welfare, public health services and public housing) and
rolled back the social and political ideals of the New Deal. The proponents
of globalization and unregulated capitalism do not waste time analyzing
other ideologies. They have an ideology, or rather a plan of action that is
defended by an ideology, and slavishly follow it. We on the left have dozens
of analyses of competing ideologies without any coherent plan of our own.
This has left us floundering while corporate forces ruthlessly dismantle
civil society.

We are living through one of civilization's great seismic reversals. The
ideology of globalization, like all "inevitable" utopian visions, is being
exposed as a fraud. The power elite, perplexed and confused, clings to the
disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the
looming political and economic vacuum. The absurd idea that the marketplace
alone should determine economic and political constructs led industrial
nations to sacrifice other areas of human importance - from working
conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and
pollution - on the altar of free trade. It left the world's poor worse off
and the United States with the largest deficits - which can never be
repaid - in human history. The massive bailouts, stimulus packages,
giveaways and short-term debt, along with imperial wars we can no longer
afford, will leave the United States struggling to finance nearly $5
trillion in debt this year. This will require Washington to auction off
about $96 billion in debt a week. Once China and the oil-rich states walk
away from our debt, which one day has to happen, the Federal Reserve will
become the buyer of last resort. The Fed has printed perhaps as much as two
trillion new dollars in the last two years, and buying this much new debt
will see it, in effect, print trillions more. This is when inflation, and
most likely hyperinflation, will turn the dollar into junk. And at that
point the entire system breaks down.

All traditional standards and beliefs are shattered in a severe economic
crisis. The moral order is turned upside down. The honest and industrious
are wiped out while the gangsters, profiteers and speculators walk away with
millions. The elite will retreat, as Naomi Klein has written in The Shock
Doctrine, into gated communities where they will have access to services,
food, amenities and security denied to the rest of us. We will begin a
period in human history when there will be only masters and serfs. The
corporate forces, which will seek to make an alliance with the radical
Christian right and other extremists, will use fear, chaos, the rage at the
ruling elites and the specter of left-wing dissent and terrorism to impose
draconian controls to ruthlessly extinguish opposition movements. And while
they do it, they will be waving the American flag, chanting patriotic
slogans, promising law and order and clutching the Christian cross.
Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith
but an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when its
structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote. "That is when its
ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by
force or fraud." Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left.
Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that
cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. All
attempts to work within this decayed system and this class of power brokers
will prove useless. And resistance must respond to the harsh new reality of
a global, capitalist order that will cling to power through ever-mounting
forms of brutal and overt repression. Once credit dries up for the average
citizen, once massive joblessness creates a permanent and enraged underclass
and the cheap manufactured goods that are the opiates of our commodity
culture vanish, we will probably evolve into a system that more closely
resembles classical totalitarianism. Cruder, more violent forms of
repression will have to be employed as the softer mechanisms of control
favored by inverted totalitarianism break down.

It is not accidental that the economic crisis will converge with the
environmental crisis. In his book The Great Transformation (1944), Karl
Polanyi laid out the devastating consequences - the depressions, wars and
totalitarianism - that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market.
He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society
that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always
devolves, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism - and a
Mafia political system - which is a good description of our financial and
political structure. A self-regulating market, Polanyi wrote, turns human
beings and the natural environment into commodities, a situation that
ensures the destruction of both society and the natural environment. The
free market's assumption that nature and human beings are objects whose
worth is determined by the market allows each to be exploited for profit
until exhaustion or collapse. A society that no longer recognizes that
nature and human life have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond
monetary value, commits collective suicide. Such societies cannibalize
themselves until they die. This is what we are undergoing.

If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as
possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task
will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that
have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much
as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient.
These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and
fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a
more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America's
strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will
need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will
see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach
out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively
expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher.

The increasingly overt uses of force by the elites to maintain control
should not end acts of resistance. Acts of resistance are moral acts. They
begin because people of conscience understand the moral imperative to
challenge systems of abuse and despotism. They should be carried out not
because they are effective but because they are right. Those who begin these
acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their
cowardice behind their cynicism. But resistance, however marginal, continues
to affirm life in a world awash in death. It is the supreme act of faith,
the highest form of spirituality and alone makes hope possible. Those who
carried out great acts of resistance often sacrificed their security and
comfort, often spent time in jail and in some cases were killed. They
understood that to live in the fullest sense of the word, to exist as free
and independent human beings, even under the darkest night of state
repression, meant to defy injustice.

When the dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was taken from his
cell in a Nazi prison to the gallows, his last words were: "This is for me
the end, but also the beginning." Bonhoeffer knew that most of the citizens
in his nation were complicit through their silence in a vast enterprise of
death. But however hopeless it appeared in the moment, he affirmed what we
all must affirm. He did not avoid death. He did not, as a distinct
individual, survive. But he understood that his resistance and even his
death were acts of love. He fought and died for the sanctity of life. He
gave, even to those who did not join him, another narrative, and his
defiance ultimately condemned his executioners.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization
that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This
makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the
immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of
resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the
dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep
alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we
may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of
resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a
Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a
corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to
catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we
will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile,
for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in
this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially,
will be the key to a life of defiance.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote that the exclusive preoccupation with
personal concerns and indifference to the suffering of others beyond the
self-identified group is what ultimately made fascism and the Holocaust
possible: "The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most
important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz
could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent
people."

The indifference to the plight of others and the supreme elevation of the
self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. It uses fear, as
well as hedonism, to thwart human compassion. We will have to continue to
battle the mechanisms of the dominant culture, if for no other reason than
to preserve through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have
to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the cruelty
outside our door. Hope endures in these often imperceptible acts of
defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what the psychopathic
forces in control of our power systems seek to eradicate. As long as we are
willing to defy these forces we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at
least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces we remain alive.
And for now this is the only victory possible.

Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best sellers War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and his latest, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. He is married to the Canadian actress Eunice Wong. They have a son, Konrad, who is also a Canadian.