As Kurt Vonnegut said, our brains are too big. It led to the creation of artificial wealth and the ability to accumulate it while commodifying the very environment upon which life depends among other insane things. Our brains to me were the downfall of our species as it also led to humans thinking they were separate from everything. Of course all of that brought us to a group suicide. Too bad we will take most if not all flora and fauna with us. On top of suicide we are committing ecocide. Also in the words of Kurt in Slaughterhouse 5: So it goes.
My mom survived that bombing - she escaped the basement of a building by folks outside battening down the wall after the first wave of allied bombers. she ran, jumping over dead chard bodies, and made it to the river just in time and threw her body against the tall embankment just as the second wave of bombers swept in. She was a french refugee in a work camp just outside of Dresden.
Humans are predators ..... and we are the failed experiment of giving a predator this level of tool making capacity ! I think we actually have the maturity and the ability (to be connected to ourselves, to the substance of our being as star dust , as beings born of the bosom of the Earth) in order to weald this level of tool making capacity ..... it is just that the aggressor often dominates.... in the beginning . So, as a species we have became just SO emotionally and physically traumatised from generations of violence and poisonous pollutive corrosion . As well the psychology of Empire is deeply entrenched into our psychology : from the individual to the international. Deep inquiry into these deeper aspect of our condition is VERY important . So Thank you for your comment !
Fully agree! Humans are by far the most powerful beings on Earth, which means we need to take by far the most responsibility. Instead, humans have been totally irresponsible and focus on all the wrong things. Our large brains could have allowed us to be the shining light on this planet if we had focused on and prioritized expanding our consciousness, wisdom, and empathy, but instead we are a cancerous tumor on it.
So I read this article, darker than the previous and the one before that. And I asked myself, “so what do I do with this information?” My vote won’t count. The world is spinning into a dark, dark, ugly annihilation, and those around me are blissfully and intentionally ignoring all this. They aren’t particularly wealthy or part of an elite class. They’re just average white Americans believing things are the same as they were when their parents were alive or their grandparents. Because in the end is knowing the truth of the rot and the decay that exists on a global level going to change anything beyond the absolute terror I feel inside my body and my mind. Should I join the masses and ignore what is all around me because after all I can’t do one goddamn thing about it. Elections are rigged. The poor will continue to be used and abused, and no amount of my philanthropy or donations of time and money will change the situation at hand. So I ask anyone including the author. , What are we fighting for? Why are we even choosing to live at all? We know hope’s not a strategy. We know those trying to fight the good fight are always gonna lose and just because we oust the Republican Party doesn’t mean that the Democrats would slide in to give us anything better or different. Again, I ask what is the point if this is the reality on the ground. Do I stop reading articles and paying attention and protesting and reading and trying to make a difference when I’m surrounded by people who are indifferent and ignorant and willfully spending their days in comfort and illusion. Thank you.
I strongly identify with the things you've listed Kathy -- very frustrated/angry/disappointed/bewildered by all of it too. Consider that nearly all of us are victims of a lifetime of propaganda and myth from our political class to our religious upbringing. We've all been sold a bill of goods that is counterfeit and in reality, near total BS. If you've paid attention along the way to the voices of a handful of battered and cancelled truth-tellers that expose the con, the gap should be rather obvious but clearly is not to the believers of the Lie. Most continue to believe in a world that never existed. It is not looking promising for the future.
Maybe it has something to do with the way “Kathy” speaks to and otherwise addresses people, John. I tried to give her examples of ways to get involved that have helped me stay engaged in what I consider a mandatory effort. However, I still remember that she and a tag team supporter were the only posters on this site to attack me in a personal way. And that was in response to a comment I made generally, not directed to either of them, about my distress that more U.S. an’s didn’t exhibit more if any concern about the genocide our tax dollars were funding in Gaza. I was called ignorant to hope for something different, given our country’s history of genocide, admonished that anyone who reads Hedges should know about that history, and was called “weak” in addition to ignorant by the tag team member. (I guess we all learned about our country’s history of genocide from Hedges, if we learned it at all. And we can’t
expect something better because genocide is in our DNA). I assumed you saw those put downs because you were posting on the same thread. Kathy” also complained in the thread about a friend who was also frustratingly ignorant.
I’m no longer falling for this drivel and I’m sorry to see that you are. The focus very much becomes us and the burden we bear because at least some of us are so much smarter, so much better informed, and, most of all, more sensitive than the rest of humanity, including other posters on the site. I’ve seen other sites ruined because of the kind of competitiveness and put downs by some. One of those sites was Truth Dig, where Hedges used to post his pieces. And in terms of feeling sorry for ourselves, there are plenty of things we can be doing. We’re not assured of success, but who has ever been? Should the Palestinians just give up and lay down and die? When I got out of law school, the small public interest firm I joined filed a case against the FBI involving the murder of several people by the Ku Klux Klan in NC. The FBI knew in advance, down to the details, that the Klan had stockpiled weapons and had planned an assault, but did nothing to stop it. Some people on the legal team were complaining about burn out and a Black investigator from NC who knew some of the people who were killed responded that he never had time for burn out. That always stayed with me. Anyway, I guess it comes down to my being frustrated that the only person who has lodged personal attacks on others on this site for not being as informed, or smart, or strong is so indulged here.
Interesting comment history sited here - I was unaware of all you mentioned. Things can really go off the rails on a comment thread like this - I wish it were better.
"So I ask anyone including the author. , What are we fighting for? Why are we even choosing to live at all? We know hope’s not a strategy. We know those trying to fight the good fight are always gonna lose" In my opinion, we need to continue fighting with our letters to the politicians, with demonstrations and most importantly voting intelligently. Prove that votes count is all the efforts that the politicians are doing to suppress it. Hope is the last thing to be lost and we should keep it.
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” - I. F. Stone
That’s a personal choice who you align with, the “circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy” or with “the suffering and abused other”.
I had to step outside my bubble — my neighborhood, my former colleagues, my immediate community to find a measure of sanity. For example, I attended a documentary on Assange at which John Kiriakou spoke. That led to alliances with others who were taking action to change things. I joined actions organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (although I’m not Jewish, they graciously welcomed me) and ultimately the connections I developed became international, when I was invited to join a conference of The Hague Group in NYC. (It helps me to remember that this is an international struggle). I’m also now involved in a local campaign for a candidate who opposes the genocide and refuses lobby money. We’re being outspent 7-1, but the media still gives us at least an even chance of winning. I’ve given up on some friendships and have even distanced myself from a relative, but a community is out there. As you note, the odds are overwhelming, but look at the Palestinians — they’re still resisting.
The US is not decaying, rather, it is dropping any remaining pretenses of being a republic governed by law and becoming an empire subject to no law other than naked force.
Sort of like how the Roman Republic became a victim of its own success and then continued as an empire for another 500 years or so in the West.
I both agree & disagree. The mask is off, and our elites no longer care if we see their actions.
On the other hand, I don't see how this can continue for long. During the Roman empire, the average person continued to plant crops, build shelter (houses) and go about their daily lives as the lives of the elite had little impact on their lives. In our modern west, you can't plant a crop without a field. You can't go about your daily life, when you have no resources with which to do so. For a person living in their sky box, when the system no longer serves them, they have nothing, no fall back position, just homelessness, despair, then death.
Or soon to be so.........pity we hadn't rallied in our millions when the genocide started........but we forgot that what goes around, does come around.
Especially when the wheel is being turned by people who've lost all humanity.
We call Trump a narcissist. What were the majority of us.....as planned demolitions of Palestinian homes were live streamed??
You'd be surprised how long sociopaths can keep up. The Byzantine Empire lasted for 1000 years. The British are playing Grima Wormtongue to the Americans right now.
In the ancient collapses, the peasants likely never knew the empire was collapsing until the barbarians were sweeping over their village. This time we get to watch it on television - or will, when the MSM can no longer pretend it isn't happening.
If oil analysts who study crude oil storage are correct, next month (June) - the tanks will be running dry here in the U.S. and prices will be going stratospheric (Trump dropped the number $8 per gallon in the last days) or won't be available.
I like the quote from Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" about how someone went broke. "Two ways, gradually - then suddenly". Team America may go the same way.
Yes like kindling, like the little sparks before a giant forest fire, a catalyst, like the Tunisian guy who ignited himself and April Spring emerged. Though that was extinguished.
It's interesting to look at the history of the life span of western empires. The Egyptian empire lasted over 3000 years. The Roman empire (including Byzantium) lasted about 1200 years. The Ottoman empire lasted about 600 years and the British empire lasted about 300 years.
One wonders why the life span of western empires has declined over time. I suspect that technology has something to do with it. As humans have developed technologically, everything has happened at ever increasing speed.
Capitalism teaches us its morals. Avarice is a good trait. Arrogance is a strong position. Ego-centricism is the best we can do so embrace Ayn Rand, cowardiceness is also built into the capitalist ideology. There is little courage to confront ones' own views or that of others. As for empathy, that went out the window with crass individualism born from egocentric thinking in a sociocentric culture. The values of capitalism or hucksterism are necessary for the economic system to work. The values and dispositions of the critical mind are receding and the result is confusion, bafflement, uncritical thought and self delusion.
Values of thinking like empathy, courage, humility, the ability to see the world from disparate points of view, giving and caring cannot exist in a toxic petri-dish like the capitalist system all based on 'self'. We do not learn these values in schools ut on the battle field and now more than ever for we are living behind enemy lines.
Perhaps advancements in communications make events happen faster. In ancient times it would take months before a nation realized about changes far away that could impact it.
I agree that changes in the means of production, i.e. the assembly line of last century or now, the communications industry have compressed time into commodified routines and structures. And the ability to travel -- many 'modern constructs' like the large Titanic ship phase of the early 1900's, the telegraph, when electricity came online and of course the radio an TV would push a consumer culture into suicide. And for many, it has. I think of the quote in Spanish on the side of a brick wall in Ecuador that reads: Die young and spare yourself.
It is still there for no one wants to paint over it or remove it.
This is where humanity is at as the onset of the digital Dark Ages redefines what it means to be human.
Yes, we are in the digital Dark Age but eventually will be a Renaissance if we are lucky. The meaning of humanness has been redifined very often during our treck of evolution. Hopefully the greed of capitalism will not succeed in wiping away civilization.
I am not disillusioned in my country, because as a kid I didn't expect better. That perception was due to what we did to the Indians and pretended we didn't, so it was the people who counted and not the government as I grew up. I never pledged the flag saying with liberty and justice for all, because it wasn't true then, and certainly is not true now.. Our wars just reinforced by perspective. People talk about racism. but no mention of America's long time preference for those that came from the north and west of Europe while those who came from the south or east of Europe were met with prejudicial distain. I guess what I'm saying it's not just now, but always that we were going down hill in one way or another. The turn into the 21st century and the Iraq war and there were people who cared world wide and marched against it, but in very short order the anti-war movement died. Interesting Hedges side lined the issue of this 21st century of war and more war and not even for whom, or the neocon agenda that has been in play as well. How could I be profoundly disappointed and upset when we were always far away from perfect in one way or another.
A small dose of denialism might have helped...but for sure. Since I studied in your country as a girl, I've known America's love of war and infinite ability to justify murder with a heavy dose of demonization.
The other side is always evil.........of the devil......and so deserve what America dishes out.
Those in your own prisons???
Just forget about them...they too must have partaken of evil.
Two ideas, one of them wrong...........the other one stupid.
But $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. So we must be 'exceptional'...lol, but it's not funny.
I like Chris Hedges, but I think he is sending us to hell too soon. As they say things could be worse, and they were never great, and I never perceived my country in any glorified light. My mother was very political so you would hear about one horror after another in our own sphere, that is in the America's, so it seemed we were never a country given to peace and for me it started with the Indians. The rich got rich and the poor got poorer is a phrase I grew up with so nothing new there. The best way I thought to deal with things is to make the American people come first in your life so you pursue fields that help people, and I can't control others and tell them what to do. I think Hedges gets too apocalyptic about things. Now if I'm a Palestinian living in Gaza I would have that perspective, but fortunately we don't, but what is disturbing to me is that we can support a genocide, which slaughters people then sends them to no where's land, and we have AIPAC who controls our politicians and policies and is the biggest threat to the US. Did he mention that?
The thing for me is........there are many messengers.
We should try not to shoot them, but too often, our innate competitiveness, and authoritarianism (which we deny) makes us easy critics...........and absentees on the street.
I've been depressed since the genocide started......as much for the indifference of most Americans and Canadians.....as for the atrocity itself.
Our inability to care......to empathize........to feel much of anything...is the daily disease I see. It may well be terminal.
You're right, for change to really happen people have to be aware of what is going on, but most don't, or their awareness is very superficial which doesn't really make change possible. You also have to be raised to not have a self centered perspective on life as you teach children America is not the only one who counts. I never developed America right or wrong, or just thinking of myself as an American. I had an uncle who was a chief engineer in the Merchant Marines. I loved him. He went everywhere and brought me trinkets from all over, and I recognized as a teenager he adopted a global perspective which said I am not just an American which I thought was really nice. Easier to empathize with people of other countries when you have that perspective.
For me US is not the elite but the bulk of the population, and all what I can see around is decay in education, health, finances and spirituality among the many other signs or our falling.
The elite are the only ones who matter. Nobody of influence and authority cares about the peons.
For Team R, we get lots of Eagle Flag Freedom talk while leaving everyone outside the 1% to be picked clean and left to rot.
Team D affects a most touching sympathy for the masses, the working class, whatever you want to call it, but only as an abstraction. Actual working class people they can't stand. Otherwise, Team D policies resemble those of the corporate imperialist muppets of Team R, BUT this time with pronouns!
Obama has not said a single word about the genocide in Gaza, even though doing so at this point would cost him virtually nothing. AOC falsely claimed during the last Democratic convention that Kamala Harris had worked hard to end the genocide. (She in fact wholeheartedly supported it and criticized its opponents). Unlike these two (Obama and Harris), Platner is not a corporate Democrat. However, I share your skepticism, in part because he opposes outlawing assault rifles — and because, as you point out, rhetoric is often inconsistent with actions.
Obama did more to kill the antiwar movement than anything Dubya or Cheney could have done, even if they were made Generalissimo and President for Life and El Jefe Maximo, respectively.
My liberal friends are incapable of putting Team Blue in the same category of evil as the Rs, when it comes to the abuse of the working class, as well as the allegiance to empire. The clueless cognitive dissonance is impressive in its tenacity.
As a young adult in the 60s I lived the death of our hope - we naively believed that what we hoped for was possible but in actuality all we accomplished was to push the forces that control everything into more repression and we got Nixon, then a watered down but more effective version in Reagan. We had hope again with Obama and now we have Trump. If we are to truly be better humans we need to stop being naive - without becoming angry and bitter. Stripping reality bare and facing it as Hedges does is where we have to start, and it is time to start, at the very least to imagine alternative paths forward.
I never had “hope” about Obama. Anyone who did never read anything about his record in either Illinois or the Senate and didn’t really pay attention to his rhetoric. But, as consumers rather than citizens, we had come to respond to the product, the advertising. This was one of our more stupid moments in history. The Democratic Party put one over on a gullible public when it was ready for real change after George W.
Agreed. After George W, any new candidate could have been the FDR of this century, but Obama didn't have the integrity required to be. I confess that, although not a democrat, I did vote for him the first time but three months later I was fully repented.
I confess to having voted for him, too, Julio, the first time, although mostly with my eyes wide open. After all, John McCain never met a war he didn’t like. Remember his “bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” refrain? I didn’t vote for Obama the second time after he embraced “free” trade agreements that transferred authority over trade disputes to unelected corporate bodies that acted in secret, bailed out the banks and protested that bank CEO’s “deserved” their bonuses while home owners lost their homes, prosecuted whistleblowers, extended the war in Iraq and further mired us in Afghanistan,
oversaw illegal drone strikes that mostly killed civilians, and authorized illegal surveillance of Americans’ phone records. Later, a friend told me that Obama, who received more campaign donations than any candidate before him from the financial industry, let Citibank appoint his cabinet. Though dubious, I looked it up and sure enough, even the msm confirmed it. (Remember, Obama rejected public financing of campaigns, while McCain had endorsed it). I also read in the NYT before the 2008 primary that Obama had withdrawn his support for a Palestinian state despite having raised money on his initial support from Arab-American backers. (He caught some flak, mostly deep disappointment, from that). The hand-writing was already on the wall.
Well, I don't know and I don't care, but I think that Obama like the great majority of the former presidents left the White House richer than when he started. One of his sins that alarmed me more was the way he behaved toward the occupy wall street movement. That was the clear demonstration of what the candidates pushed by the democratic party really are. They don't care about the common people, just the same as the republicans. This is why I'm independent although at times I have been desieved by the propaganda.
Having had the fortune to travel, live, and learn across several countries, I’ve come away with an unpopular point of view here in the United States. I believe that its citizens are not merely misinformed but may be the most successfully propagandized people on Earth - "Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools"
There is a vacuum in public education. Freedom. Integrity. Character. Trust. Decency. Compassion. Empathy. Power. Strength. Responsibility. daring. Meanings. Right relations. Courage. Lying. Cheating.Selfishness. Deceit. Betrayal. Scruples. Exploiting others. As long as values are not experientially explored,(engaging soul) but are intellectualized instead, they are just throw aways.
Chris For God's sake give us some hope. What can we do man? I'm in Ireland but it matters not a tap and we are suffering the same fate ss those in the U.S. because our ridiculous Government has put all our eggs in the Capitalist unregulated basket of big Pharma and big Tech and made us as complicit in genocide as the U.S.
You can put lipstick on a pig and some people would think it adorable. Others might disagree. What you unravel are some of the logic and strategy behind the sordid bourgeois class. Where it has not failed and where Marx again was right is the development of the means of production: the necessary items the chemist needs to make a drug or like the global south, develop intensive mining and extraction. But mining from whom and who makes the rules and parts the i.e.: the bourgeois, the same people who profit from your work a a worker and the land as, in this case, industrial mining.
So when there is a murder, investigation and a hammer was found to be the source of death do we blame the hammer or the person wielding it.
Americans are in love with gadgets, technology and all the other self absorbtion distractions that abound.
Take gambling. It is now considered the major addiction in the United States and elsewhere but it thrives where dictators abound.
Should be blame the 'games' the casino economy offers or go further, radically look at these structures through human need.
The means of production are so far ahead of the relations of production that it is hard to see how, armed with all the high tech and billions of dollars, they can lose. Yes, of course organizing for socialism basically is important, as is journalism.
But real learning comes from real crisis and if you think the US is in crisis now just wait. Soon the rest will fall and because critical thinking is not prevalent in the Empire, we're in very bad shape.
We have also lost the language of social change as the libertarian mind seeks it's own salvation, developing its own culture, language and actions.
One enormous problem is the lack of critical thinking and opportunities to learn it.
Until we understand capitalism and have a vocabulary that parallels it, we will be subjectively incarcerated.
“[W]hen there is no materialist criticism of political institutions, and when the class character of the modern state is not understood, it is only one step from political radicalism to political opportunism.” - V.I. Lenin; What The “Friends Of The People” Are And How They Fight The Social-Democrats (1894)
Big Bill Haywood - The working class haven't got anything. They can't lose anything. While the capitalist class have got all the money and all the credit, still if the working class laid off, the capitalists couldn't get food at any price.
This is the power of the working class: If the workers are organized (remember now, I say "if they are organized"--by that I don't mean 100 per cent, but a good strong minority), all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped. The working class can stand it a week without anything to eat--I have gone pretty nearly that long myself, and I wasn't on strike.
Still they will speak to these people about the power of the ballot, and they never mention a thing about the power of the general strike. They seem to lack the foresight, the penetration to interpret political power. They seem to lack the understanding that the broadest interpretation of political power comes through the industrial organization; that the industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker; it gives the vote to women, it reenfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely, in the place where they work.
I came to-night to speak to you on the general strike. And this night, of all the nights in the year, is a fitting time. Forty years ago to-day there began the greatest general strike known in modern history, the French Commune; a strike that required the political powers of two nations to subdue, namely, that of France and the iron hand of a Bismarck government of Germany.
“(TheDemocratic Party) will no doubt anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee.” Exactly right.
Yesterday, I posted a comment on a purportedly progressive site that invited readers to express a preference from a list of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. The list included Sen. Cory Booker (well-known for his Netanyahu sycophancy) and Rahm Emanuel. Past lists included Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom. There was no one on the list I could vote for.
I complained about the author’s “dreadful” list and said I wouldn’t vote for anyone who had supported a genocide. I expected to be attacked, and I was, but surprisingly (to me), by only one person. That person predictably criticized what she called a selfish adherence on my part to “principle,” called for me to “compromise,” and said that if the Democrats lost the election, it would be because of people like me. This is an old refrain dating back at least to 2016, when establishment Democrats complained about Bernie Sanders. What did surprise me was the support my comment elicited — voices in the wilderness. It probably wouldn’t have happened a year ago.
Democratic pundits gleefully report on Trump’s diminishing popularity, according to polls. What strikes me instead is that more than a third of the population still “approves” of him. Add to that the significant portion of Democrats who are still willing to vote for “a genocide-supporting nominee,” and it’s clear that the rot that Hedges describes goes deep into the U.S. population. From my limited personal perspective, those Democrats are mostly part of what John Kenneth Galbraith years ago called “the contented class.” Nonetheless, the people are our only hope. But, as discussed here before, hope without action is just another fantasy.
I would like Chris to address some of the similarities between the death of Empire and the death of an individual. Both are guaranteed to happen, and both are shattering. Our challenge is to pass on without blowing the place up. Militarism and machoism are very dangerous in a nuclear age.
Thank you! Too many people seem to forget (or never learned) U.S. history.
I had an exchange with one of them just yesterday on this platform, and wrote a few years ago about the explicit and prolific warnings offered to this country by someone widely acknowledged as a contemporary prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If America had actually listened to him rather than reducing him to a caricature, many events in the more recent history would have been different. Today’s madness is a price we are all paying for institutions and elites having forgotten the past.
I know you agree that Obama and Biden share their measure of blame, but figured I’d share some receipts for anyone interested in exploring their records of complicity in bipartisan fascism.
As Kurt Vonnegut said, our brains are too big. It led to the creation of artificial wealth and the ability to accumulate it while commodifying the very environment upon which life depends among other insane things. Our brains to me were the downfall of our species as it also led to humans thinking they were separate from everything. Of course all of that brought us to a group suicide. Too bad we will take most if not all flora and fauna with us. On top of suicide we are committing ecocide. Also in the words of Kurt in Slaughterhouse 5: So it goes.
Brain power or raw intelligence without a loving compassionate heart gets us nowhere.
Yes! As the Buddha taught, we must develop our hearts and our minds. One without the other leads to evil (not good to be a good-hearted fool either).
Yes, and we have also seen how our brains have led us everywhere when they are part of healthty human being.
My mom survived that bombing - she escaped the basement of a building by folks outside battening down the wall after the first wave of allied bombers. she ran, jumping over dead chard bodies, and made it to the river just in time and threw her body against the tall embankment just as the second wave of bombers swept in. She was a french refugee in a work camp just outside of Dresden.
Humans are predators ..... and we are the failed experiment of giving a predator this level of tool making capacity ! I think we actually have the maturity and the ability (to be connected to ourselves, to the substance of our being as star dust , as beings born of the bosom of the Earth) in order to weald this level of tool making capacity ..... it is just that the aggressor often dominates.... in the beginning . So, as a species we have became just SO emotionally and physically traumatised from generations of violence and poisonous pollutive corrosion . As well the psychology of Empire is deeply entrenched into our psychology : from the individual to the international. Deep inquiry into these deeper aspect of our condition is VERY important . So Thank you for your comment !
I can’t stop my tears. 🥹😭😱
DEAR CHRIS, IMHO:
CRONY
CORPORATE
CAPITALISM
IS CANCER OF “THE THIRD COMINGS”
Fully agree! Humans are by far the most powerful beings on Earth, which means we need to take by far the most responsibility. Instead, humans have been totally irresponsible and focus on all the wrong things. Our large brains could have allowed us to be the shining light on this planet if we had focused on and prioritized expanding our consciousness, wisdom, and empathy, but instead we are a cancerous tumor on it.
Excellent analysis, thank you.
So I read this article, darker than the previous and the one before that. And I asked myself, “so what do I do with this information?” My vote won’t count. The world is spinning into a dark, dark, ugly annihilation, and those around me are blissfully and intentionally ignoring all this. They aren’t particularly wealthy or part of an elite class. They’re just average white Americans believing things are the same as they were when their parents were alive or their grandparents. Because in the end is knowing the truth of the rot and the decay that exists on a global level going to change anything beyond the absolute terror I feel inside my body and my mind. Should I join the masses and ignore what is all around me because after all I can’t do one goddamn thing about it. Elections are rigged. The poor will continue to be used and abused, and no amount of my philanthropy or donations of time and money will change the situation at hand. So I ask anyone including the author. , What are we fighting for? Why are we even choosing to live at all? We know hope’s not a strategy. We know those trying to fight the good fight are always gonna lose and just because we oust the Republican Party doesn’t mean that the Democrats would slide in to give us anything better or different. Again, I ask what is the point if this is the reality on the ground. Do I stop reading articles and paying attention and protesting and reading and trying to make a difference when I’m surrounded by people who are indifferent and ignorant and willfully spending their days in comfort and illusion. Thank you.
I strongly identify with the things you've listed Kathy -- very frustrated/angry/disappointed/bewildered by all of it too. Consider that nearly all of us are victims of a lifetime of propaganda and myth from our political class to our religious upbringing. We've all been sold a bill of goods that is counterfeit and in reality, near total BS. If you've paid attention along the way to the voices of a handful of battered and cancelled truth-tellers that expose the con, the gap should be rather obvious but clearly is not to the believers of the Lie. Most continue to believe in a world that never existed. It is not looking promising for the future.
Thx John. Truly.
Maybe it has something to do with the way “Kathy” speaks to and otherwise addresses people, John. I tried to give her examples of ways to get involved that have helped me stay engaged in what I consider a mandatory effort. However, I still remember that she and a tag team supporter were the only posters on this site to attack me in a personal way. And that was in response to a comment I made generally, not directed to either of them, about my distress that more U.S. an’s didn’t exhibit more if any concern about the genocide our tax dollars were funding in Gaza. I was called ignorant to hope for something different, given our country’s history of genocide, admonished that anyone who reads Hedges should know about that history, and was called “weak” in addition to ignorant by the tag team member. (I guess we all learned about our country’s history of genocide from Hedges, if we learned it at all. And we can’t
expect something better because genocide is in our DNA). I assumed you saw those put downs because you were posting on the same thread. Kathy” also complained in the thread about a friend who was also frustratingly ignorant.
I’m no longer falling for this drivel and I’m sorry to see that you are. The focus very much becomes us and the burden we bear because at least some of us are so much smarter, so much better informed, and, most of all, more sensitive than the rest of humanity, including other posters on the site. I’ve seen other sites ruined because of the kind of competitiveness and put downs by some. One of those sites was Truth Dig, where Hedges used to post his pieces. And in terms of feeling sorry for ourselves, there are plenty of things we can be doing. We’re not assured of success, but who has ever been? Should the Palestinians just give up and lay down and die? When I got out of law school, the small public interest firm I joined filed a case against the FBI involving the murder of several people by the Ku Klux Klan in NC. The FBI knew in advance, down to the details, that the Klan had stockpiled weapons and had planned an assault, but did nothing to stop it. Some people on the legal team were complaining about burn out and a Black investigator from NC who knew some of the people who were killed responded that he never had time for burn out. That always stayed with me. Anyway, I guess it comes down to my being frustrated that the only person who has lodged personal attacks on others on this site for not being as informed, or smart, or strong is so indulged here.
Interesting comment history sited here - I was unaware of all you mentioned. Things can really go off the rails on a comment thread like this - I wish it were better.
"So I ask anyone including the author. , What are we fighting for? Why are we even choosing to live at all? We know hope’s not a strategy. We know those trying to fight the good fight are always gonna lose" In my opinion, we need to continue fighting with our letters to the politicians, with demonstrations and most importantly voting intelligently. Prove that votes count is all the efforts that the politicians are doing to suppress it. Hope is the last thing to be lost and we should keep it.
In the words of Chris Hedges himself (I repeat this to myself like a mantra...), "The soul is real....we may not win, but we must save our souls".
“The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you are going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday, somebody who believes as you do wins. In order for somebody to win an important, major fight 100 years hence, a lot of other people have got to be willing — for the sheer fun and joy of it — to go right ahead and fight, knowing you’re going to lose. You mustn’t feel like a martyr. You’ve got to enjoy it.” - I. F. Stone
This system will collapse. The question is what follows? I believe you would find interest in Nate Hagens The Great Simplification on YouTube.
If I had answers, I would have given them long ago.
Exactly
That’s a personal choice who you align with, the “circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy” or with “the suffering and abused other”.
Not following your train of thought
I had to step outside my bubble — my neighborhood, my former colleagues, my immediate community to find a measure of sanity. For example, I attended a documentary on Assange at which John Kiriakou spoke. That led to alliances with others who were taking action to change things. I joined actions organized by Jewish Voice for Peace (although I’m not Jewish, they graciously welcomed me) and ultimately the connections I developed became international, when I was invited to join a conference of The Hague Group in NYC. (It helps me to remember that this is an international struggle). I’m also now involved in a local campaign for a candidate who opposes the genocide and refuses lobby money. We’re being outspent 7-1, but the media still gives us at least an even chance of winning. I’ve given up on some friendships and have even distanced myself from a relative, but a community is out there. As you note, the odds are overwhelming, but look at the Palestinians — they’re still resisting.
The US is not decaying, rather, it is dropping any remaining pretenses of being a republic governed by law and becoming an empire subject to no law other than naked force.
Sort of like how the Roman Republic became a victim of its own success and then continued as an empire for another 500 years or so in the West.
I both agree & disagree. The mask is off, and our elites no longer care if we see their actions.
On the other hand, I don't see how this can continue for long. During the Roman empire, the average person continued to plant crops, build shelter (houses) and go about their daily lives as the lives of the elite had little impact on their lives. In our modern west, you can't plant a crop without a field. You can't go about your daily life, when you have no resources with which to do so. For a person living in their sky box, when the system no longer serves them, they have nothing, no fall back position, just homelessness, despair, then death.
Much like the Palestinians. We are all Gazans now
Or soon to be so.........pity we hadn't rallied in our millions when the genocide started........but we forgot that what goes around, does come around.
Especially when the wheel is being turned by people who've lost all humanity.
We call Trump a narcissist. What were the majority of us.....as planned demolitions of Palestinian homes were live streamed??
I think "forgot" is too kind. Couldn't be bothered to pay attention, or even wilfully ignored, might be more accurate.
I know.....but as a foreign movie I watched many years ago...about a mixed race relationship, said in the title: FEAR EATS THE SOUL.
Many in the west, espeically now, are very afraid.
I am afraid too. But what scares me most is that people will not use their fear to wake up and fight for our future.
Excellent point!
You'd be surprised how long sociopaths can keep up. The Byzantine Empire lasted for 1000 years. The British are playing Grima Wormtongue to the Americans right now.
In the ancient collapses, the peasants likely never knew the empire was collapsing until the barbarians were sweeping over their village. This time we get to watch it on television - or will, when the MSM can no longer pretend it isn't happening.
If oil analysts who study crude oil storage are correct, next month (June) - the tanks will be running dry here in the U.S. and prices will be going stratospheric (Trump dropped the number $8 per gallon in the last days) or won't be available.
I like the quote from Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" about how someone went broke. "Two ways, gradually - then suddenly". Team America may go the same way.
Yes like kindling, like the little sparks before a giant forest fire, a catalyst, like the Tunisian guy who ignited himself and April Spring emerged. Though that was extinguished.
Well maybe July 14th will be auspicious.
The US is imploding.
We've been hearing such breathy predictions of collapse and Hemingway quotes since before I was a kitten.
It's interesting to look at the history of the life span of western empires. The Egyptian empire lasted over 3000 years. The Roman empire (including Byzantium) lasted about 1200 years. The Ottoman empire lasted about 600 years and the British empire lasted about 300 years.
One wonders why the life span of western empires has declined over time. I suspect that technology has something to do with it. As humans have developed technologically, everything has happened at ever increasing speed.
The U.S. is 250 years old this year.
Yes. Sadly, it seems our social, moral development has been outrun by our technology. We got the horse to run, but then let go of the reins
Capitalism teaches us its morals. Avarice is a good trait. Arrogance is a strong position. Ego-centricism is the best we can do so embrace Ayn Rand, cowardiceness is also built into the capitalist ideology. There is little courage to confront ones' own views or that of others. As for empathy, that went out the window with crass individualism born from egocentric thinking in a sociocentric culture. The values of capitalism or hucksterism are necessary for the economic system to work. The values and dispositions of the critical mind are receding and the result is confusion, bafflement, uncritical thought and self delusion.
Values of thinking like empathy, courage, humility, the ability to see the world from disparate points of view, giving and caring cannot exist in a toxic petri-dish like the capitalist system all based on 'self'. We do not learn these values in schools ut on the battle field and now more than ever for we are living behind enemy lines.
Not sure I'd call Egypt or the Ottomans "western", but I get your point.
And a lot has happened over this tiny swath of time.
Perhaps advancements in communications make events happen faster. In ancient times it would take months before a nation realized about changes far away that could impact it.
I agree that changes in the means of production, i.e. the assembly line of last century or now, the communications industry have compressed time into commodified routines and structures. And the ability to travel -- many 'modern constructs' like the large Titanic ship phase of the early 1900's, the telegraph, when electricity came online and of course the radio an TV would push a consumer culture into suicide. And for many, it has. I think of the quote in Spanish on the side of a brick wall in Ecuador that reads: Die young and spare yourself.
It is still there for no one wants to paint over it or remove it.
This is where humanity is at as the onset of the digital Dark Ages redefines what it means to be human.
Yes, we are in the digital Dark Age but eventually will be a Renaissance if we are lucky. The meaning of humanness has been redifined very often during our treck of evolution. Hopefully the greed of capitalism will not succeed in wiping away civilization.
And it looks terrible, like it slept in the rain.
I am not disillusioned in my country, because as a kid I didn't expect better. That perception was due to what we did to the Indians and pretended we didn't, so it was the people who counted and not the government as I grew up. I never pledged the flag saying with liberty and justice for all, because it wasn't true then, and certainly is not true now.. Our wars just reinforced by perspective. People talk about racism. but no mention of America's long time preference for those that came from the north and west of Europe while those who came from the south or east of Europe were met with prejudicial distain. I guess what I'm saying it's not just now, but always that we were going down hill in one way or another. The turn into the 21st century and the Iraq war and there were people who cared world wide and marched against it, but in very short order the anti-war movement died. Interesting Hedges side lined the issue of this 21st century of war and more war and not even for whom, or the neocon agenda that has been in play as well. How could I be profoundly disappointed and upset when we were always far away from perfect in one way or another.
A small dose of denialism might have helped...but for sure. Since I studied in your country as a girl, I've known America's love of war and infinite ability to justify murder with a heavy dose of demonization.
The other side is always evil.........of the devil......and so deserve what America dishes out.
Those in your own prisons???
Just forget about them...they too must have partaken of evil.
Two ideas, one of them wrong...........the other one stupid.
But $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. So we must be 'exceptional'...lol, but it's not funny.
I like Chris Hedges, but I think he is sending us to hell too soon. As they say things could be worse, and they were never great, and I never perceived my country in any glorified light. My mother was very political so you would hear about one horror after another in our own sphere, that is in the America's, so it seemed we were never a country given to peace and for me it started with the Indians. The rich got rich and the poor got poorer is a phrase I grew up with so nothing new there. The best way I thought to deal with things is to make the American people come first in your life so you pursue fields that help people, and I can't control others and tell them what to do. I think Hedges gets too apocalyptic about things. Now if I'm a Palestinian living in Gaza I would have that perspective, but fortunately we don't, but what is disturbing to me is that we can support a genocide, which slaughters people then sends them to no where's land, and we have AIPAC who controls our politicians and policies and is the biggest threat to the US. Did he mention that?
I'm sure he's aware of it Fran.
The thing for me is........there are many messengers.
We should try not to shoot them, but too often, our innate competitiveness, and authoritarianism (which we deny) makes us easy critics...........and absentees on the street.
I've been depressed since the genocide started......as much for the indifference of most Americans and Canadians.....as for the atrocity itself.
Our inability to care......to empathize........to feel much of anything...is the daily disease I see. It may well be terminal.
You're right, for change to really happen people have to be aware of what is going on, but most don't, or their awareness is very superficial which doesn't really make change possible. You also have to be raised to not have a self centered perspective on life as you teach children America is not the only one who counts. I never developed America right or wrong, or just thinking of myself as an American. I had an uncle who was a chief engineer in the Merchant Marines. I loved him. He went everywhere and brought me trinkets from all over, and I recognized as a teenager he adopted a global perspective which said I am not just an American which I thought was really nice. Easier to empathize with people of other countries when you have that perspective.
For me US is not the elite but the bulk of the population, and all what I can see around is decay in education, health, finances and spirituality among the many other signs or our falling.
The elite are the only ones who matter. Nobody of influence and authority cares about the peons.
For Team R, we get lots of Eagle Flag Freedom talk while leaving everyone outside the 1% to be picked clean and left to rot.
Team D affects a most touching sympathy for the masses, the working class, whatever you want to call it, but only as an abstraction. Actual working class people they can't stand. Otherwise, Team D policies resemble those of the corporate imperialist muppets of Team R, BUT this time with pronouns!
Yes, you are right but my comment was that we, America, are indeed decaying.
Nobody cares. A farmer doesn't mourn the deaths of his poultry as he drops a load off at the slaughterhouse.
I agree it is dropping pretences which were laid on its inception foiling everyone by installing the idol of fake Statue of Liberty
While reading your fine essay I was reminded of this piece on the rise of former mercenary Graham Platner over whom people in Maine are losing their minds because he says some attractive words about Gaza and inequality in the U.S. https://africasacountry.com/2025/12/what-graham-platner-reveals-about-the-us-left
Yes so did AOC, Obama, et al. say words like that. And what have they done exactly?
If the establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to buy off, whom to co-opt, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Obama has not said a single word about the genocide in Gaza, even though doing so at this point would cost him virtually nothing. AOC falsely claimed during the last Democratic convention that Kamala Harris had worked hard to end the genocide. (She in fact wholeheartedly supported it and criticized its opponents). Unlike these two (Obama and Harris), Platner is not a corporate Democrat. However, I share your skepticism, in part because he opposes outlawing assault rifles — and because, as you point out, rhetoric is often inconsistent with actions.
Obama did more to kill the antiwar movement than anything Dubya or Cheney could have done, even if they were made Generalissimo and President for Life and El Jefe Maximo, respectively.
My liberal friends are incapable of putting Team Blue in the same category of evil as the Rs, when it comes to the abuse of the working class, as well as the allegiance to empire. The clueless cognitive dissonance is impressive in its tenacity.
When WE do it, then that makes it okay!
As a young adult in the 60s I lived the death of our hope - we naively believed that what we hoped for was possible but in actuality all we accomplished was to push the forces that control everything into more repression and we got Nixon, then a watered down but more effective version in Reagan. We had hope again with Obama and now we have Trump. If we are to truly be better humans we need to stop being naive - without becoming angry and bitter. Stripping reality bare and facing it as Hedges does is where we have to start, and it is time to start, at the very least to imagine alternative paths forward.
I never had “hope” about Obama. Anyone who did never read anything about his record in either Illinois or the Senate and didn’t really pay attention to his rhetoric. But, as consumers rather than citizens, we had come to respond to the product, the advertising. This was one of our more stupid moments in history. The Democratic Party put one over on a gullible public when it was ready for real change after George W.
Agreed. After George W, any new candidate could have been the FDR of this century, but Obama didn't have the integrity required to be. I confess that, although not a democrat, I did vote for him the first time but three months later I was fully repented.
I confess to having voted for him, too, Julio, the first time, although mostly with my eyes wide open. After all, John McCain never met a war he didn’t like. Remember his “bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” refrain? I didn’t vote for Obama the second time after he embraced “free” trade agreements that transferred authority over trade disputes to unelected corporate bodies that acted in secret, bailed out the banks and protested that bank CEO’s “deserved” their bonuses while home owners lost their homes, prosecuted whistleblowers, extended the war in Iraq and further mired us in Afghanistan,
oversaw illegal drone strikes that mostly killed civilians, and authorized illegal surveillance of Americans’ phone records. Later, a friend told me that Obama, who received more campaign donations than any candidate before him from the financial industry, let Citibank appoint his cabinet. Though dubious, I looked it up and sure enough, even the msm confirmed it. (Remember, Obama rejected public financing of campaigns, while McCain had endorsed it). I also read in the NYT before the 2008 primary that Obama had withdrawn his support for a Palestinian state despite having raised money on his initial support from Arab-American backers. (He caught some flak, mostly deep disappointment, from that). The hand-writing was already on the wall.
Well, I don't know and I don't care, but I think that Obama like the great majority of the former presidents left the White House richer than when he started. One of his sins that alarmed me more was the way he behaved toward the occupy wall street movement. That was the clear demonstration of what the candidates pushed by the democratic party really are. They don't care about the common people, just the same as the republicans. This is why I'm independent although at times I have been desieved by the propaganda.
Right there with you. As soon as he assembled his economic team before his inauguration, I knew he was a fraud, and my vote for him was a mistake.
Hedges remains the best
It couldn't have been said better than this, Chris. Thank you for speaking the truth in a time when it's dangerous to speak at all!
Having had the fortune to travel, live, and learn across several countries, I’ve come away with an unpopular point of view here in the United States. I believe that its citizens are not merely misinformed but may be the most successfully propagandized people on Earth - "Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools"
There is a vacuum in public education. Freedom. Integrity. Character. Trust. Decency. Compassion. Empathy. Power. Strength. Responsibility. daring. Meanings. Right relations. Courage. Lying. Cheating.Selfishness. Deceit. Betrayal. Scruples. Exploiting others. As long as values are not experientially explored,(engaging soul) but are intellectualized instead, they are just throw aways.
Chris For God's sake give us some hope. What can we do man? I'm in Ireland but it matters not a tap and we are suffering the same fate ss those in the U.S. because our ridiculous Government has put all our eggs in the Capitalist unregulated basket of big Pharma and big Tech and made us as complicit in genocide as the U.S.
Thank you! Painfully simple truthful analysis!
You can put lipstick on a pig and some people would think it adorable. Others might disagree. What you unravel are some of the logic and strategy behind the sordid bourgeois class. Where it has not failed and where Marx again was right is the development of the means of production: the necessary items the chemist needs to make a drug or like the global south, develop intensive mining and extraction. But mining from whom and who makes the rules and parts the i.e.: the bourgeois, the same people who profit from your work a a worker and the land as, in this case, industrial mining.
So when there is a murder, investigation and a hammer was found to be the source of death do we blame the hammer or the person wielding it.
Americans are in love with gadgets, technology and all the other self absorbtion distractions that abound.
Take gambling. It is now considered the major addiction in the United States and elsewhere but it thrives where dictators abound.
Should be blame the 'games' the casino economy offers or go further, radically look at these structures through human need.
The means of production are so far ahead of the relations of production that it is hard to see how, armed with all the high tech and billions of dollars, they can lose. Yes, of course organizing for socialism basically is important, as is journalism.
But real learning comes from real crisis and if you think the US is in crisis now just wait. Soon the rest will fall and because critical thinking is not prevalent in the Empire, we're in very bad shape.
We have also lost the language of social change as the libertarian mind seeks it's own salvation, developing its own culture, language and actions.
One enormous problem is the lack of critical thinking and opportunities to learn it.
Until we understand capitalism and have a vocabulary that parallels it, we will be subjectively incarcerated.
“[W]hen there is no materialist criticism of political institutions, and when the class character of the modern state is not understood, it is only one step from political radicalism to political opportunism.” - V.I. Lenin; What The “Friends Of The People” Are And How They Fight The Social-Democrats (1894)
How to beat the capitalist class
History is a weapon: the General Strike by Big Bill Haywood of the International Workers of the World (1911)
https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/haywoodgeneralstrike.html
Big Bill Haywood - The working class haven't got anything. They can't lose anything. While the capitalist class have got all the money and all the credit, still if the working class laid off, the capitalists couldn't get food at any price.
This is the power of the working class: If the workers are organized (remember now, I say "if they are organized"--by that I don't mean 100 per cent, but a good strong minority), all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped. The working class can stand it a week without anything to eat--I have gone pretty nearly that long myself, and I wasn't on strike.
Still they will speak to these people about the power of the ballot, and they never mention a thing about the power of the general strike. They seem to lack the foresight, the penetration to interpret political power. They seem to lack the understanding that the broadest interpretation of political power comes through the industrial organization; that the industrial organization is capable not only of the general strike, but prevents the capitalists from disfranchising the worker; it gives the vote to women, it reenfranchises the black man and places the ballot in the hands of every boy and girl employed in a shop, makes them eligible to take part in the general strike, makes them eligible to legislate for themselves where they are most interested in changing conditions, namely, in the place where they work.
I came to-night to speak to you on the general strike. And this night, of all the nights in the year, is a fitting time. Forty years ago to-day there began the greatest general strike known in modern history, the French Commune; a strike that required the political powers of two nations to subdue, namely, that of France and the iron hand of a Bismarck government of Germany.
“(TheDemocratic Party) will no doubt anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee.” Exactly right.
Yesterday, I posted a comment on a purportedly progressive site that invited readers to express a preference from a list of potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidates. The list included Sen. Cory Booker (well-known for his Netanyahu sycophancy) and Rahm Emanuel. Past lists included Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom. There was no one on the list I could vote for.
I complained about the author’s “dreadful” list and said I wouldn’t vote for anyone who had supported a genocide. I expected to be attacked, and I was, but surprisingly (to me), by only one person. That person predictably criticized what she called a selfish adherence on my part to “principle,” called for me to “compromise,” and said that if the Democrats lost the election, it would be because of people like me. This is an old refrain dating back at least to 2016, when establishment Democrats complained about Bernie Sanders. What did surprise me was the support my comment elicited — voices in the wilderness. It probably wouldn’t have happened a year ago.
Democratic pundits gleefully report on Trump’s diminishing popularity, according to polls. What strikes me instead is that more than a third of the population still “approves” of him. Add to that the significant portion of Democrats who are still willing to vote for “a genocide-supporting nominee,” and it’s clear that the rot that Hedges describes goes deep into the U.S. population. From my limited personal perspective, those Democrats are mostly part of what John Kenneth Galbraith years ago called “the contented class.” Nonetheless, the people are our only hope. But, as discussed here before, hope without action is just another fantasy.
Succinct and right on. Devastating
I would like Chris to address some of the similarities between the death of Empire and the death of an individual. Both are guaranteed to happen, and both are shattering. Our challenge is to pass on without blowing the place up. Militarism and machoism are very dangerous in a nuclear age.
Thank you! Too many people seem to forget (or never learned) U.S. history.
I had an exchange with one of them just yesterday on this platform, and wrote a few years ago about the explicit and prolific warnings offered to this country by someone widely acknowledged as a contemporary prophet, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If America had actually listened to him rather than reducing him to a caricature, many events in the more recent history would have been different. Today’s madness is a price we are all paying for institutions and elites having forgotten the past.
https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-jr-tried-to-warn
I know you agree that Obama and Biden share their measure of blame, but figured I’d share some receipts for anyone interested in exploring their records of complicity in bipartisan fascism.
https://shahidbuttar.substack.com/p/fears-of-a-fascist-future-overlook