The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden about the dangerous bifurcation of the United States into antagonistic tribes that can no longer communicate
The Chris Hedges Report Podcast with Mickey Huff & Nolan Higden about the dangerous bifurcation of the United States into antagonistic tribes that can no longer communicate
The lack of job security most Americans experience has certainly contributed to the absence of political dialogue in daily life, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. When you spend the majority of your waking and productive hours with coworkers, work is a natural place to engage in political conversation. However, when the job is tenuous and you live a couple paychecks away from the street, how could you risk holding an unpopular opinion or showing open disagreement?
From my own workplace experiences there also frequently exists in management a sick obsession with obedience. I encountered it at the dead-end jobs I’ve worked and I’ve encountered it as a pilot – a discipline where blind obedience directly contradicts the principles of safety and ethics. When you choose integrity in these environments the consequence is siloing, harassment, and removal (if you don’t remove yourself first). When jobs are scarce and job security is nonexistent, those work environments turn the coworker who could otherwise be your ally into an informant and an enemy. The exchange of political ideas cannot take place where disagreement is actively punished, and if your choice is between disagreeing or keeping a roof over your head you don’t actually have a choice. It’s coercion.
To contrast this, the environment I now work in has a culture of open and active criticism. Everyone is always being criticized, all the time, tactfully or through a stream of obscenity. None of it is personal and most of it is entertaining. Ostensibly this activity is widely encouraged to increase safety, and certainly if you let people voice their opinions they will do so enthusiastically.
The side effect of this openness and willingness to piss each other off has been a vigorous and honest political exchange. One of the few places I’ve ever encountered it.
Most of us are not unionized, and we all lose our jobs anyway when the rains come in October, so job security isn’t really part of the calculation (union activity would benefit us in other ways). For other workplaces the security and solidarity afforded by a union could be the difference between a barren, oppressive and antisocial environment and one where a political dialogue can flourish. Seems like a strong remedy for polarization, actually. I wonder why unions are not more common...
Thank you Chris for this excellent interview. The news is so biased I have gone from skeptical to cynical ; but to hear such clear analysis and understanding about media history todays sad state gives one hope (at least a glimmer)
That isthe way they can give the people an active target for censorship thereby further dividing the people. These tactics are clearly being used against the people and sadly, far too many have taken the bait. It will lead far worse outcomes. I have been a fan of Chris Hedges for many years.
I live abroad, OJ. I live in S. America and have for ten years and in Central America and MX for another three, not to mention two years in Europe.
Fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by traveling.
STEM education is what has turned Americans into illiterates, among other causes.
This is not reflection on you, but as a philosophy teacher, K-12 teacher for 25 years I see that most people go to school not to learn how to live, but to learn how to make a living.
And this is why humanities is under constant attack and defunding.
Critical thinking is not genetic, it is not something handed down in testaments or wills: it is learned.
America is an anti-intellectual culture and has been for multiple decades.
Thus, thinking is subversive and one is not rewarded for thinking critically unless it is to teach someone how to make a better widget.
This is why I left America ten years ago.
I am 70 years old so was able to get out.
At least get out of America.
Getting out of exploitation, sexism, classism and racism, to name a few, requires active collaboration and the development of a questioning mind. For it is the foundation for all progressive thinking.
If we do not, and I say we, for the problem exists everywhere, do not find a strategy for organizing and educating, then autocracy and fascism will rule the day.
The problem is that thinking is hard work which is why so many would rather contract it out to others than attempt to do it themselves.
Here, in South America, as bad as things are, there is more class consciousness than in America.
That is why my hope and work is here.
But yes, critical thinking is a field within philosophy and of course we are all critical and non-critical to some extent.
The issue is developing critical thinking in all endeavors, not just politics.
PS: Do you have a source for this quotation? Many thanks
As to the nation state:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
Maurice Frederick Strong, PC, CC, OM, FRSC, FRAIC (April 29, 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, observations, & experiences, Maricata & much of what you say resonates with me. I made the very wise decision myself to head abroad in '09 & have no desire to move back...which my friends & family (left, right, & center) simply struggle to wrap their minds around based on their propagandized perspective on the Great America. Every time I explain how much better life is in nearly all of the countries, rich & poor, that I've lived in, they simply scoff at the possibility & go back to discussing professional sports, the latest reality TV show, or whatever the mainstream political talking point is at the moment.
The class consciousness you mention is so sorely missing, but I hold little hope for any awareness or understanding of it for Americans.
Keep living, keep sharing, keep educating, & keep making the world better where you are...maybe eventually others will recognize & 'get out of America' as well in order to begin to collaborate, develop, witness class struggle, and engage in critical thinking!
It is not the messengers who are important in this discussion for me. What is important is the descriptions of what is wrong as well as having an ideology and n a attempt at finding solutions to some of the most effective roadblocks to our ability to actually be able to think critically about where we are and the actual consequences of our continuing to be bamboozled by media. Nothing changes if nothing changes! Its a place in which to find hope and in our current situation there has been very little if any to drive the actions for that change.
At this point, we need to give up on democracy. It is a joke. The day and age of the nation-state is over....time to recognize that and move on. Do I have an alternative, no. Any "ism" out there has the problem with the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" such that the little man is always pissed on. Don't believe me? Look at Cuba...sure...great health care but the leaders in the government live A LOT better than the common folks. Human selfishness and greed is the same everywhere. At this point maybe anarchy is something worth checking out?
Cuba? Pax Americana has blocked a beaming possibility. Cast aside by red bating. Castro helped educate an illiterate population that would put the MAGA south to shame! The US Oligarchy and Empire's of the past show greed and human selfishness are from the few not everyone. The "devil and the details" are missing from anarchy but some sort of revolution and a third party is a must. I have ordered the book and hopefully get some details for change before the masters of men have their boots on our faces forever. As Orwell said "Remember I said Forever"!
I have been to Cuba. Beautiful country and such lovely people. Agreed - the blockade is actually cruel and hurts only the common folks...not the Cuban elite. My point is every nation-state that I have seen has some level of oligarchy that crushes the spirit of that country. It is almost as if decentralization will provide a more progressive life for everyone!
Power (Corporations and the Rich) vs Countervailing Power (Real democratic government with Unions or people power). A small government stands no chance against them just like individualism, John Kenneth Galbreath wrote a good book "Understanding Power" and I re-read it now again would be a good start for a lot of people. He once sarcastically said just before his death on the extreme right swing of the USA "I look fondly back at the Reagan years" when he saw the PNAC Neo Cons taking power. Along with yesterdays man Joe Biden and Neo Liberal Clinton. They made Reagan look almost left wing although extreme right for his time.
Ironically the one thing AOC was right about...there is no 'left wing' in the US - not in the true sense of the word. Joe Biden/Obama/Bush/Trump...all of the are right wingers. Their love for war and complete disdain for the common man is a give away. Biden actually screwed over the rail workers by forcing the union to accept a 'deal.' Who would have thought a DEMOCRAT to do this? This is a Reagan move...but, alas, the uni-party answers to the corporations. To this day NO ONE has addressed the lead pipes in Flint MI. BUT, we did GIVE $100 Billion to Ukraine nazis. If anything, the US government is a criminal enterprise...a legalized version of the mafioso. @Jim harper - I can only hope over the next year the countervailing power grows in this country.
“We are staring down at the corpse of the American Dream, tied like a trophy hunter’s kill to the roof of our new electric vehicles (leased, never owned!), unaware that what we are looking at is our own future. Efforts to present this atrocity as either “new” or “normal” have been found wanting over the past year, and it seems all but impossible that that element of the New Normal will be achieved – but humans are adaptable creatures, and we can con ourselves into pretty much anything.”
As to Americans and class consciousness. The US ruling class understands well the class struggle and they surely do have the class consciousness for their class.
For the average American, if If I can be general, are like birds born in cages.
You have seen a lot. I hope your health is well and do wish you all the best.
We seem to be caught in that interregnum.
You will enjoy this very, very much.
I learned quite a bit from it.
Double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack, the US-born woman at the centre of the underground resistance to Nazism in Berlin during World War II. In conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred’s great-grandniece and author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
Maurice Frederick Strong, PC, CC, OM, FRSC, FRAIC (April 29, 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong)
We are dealing with psychopaths on both sides of the crumbling aisle.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but I concluded the guests were so isolated in their ivory tower that I didn't hear anything from them that I could actually use in my life. I found the talk to be wall-to-wall concepts, without anything that touched the real world. Perhaps that's what academic life does to you..
Capitalism and democracy are not compatible. Never have been.
Under capitalism:
"The difference between democracy and dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first, and take orders later; in a dictatorship, you don't have to waste your time voting."
---------Charles Bukowski
As to the nation state:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
-----David Rockefeller
The nation state is and will be reduced to nothing more than the managerial desk for global capitalism.
Without the values of critical thinking, and yes there are values, the cognitive engine alone will not wake up the people.
“Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power of the autocrat.
“He uses them like animals and, even if he does not tell them so, in himself he always knows quite clearly that they mean just as little to him; when he speaks to his intimates, he will call them sheep or cattle.
His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them.
What remains of them afterwards does not matter to him.
The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them.
When they are no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does excrement, simply seeing to it that they do not poison the air of his house.”
Notice the elites speaking of the "useless class"? Check out Hari and WEF.
Hitler used the words "useless eaters."
Unfortunately there is no 'left' in the US. There are commentators and many of them.
Celebrity journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald get gravitas, idolization and money from the interregnum we are in.
The intellectuals today, save Chris and a few others, are NGO and 501 C 3 intellectuals who do good work but do not reach the masses.
We need a counterculture.
Even the fascists have one: from haircuts to clothing.
We need to understand cultural hegemony and what Gramsci was telling us.
We need parallel institutions and economy.
And it must come from the most desperate and discriminated against.
It must be a working class movement not a Hegelian one.
I've been thinking about this, and yeah. Facts and truth, and being media literate are not enough to have a conversation about politics. People generally don't work that way.
If you square up and approach things like a debate in most cases you'll find yourself talking to a stone wall. It's arrogant and disrespectful. I would argue the ability to listen and understand someone else's perspective, and demonstrating a willingness to learn about and from them is the first step in the process of changing strongly held beliefs. It requires humility, respect, and active inquiry.
None of the "correct" information you can vomit up will have an impact if the person you're talking to flags you as being part of the different team. And in that respect, listening is far more important than being able to argue with the perceived authority of truth.
I think, OJ, it is a dialectic. Listening and responding.
For critical thinking we wish to assure that we know exactly the assumptions a person is making, the definition of their terms, the purpose of their discussion or writing, their goals, the conclusions they come to and how they arrived at them. The evidence they have for their assumptions and conclusions or if they have none, what they would need. And of course we must understand there are consequences to conclusions and we would want to know if the speaker acknowledges this. Finally, all points of view are biased for what they believe. Critical thinkers want to excavate these biases to understand them.
All of this of course requires a healthy appreciation for Socratic questioning, the art of probing reasoning which the above is.
And these questions should be metacogntive as well; learning to understand our own reasoning and point of view.
Without listening, how can I possibly hope to agree or disagree, sway or not sway a point of view?
We are not only not taught this, we are encouraged to abandon any notion of it and argue, as you state, from our own arrogance without precisely, clearly and concisely stating the point of view we disagree with or agree with.
We are taught hubris as individuals within Empire. And thus, we are taught that we are 'individuals' first, members of communities last and we seek not the right answers, but simply being 'right'.
I'm glad to hear there is a epistemological root to this argument (and of course there is, there is nothing new under the sun). I hope you'll forgive my relative ignorance in that regard, I am limited by a STEM education. I can teach you how to fly an airplane or how to use a chainsaw to fall a burning tree, but I am admittedly far less versed in the terminology of logic, debate, and its philosophical underpinnings.
Your comment on hubris I find particularly salient. As someone who has lived within other cultures, I find the profound lack of perspective Americans possess contributes to the general absence of empathy for other nations within our own cultural dialogue. My experiences living abroad have taught me that this individualistic nature is not a universal phenomenon. And naturally the only way you can approach this issue is, as you stated, by listening and understanding - building a rapport and common ground, though that process is often onerous.
As a former professor of philosophy, I saw first-hand what ‘standards’ and the push for ‘STEM’ did to the humanities. It virtually destroyed the fields.
Funding was withdrawn, course abolished and we were told that it was all to compete with China.
I am not saying STEM education is a bad thing.
What I am saying is we should go to school not to just learn how to make a living but how to live.
We should ask what it means to be human and what the ‘good life’ might look like and what policies promote them.
But scientism, a very different creature from science and the scientific method, has been shoved down our throats, literally.
It is the new religion and of course in classes in chemistry or biology one rarely questions the human condition.
In TX, critical thinking was deemed illegal to be taught in schools. I wrote about this eleven years ago.
Hi Maricata -- I enjoyed reading your thoughtful and witty comments and -- have learned a lot. Somewhat surprising since I am ten years older than young you ;-))
You have seen a lot. I hope your health is well and do wish you all the best.
We seem to be caught in that interregnum.
You will enjoy this very, very much.
I learned quite a bit from it.
Double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack, the US-born woman at the centre of the underground resistance to Nazism in Berlin during World War II. In conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred’s great-grandniece and author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
The lack of job security most Americans experience has certainly contributed to the absence of political dialogue in daily life, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned. When you spend the majority of your waking and productive hours with coworkers, work is a natural place to engage in political conversation. However, when the job is tenuous and you live a couple paychecks away from the street, how could you risk holding an unpopular opinion or showing open disagreement?
From my own workplace experiences there also frequently exists in management a sick obsession with obedience. I encountered it at the dead-end jobs I’ve worked and I’ve encountered it as a pilot – a discipline where blind obedience directly contradicts the principles of safety and ethics. When you choose integrity in these environments the consequence is siloing, harassment, and removal (if you don’t remove yourself first). When jobs are scarce and job security is nonexistent, those work environments turn the coworker who could otherwise be your ally into an informant and an enemy. The exchange of political ideas cannot take place where disagreement is actively punished, and if your choice is between disagreeing or keeping a roof over your head you don’t actually have a choice. It’s coercion.
To contrast this, the environment I now work in has a culture of open and active criticism. Everyone is always being criticized, all the time, tactfully or through a stream of obscenity. None of it is personal and most of it is entertaining. Ostensibly this activity is widely encouraged to increase safety, and certainly if you let people voice their opinions they will do so enthusiastically.
The side effect of this openness and willingness to piss each other off has been a vigorous and honest political exchange. One of the few places I’ve ever encountered it.
Most of us are not unionized, and we all lose our jobs anyway when the rains come in October, so job security isn’t really part of the calculation (union activity would benefit us in other ways). For other workplaces the security and solidarity afforded by a union could be the difference between a barren, oppressive and antisocial environment and one where a political dialogue can flourish. Seems like a strong remedy for polarization, actually. I wonder why unions are not more common...
As a former war correspondent , Chris why is there a virtual black out of coverage on the war in Yemen. Is it a Sunni Shite issue?
Thank you Chris for this excellent interview. The news is so biased I have gone from skeptical to cynical ; but to hear such clear analysis and understanding about media history todays sad state gives one hope (at least a glimmer)
Jimmy Dore must be exempt. It is surprising what speech he gets away with!
Because they use him to claim that dissent of tyranny is a bad thing.
That isthe way they can give the people an active target for censorship thereby further dividing the people. These tactics are clearly being used against the people and sadly, far too many have taken the bait. It will lead far worse outcomes. I have been a fan of Chris Hedges for many years.
I live abroad, OJ. I live in S. America and have for ten years and in Central America and MX for another three, not to mention two years in Europe.
Fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by traveling.
STEM education is what has turned Americans into illiterates, among other causes.
This is not reflection on you, but as a philosophy teacher, K-12 teacher for 25 years I see that most people go to school not to learn how to live, but to learn how to make a living.
And this is why humanities is under constant attack and defunding.
Critical thinking is not genetic, it is not something handed down in testaments or wills: it is learned.
America is an anti-intellectual culture and has been for multiple decades.
Thus, thinking is subversive and one is not rewarded for thinking critically unless it is to teach someone how to make a better widget.
This is why I left America ten years ago.
I am 70 years old so was able to get out.
At least get out of America.
Getting out of exploitation, sexism, classism and racism, to name a few, requires active collaboration and the development of a questioning mind. For it is the foundation for all progressive thinking.
If we do not, and I say we, for the problem exists everywhere, do not find a strategy for organizing and educating, then autocracy and fascism will rule the day.
The problem is that thinking is hard work which is why so many would rather contract it out to others than attempt to do it themselves.
Here, in South America, as bad as things are, there is more class consciousness than in America.
That is why my hope and work is here.
But yes, critical thinking is a field within philosophy and of course we are all critical and non-critical to some extent.
The issue is developing critical thinking in all endeavors, not just politics.
Wow Maricata - very thoughtful comments. Thank you
You are welcome. Stay safe and well
PS: Do you have a source for this quotation? Many thanks
As to the nation state:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
-----David Rockefeller
OK, let us see if this goes through.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/288636-we-are-grateful-to-the-washington-post-the-new-york
This is the latest site.
I have heard this quote and read it for years.
Knowing the Rockefeller family and their work especially in Latin America, among other historical contexts, it makes sense.
And when one puts it side by side with this quote from Strobe Talbott, CFR:
“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.
National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
-----Strobe Talbott President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.
it gives credibility to the quote from his boss.
These individuals are psychopaths, as you know, but you might not have read the quote by Maurice Strong which is even more debilitating:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, Opening Speech to UN Rio Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, accessed in http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/
Maurice Frederick Strong, PC, CC, OM, FRSC, FRAIC (April 29, 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong
Excellent -- thank you !! All went through and received with gratitude...
Very strange often when I post and it appears and then disappears.
Let me know if it shows up.
It was posted as a 'reply' but within seconds disappeared.
This link is not functional:
blob: https://www.facebook.com/98e8b464-6c34-43ef-a51b-3c847be281e0
Alas, the memory hole is growing into a sink hole.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, observations, & experiences, Maricata & much of what you say resonates with me. I made the very wise decision myself to head abroad in '09 & have no desire to move back...which my friends & family (left, right, & center) simply struggle to wrap their minds around based on their propagandized perspective on the Great America. Every time I explain how much better life is in nearly all of the countries, rich & poor, that I've lived in, they simply scoff at the possibility & go back to discussing professional sports, the latest reality TV show, or whatever the mainstream political talking point is at the moment.
The class consciousness you mention is so sorely missing, but I hold little hope for any awareness or understanding of it for Americans.
Keep living, keep sharing, keep educating, & keep making the world better where you are...maybe eventually others will recognize & 'get out of America' as well in order to begin to collaborate, develop, witness class struggle, and engage in critical thinking!
Thanks for writing, Mark. I am not sure if what I write is posting. Things disappear.
It is difficult to speak with Americans about anything that rubs their self-justifying belief systems the wrong way.
Many are suffering from mass psychosis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
It is like birds born in cages.
They think flying is insane.
Thank you for responding and sharing your thoughts.
Our problems are global, and each of us must make our own decisions as to how to live and why.
I can only wish you well, Mark.
Wow - even better -- very impressive. Especially “birds in a cage” thought...
Thanks a lot !!!
FYI - a great interview with Rumble CEO on TC Today: "The Rise of Rumble"
It is not the messengers who are important in this discussion for me. What is important is the descriptions of what is wrong as well as having an ideology and n a attempt at finding solutions to some of the most effective roadblocks to our ability to actually be able to think critically about where we are and the actual consequences of our continuing to be bamboozled by media. Nothing changes if nothing changes! Its a place in which to find hope and in our current situation there has been very little if any to drive the actions for that change.
At this point, we need to give up on democracy. It is a joke. The day and age of the nation-state is over....time to recognize that and move on. Do I have an alternative, no. Any "ism" out there has the problem with the "Iron Law of Oligarchy" such that the little man is always pissed on. Don't believe me? Look at Cuba...sure...great health care but the leaders in the government live A LOT better than the common folks. Human selfishness and greed is the same everywhere. At this point maybe anarchy is something worth checking out?
Cuba? Pax Americana has blocked a beaming possibility. Cast aside by red bating. Castro helped educate an illiterate population that would put the MAGA south to shame! The US Oligarchy and Empire's of the past show greed and human selfishness are from the few not everyone. The "devil and the details" are missing from anarchy but some sort of revolution and a third party is a must. I have ordered the book and hopefully get some details for change before the masters of men have their boots on our faces forever. As Orwell said "Remember I said Forever"!
I have been to Cuba. Beautiful country and such lovely people. Agreed - the blockade is actually cruel and hurts only the common folks...not the Cuban elite. My point is every nation-state that I have seen has some level of oligarchy that crushes the spirit of that country. It is almost as if decentralization will provide a more progressive life for everyone!
Power (Corporations and the Rich) vs Countervailing Power (Real democratic government with Unions or people power). A small government stands no chance against them just like individualism, John Kenneth Galbreath wrote a good book "Understanding Power" and I re-read it now again would be a good start for a lot of people. He once sarcastically said just before his death on the extreme right swing of the USA "I look fondly back at the Reagan years" when he saw the PNAC Neo Cons taking power. Along with yesterdays man Joe Biden and Neo Liberal Clinton. They made Reagan look almost left wing although extreme right for his time.
Ironically the one thing AOC was right about...there is no 'left wing' in the US - not in the true sense of the word. Joe Biden/Obama/Bush/Trump...all of the are right wingers. Their love for war and complete disdain for the common man is a give away. Biden actually screwed over the rail workers by forcing the union to accept a 'deal.' Who would have thought a DEMOCRAT to do this? This is a Reagan move...but, alas, the uni-party answers to the corporations. To this day NO ONE has addressed the lead pipes in Flint MI. BUT, we did GIVE $100 Billion to Ukraine nazis. If anything, the US government is a criminal enterprise...a legalized version of the mafioso. @Jim harper - I can only hope over the next year the countervailing power grows in this country.
We are seeing mass psychosis in the US. The system is driving people literally crazy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09maaUaRT4M
I think the following quote captures most of it:
“We are staring down at the corpse of the American Dream, tied like a trophy hunter’s kill to the roof of our new electric vehicles (leased, never owned!), unaware that what we are looking at is our own future. Efforts to present this atrocity as either “new” or “normal” have been found wanting over the past year, and it seems all but impossible that that element of the New Normal will be achieved – but humans are adaptable creatures, and we can con ourselves into pretty much anything.”
blob:https://www.facebook.com/98e8b464-6c34-43ef-a51b-3c847be281e0
As to Americans and class consciousness. The US ruling class understands well the class struggle and they surely do have the class consciousness for their class.
For the average American, if If I can be general, are like birds born in cages.
They think flying is an illness.
Thanks for your reply and sharing your life.
https://censorednews.substack.com/p/biden-admin-told-facebook-to-censor
BRAVO “Censored News” – for using correct term for a photo of Biden's Digital Director Rob Flaherty:
“ This, ladies and gentlemen, is what a modern fascist looks like: Rob Flaherty. “
You have seen a lot. I hope your health is well and do wish you all the best.
We seem to be caught in that interregnum.
You will enjoy this very, very much.
I learned quite a bit from it.
Double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack, the US-born woman at the centre of the underground resistance to Nazism in Berlin during World War II. In conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred’s great-grandniece and author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e63-64-mildred-fish-harnack/
This is the most recent siting of this quote.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/288636-we-are-grateful-to-the-washington-post-the-new-york
Ron Paul in September of this year asked where the quote came from.
This is not the first time I have heard this quote and when laid side by side with Rockefeller and his families agenda, it appears to me to be valid.
This is another quote that expresses a similar idea.
“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority.
National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”
-----Strobe Talbott President Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, l992.
Talbott was CFR, Council on Foreign Relations and this of course was spawned by the Rockefeller family.
But it gets worse:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong, Opening Speech to UN Rio Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, accessed in http://www.infowars.com/maurice-strong-in-1972-isnt-it-our-responsibility-to-collapse-industrial-societies/
Maurice Frederick Strong, PC, CC, OM, FRSC, FRAIC (April 29, 1929 – November 27, 2015) was a Canadian oil and mineral businessman and a diplomat who served as Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Strong)
We are dealing with psychopaths on both sides of the crumbling aisle.
I wish the guests had acknowledged that their analysis of cable news is precisely that of Matt Taibbi. They just parrot what he says in Hate Inc.
I'm sorry to have to say this, but I concluded the guests were so isolated in their ivory tower that I didn't hear anything from them that I could actually use in my life. I found the talk to be wall-to-wall concepts, without anything that touched the real world. Perhaps that's what academic life does to you..
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than imagine the end of capitalism.”
---- Mark Fisher
https://files.libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%20No%20Alternat%20-%20Mark%20Fisher.pdf
Capitalism and democracy are not compatible. Never have been.
Under capitalism:
"The difference between democracy and dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first, and take orders later; in a dictatorship, you don't have to waste your time voting."
---------Charles Bukowski
As to the nation state:
“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years......It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.
But, the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government.
The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
-----David Rockefeller
The nation state is and will be reduced to nothing more than the managerial desk for global capitalism.
Without the values of critical thinking, and yes there are values, the cognitive engine alone will not wake up the people.
https://louisville.edu/ideastoaction/about/criticalthinking/framework
“Anyone who wants to rule men first tries to humiliate them, to trick them out of their rights and their capacity for resistance, until they are as powerless before him as animals,” wrote Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power of the autocrat.
“He uses them like animals and, even if he does not tell them so, in himself he always knows quite clearly that they mean just as little to him; when he speaks to his intimates, he will call them sheep or cattle.
His ultimate aim is to incorporate them into himself and to suck the substance out of them.
What remains of them afterwards does not matter to him.
The worse he has treated them, the more he despises them.
When they are no more use at all, he disposes of them as he does excrement, simply seeing to it that they do not poison the air of his house.”
Notice the elites speaking of the "useless class"? Check out Hari and WEF.
Hitler used the words "useless eaters."
Unfortunately there is no 'left' in the US. There are commentators and many of them.
Celebrity journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald get gravitas, idolization and money from the interregnum we are in.
The intellectuals today, save Chris and a few others, are NGO and 501 C 3 intellectuals who do good work but do not reach the masses.
We need a counterculture.
Even the fascists have one: from haircuts to clothing.
We need to understand cultural hegemony and what Gramsci was telling us.
We need parallel institutions and economy.
And it must come from the most desperate and discriminated against.
It must be a working class movement not a Hegelian one.
I've been thinking about this, and yeah. Facts and truth, and being media literate are not enough to have a conversation about politics. People generally don't work that way.
If you square up and approach things like a debate in most cases you'll find yourself talking to a stone wall. It's arrogant and disrespectful. I would argue the ability to listen and understand someone else's perspective, and demonstrating a willingness to learn about and from them is the first step in the process of changing strongly held beliefs. It requires humility, respect, and active inquiry.
None of the "correct" information you can vomit up will have an impact if the person you're talking to flags you as being part of the different team. And in that respect, listening is far more important than being able to argue with the perceived authority of truth.
I think, OJ, it is a dialectic. Listening and responding.
For critical thinking we wish to assure that we know exactly the assumptions a person is making, the definition of their terms, the purpose of their discussion or writing, their goals, the conclusions they come to and how they arrived at them. The evidence they have for their assumptions and conclusions or if they have none, what they would need. And of course we must understand there are consequences to conclusions and we would want to know if the speaker acknowledges this. Finally, all points of view are biased for what they believe. Critical thinkers want to excavate these biases to understand them.
All of this of course requires a healthy appreciation for Socratic questioning, the art of probing reasoning which the above is.
And these questions should be metacogntive as well; learning to understand our own reasoning and point of view.
Without listening, how can I possibly hope to agree or disagree, sway or not sway a point of view?
We are not only not taught this, we are encouraged to abandon any notion of it and argue, as you state, from our own arrogance without precisely, clearly and concisely stating the point of view we disagree with or agree with.
We are taught hubris as individuals within Empire. And thus, we are taught that we are 'individuals' first, members of communities last and we seek not the right answers, but simply being 'right'.
I'm glad to hear there is a epistemological root to this argument (and of course there is, there is nothing new under the sun). I hope you'll forgive my relative ignorance in that regard, I am limited by a STEM education. I can teach you how to fly an airplane or how to use a chainsaw to fall a burning tree, but I am admittedly far less versed in the terminology of logic, debate, and its philosophical underpinnings.
Your comment on hubris I find particularly salient. As someone who has lived within other cultures, I find the profound lack of perspective Americans possess contributes to the general absence of empathy for other nations within our own cultural dialogue. My experiences living abroad have taught me that this individualistic nature is not a universal phenomenon. And naturally the only way you can approach this issue is, as you stated, by listening and understanding - building a rapport and common ground, though that process is often onerous.
As a former professor of philosophy, I saw first-hand what ‘standards’ and the push for ‘STEM’ did to the humanities. It virtually destroyed the fields.
Funding was withdrawn, course abolished and we were told that it was all to compete with China.
I am not saying STEM education is a bad thing.
What I am saying is we should go to school not to just learn how to make a living but how to live.
We should ask what it means to be human and what the ‘good life’ might look like and what policies promote them.
But scientism, a very different creature from science and the scientific method, has been shoved down our throats, literally.
It is the new religion and of course in classes in chemistry or biology one rarely questions the human condition.
In TX, critical thinking was deemed illegal to be taught in schools. I wrote about this eleven years ago.
https://truthout.org/articles/texas-gop-declares-no-more-teaching-of-critical-thinking-skills-in-texas-public-schools/
Fascism is cured by reading and racism is cured by traveling.
Americans do little of either.
There are no civics classes in high school or even junior high.
Education, once thought of as a human right has now been commodified and weaponized for profit seeking and war.
But then this has always been the case.
I have lived a quarter of my life outside of the US.
And yes, another world is possible but talking to most Americans, only the telephone is the Oracle of Delphi.
Hi Maricata -- I enjoyed reading your thoughtful and witty comments and -- have learned a lot. Somewhat surprising since I am ten years older than young you ;-))
Stay well
You have seen a lot. I hope your health is well and do wish you all the best.
We seem to be caught in that interregnum.
You will enjoy this very, very much.
I learned quite a bit from it.
Double podcast episode about Mildred Fish-Harnack, the US-born woman at the centre of the underground resistance to Nazism in Berlin during World War II. In conversation with Rebecca Donner, Mildred’s great-grandniece and author of All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days.
https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e63-64-mildred-fish-harnack/