American Psychosis

[agent46]

The United States, locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusions. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and the absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another, whether it is Michael Jackson, Britney Spears [or Miley Cyrus], enthralls the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

The virtues that sustain a nation-state and build community, from honesty to self-sacrifice to transparency to sharing, are ridiculed each night on television as rubes stupid enough to cling to this antiquated behavior are voted off reality shows. Fellow competitors for prize money and a chance for fleeting fame, cheered on by millions of viewers, elect to “disappear” the unwanted. In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Celebrities that can no longer generate publicity, good or bad, vanish. Life, these shows persistently teach, is a brutal world of unadulterated competition and a constant quest for notoriety and attention.

Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the American character, permits the humiliation of all those who oppose us. We believe, after all, that because we have the capacity to wage war we have a right to wage war. Those who lose deserve to be erased. Those who fail, those who are deemed ugly, ignorant or poor, should be belittled and mocked. Human beings are used and discarded like Styrofoam boxes that held junk food. And the numbers of superfluous human beings are swelling the unemployment offices, the prisons and the soup kitchens.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Michael Jackson, from his phony marriages to the portraits of himself dressed as royalty to his insatiable hunger for new toys to his questionable relationships with young boys, had all these qualities. And this is also the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. It is the nationwide celebration of image over substance, of illusion over truth. And it is why investment bankers blink in confusion when questioned about the morality of the billions in profits they made by selling worthless toxic assets to investors.

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/90/hedges-american-psychosis.html

[Moliere]

1. Of course it's Chris Hedges

Edited to include and express my man-crush for Chris

[RobertEarl]

2. Bravo! For the Truth!

The way this country is: You are only as good as your last credit report.

[agent46]

3. Chris Hedges

Should be required reading in every AP English class in America.

[defacto7]

4. This is as real as it gets.

I have written on the same points myself, I'm sure not as eloquently but the premise and points are right out of my own head. That is a painting of the 21st century United States of America.

[duffyduff]

5. His smearing of Michael Jackson is totally uncalled for.

Fuck Chris Hedges for that.

[awoke_in_2003]

10. God forbid...

a serial child molester be smeared. Fuck the corpse of Michael Jackson and his Jesus Juice.

[ReRe]

6. Marking to read the rest later tonight!

Thanks for posting

[niyad]

7. k and r and bookmarking for later

[zeemike]

8. "the cult of self"

Yep that pretty well sums it up.
And if you look closely you can see when it began...in the 80s....and you can't pin it to one single thing but the thing that represents the change to me is that move where the song goes.
"My future's so bright I gotta wear shades"

[Art_from_Ark]

11. I thought it began in the '70s

After all, weren't the '70s referred to as the "Me Decade"?

[defacto7]

13. It was referred to that until the 90s came along.

It was probably labeled that by the greatest generation comparing free love the previous social standard. Once economics of the 80s took over, it gathered a whole new meaning. The idea of "love, love, love" became passé. It was overtaken by "money, money, money".

[Art_from_Ark]

14. I don't know how much "free love" had to do with it

The '70s were pretty hedonistic, all right, but that was the decade when I came of age, and I do remember it being a somewhat greedy and egotistical decade- not as bad as the '80s, but still somewhat selfish, especially after the Vietnam War ended.

[zeemike]

15. That is not how I experienced it.

The 70s is when the 60s really happened.
In the 70s we through out a cooked president and elected a genuine good man...in the 80s we installed an actor to play the part.

[Art_from_Ark]

18. In the '70s, we also elected a bad man-- by a landslide--

even after revelations of wrongdoing were leaking out, and even though the guy had been suspected of being a crook for more than 2 decades. Not to mention that 18-to-20-year-olds were voting in a presidential election for the first time.

[zeemike]

19. And how many of them actually voted?

It may have been because of Nixon that Carter was elected...in fact I am sure of it.
Many of my friend voted for the first time for Carter because they thought they had a real choice for the first time...there was great optimism when Carter came in.

[Art_from_Ark]

20. I imagine quite a few of them voted

Nixon probably gained their confidence by announcing, through Kissinger, a deal in October 1972, just before the election, that would apparently end American involvement in the Vietnam War-- "Peace is at hand".

Carter barely beat Ford, and he won a lot of Southern states that had voted for Nixon in the previous election, not so much out of idealism, but because Carter was a fellow Southerner while Ford was an unelected Northerner. If the Democrat in that election had been someone like Humphrey, I think Ford would probably have won.

[zeemike]

21. Well to get back to the original point.

It was my experience that it did not start in the 70s...in fact that decade was really the 60s in it's as we think of it...there was a lot of free love, lots of drugs, and partying...and no party was cool unless you had at least one black person there...I lived in a party house with friends and we lived like it was the 60 that you see in the movies.
In the 80s is when things changed.
That is when the hippie wannabes found Jesus and Reagan started the drug war...and the left leaders became money market managers...and greed was good...love and peace were kicked to the curb.

But that was just my experience, yours may be different.

[Art_from_Ark]

22. Nixon started the drug war in June 1971

It kind of petered out under Ford and Carter, but Reagan ramped it back up.

I do not see the '70s as being the '60s. Far from it. I think the '60s ended with the election of 1972, if not before. I traveled all over the country in the '70s, particularly the Midwest, South and East, and from my experiences I do think it was the "Me Decade". There were plenty of people then who were just concerned about what was in it for them. Reagan just helped take it to a higher dimension.

[Grey]

9. K&R

[libdem4life]

12. If I could write like that, I would have written exactly that. Every concept and thought has passed

and/or lodged in my consciousness. It's a damn hard read...and I'm glad I'm old. But as luck would have it, I was a late mom and have a millenial with a (political) father in deep denial. So I can't drop out, as easy as it would be for an old hippie.

Namaste.

[aikoaiko]

16. It seems like I've read that same angst-filled topic several times over the last 10 years.

[PowerToThePeople]

17. I have thought these thoughts

I have even posted here recently on our misguided love of celebrity.