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Chris Hedges: "All cultures decay and die. Dying cultures...begin to deeply fear change"
from truthdig:
The Wages of Sin
Posted on Apr 10, 2016
By Chris Hedges
When Plato wrote “The Republic,” his lament for a lost Athenian democracy, he did not believe democracy could be recovered. The classical world, unlike our own, did not see time as linear. Time was cyclical. It inevitably brought decay and eventually death. This true for both individuals and societies. And in his “Republic,” Plato proposed that those who attempted in the future to create the ideal state carry out a series of draconian measures, including banning drama and music, which diverted the citizen from performing civic duties and instilled corruption, and removing children from their parents to provide a proper indoctrination. Plato wanted to slow the process of dissolution. He wanted to stymie change. But that decay and death would come was certain, even in Plato’s ideal state.
History has proved the ancient Greeks correct: All cultures decay and die. Dying cultures, even when they cannot fully articulate their reality, begin to deeply fear change. Change, they find, brings with it increasing dysfunction, misery and suffering. This fear of change soon becomes irrational. It compounds decay and accelerates morbidity. To see modern-day victims of this process, we need only look to white American workers who once had good manufacturing jobs and benefited from the structures of white supremacy.
Those who promise to miraculously roll back time rise up in decaying cultures to hypnotize a bewildered and confused population. Plastic surgeons who provide the illusion of eternal youth, religious leaders who promise a return to a simplified biblical morality, political demagogues who hold out the promise of a renewed greatness, and charlatans offering techniques for self-advancement and success all peddle magical thinking. A desperate population, fearing change, clamors for greater and greater illusion. The forces that ensure collective death—including corporate capitalism, the fossil fuel industry and the animal agriculture industry—are blotted out of consciousness.
When a society laments the past and dreads the future, when it senses the looming presence of death, it falls down a rabbit hole. And as in the case of Alice—who “went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it”—language becomes unmoored from experience. Daily discourse, especially public discourse, is, as our presidential campaign illustrates, reduced to childish gibberish.
.....(snip).....
The pent-up anger and frustration among the white working class have given birth to dark pathologies of hate. The hate is directed against those of different skin color or ethnicity who somehow seem to have heralded the changes that destroyed families and communities.
This sentiment, on display at Donald Trump rallies, will outlive the Trump campaign even should the candidate be, as I expect, deposed by the party elites. It is a very dangerous force. ............(more)
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_wages_of_sin_20160410
18 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The classical world, unlike our own, did not see time as linear.
Whose "world" does he call "our own"?
Perhaps it's his naivete and modern eurocentric assumptions that default "linear" as the "norm" because that is the belief within his culture, which in turn explains why the below happens -
The pent-up anger and frustration among the white working class have given birth to dark pathologies of hate. The hate is directed against those of different skin color or ethnicity who somehow seem to have heralded the changes that destroyed families and communities.
The whole piece is like a hyperbolic alpha and omega.
At the end, death arrives as a relief.
We are no more immune to the forces of decay and death than were ancient Athens, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Aztecs, Easter Island, Europe’s feudal society of lords and serfs, and the monarchal empires in early 20th-century Europe. Human nature has not changed. We will react as those before us reacted when they faced collapse. We will be increasingly consumed by illusion. We will seek to stop time, to prevent change, to embrace magical thinking in a desperate effort to return to an idealized past. Many will suffer.
This time, collapse will be planetwide. There will be no new lands to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate, no new natural resources to plunder and exploit. Climate change will teach us a brutal lessen about hubris.
We are no more immune to the forces of decay and death than were ancient Athens, ancient Egypt, ancient Rome, the Mayans, the Aztecs, Easter Island, Europe’s feudal society of lords and serfs, and the monarchal empires in early 20th-century Europe. Human nature has not changed. We will react as those before us reacted when they faced collapse. We will be increasingly consumed by illusion. We will seek to stop time, to prevent change, to embrace magical thinking in a desperate effort to return to an idealized past. Many will suffer.
This time, collapse will be planetwide. There will be no new lands to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate, no new natural resources to plunder and exploit. Climate change will teach us a brutal lessen about hubris.
Meanwhile he misses the fact that although no longer "ruling the world", most if not all of those ancient societies are still here - notably the large cities. Athens is still around. Luxor is still around. Rome & Constantinople (now called Istanbul) are still here. The irony of his mention of the Mayans in an attempt to be "inclusive", was that many within his own culture, assumed that the famous "
Long count) Maya calendar" marked the "end of the world", yet it merely marked the end of a cycle.
The "human nature" part that is missed is that humans tend to congregate in places that offer sustenance or provide access to it (as stopovers along trade routes) and many of the ancient cities were situated and built/rebuilt (many many times) to maximize that. He also misses that many many societies worked with nature for millenia, and when doing so, were (and still are) branded as "savages" and "uncivilized" by his culture, while his culture worked to "tame" it and "conquer" it. If anything, I don't think he gives "mother nature" enough credit for balancing out the planet in other ways, in order to come into scientific equilibrium.
