American Psychosis - Chris Hedges on the US empire of narcissism and psychopathy.

beauty grief death the struggle with our own mortality the search for a life of meaning love the capacity for transformation those forces are ones that make us stop and become introspective and think and and look within ourselves to see who we are and where we're going and that's what any totalitarian state seeks to crush and yet we kind of blissfully have checked out [Music] most people have no concept of how fragile their environment is i think you have to have as i have done live in societies that collapse to realize how quickly they go down and how fragile they are and so there's a kind of emotional incapacity to understand collapse even when it's facing you i spent 20 years outside the united states and i had covered as a foreign correspondent totalitarian cultures everything from the east german stasi state to slobodan milosevic's serbia so i know how totalitarian systems work i know the kind of dark emotions they evoke i know the mechanisms they use to shut down dissent and when i came back it was utterly apparent that the country had gone collectively insane in a very frightening way not only their misunderstanding of the wider world something as a foreign correspondent i was very cognizant of but their misunderstanding of who they were and where they were going [Music] the nature of illusion is that it's designed at least at the moment to make you feel good about yourself about your country about where you're going in that sense it functions like a drug those who question that illusion are challenged not so much for the veracity of what they say but for puncturing those feelings attempt to get up and question where we're going and who we are and the critique will be that you're such a pessimist that you're such a cynic that you're not an optimist optimism becomes a kind of disease it's what created the financial meltdown where you have this kind of cheerful optimism in the face of utter catastrophe and you plow forward based on an optimism that is no longer rooted in reality if hope becomes something you express through illusion then it's not hope it's fantasy [Music] the cult of the self is in biblical terms a form of idolatry everything is about you whether it's the worship of power or money it all goes back to the self it all goes back to creating little monuments to yourself all investment into a particular goal of self-aggrandizement is a kind of pathetic attempt at self-exaltation in a kind of maybe even subconscious way of immortality [Music] we have replicated the patterns that pass civilizations in collapse underwent an elite that is no longer connected with the real that retreats into their bubbles like the forbidden city or versailles yet has total economic and political power the crumbling of infrastructure civilizations always decay their cities go first we've already done that the retreat into illusion the danger is that this time when we go down the whole planet's gonna go with us the corporate state has made a war against critical thinking and in particular humanities because the humanities at their best are about teaching people how to think rather than what to think they're about teaching people to challenge assumptions and structures the discipline of the humanities is subversive it's meant to be subversive the other thing that the failure to think critically does is it creates a very frightening historical amnesia so you don't know how you got here you don't know where you came from and again that is something that popular culture let's call it totalitarian capitalism seeks to put in place so that people interpret their problems as personal problems rather than political or social problems when you don't understand what's going on when you imbibe the illusion that you're fed the belief that reality is never an impediment to what you desire that you can have everything you want that blinds you it keeps you from seeing what's happening around you then because you are intellectually and emotionally unprepared you scream for moral renewal and a new savior and a demagogue and vengeance and at that point you vomited up these very frightening figures so the lunatic fringe of our political establishment which is often laughed at by even a majority of the populists in moments like that suddenly seizes [Music] power you can oftentimes in moments of breakdown have a society a clamor for their own enslavement [Music] the cost that we're paying is that the forces arrayed against us are going to kill us unfettered unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force as karl marx understood it exploits everything everything becomes a commodity human beings become commodities the natural world becomes a commodity that it exploits until exhaustion or collapse and that's why the environmental crisis is intimately twinned with the economic crisis 40 of the summer arctic sea ice melts and that becomes a business opportunity for shell that's up there dropping half billion dollar drill bits down into the arctic sea it's insane when societies reach the kind of end stage the language by they use to describe their own economic and political and social and cultural reality there's no resemblance to that reality which is where we are the language of free-market laissez-faire capitalism is what they feed business students and the wider public but it is an ideology that bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality and that gets back to the fact of living in a kind of culture uh warped by pervasive illusion and self-delusion [Music] totalitarian societies by their nature are hyper masculine cultures and seek to banish empathy they not only ignore the vulnerable and the weak but they ridicule them and persecute them they celebrate supposed values of force strength violence and empathy is seen as weakness i mean in a free market society all of those companies like goldman sachs would have gone into bankruptcy but we don't live in a so-called free market we live in a kind of bizarre species of corporate socialism so in the end process of decayed states you have forces in essence cannibalizing the state itself which is where we are [Music] i mean a poor person of color on the streets of camden new jersey are worth nothing to the state put them behind bars they're worth 40 or 50 000 a year to prison contractors and food service companies and phone card companies and that is something that is very real but often not even understood by the by the victims themselves totalitarian societies seek to funnel all intellectual and emotional energy into spectacle into the super bowl into celebrity saga that's why the nazi party made sure every single household got a free radio and now you sit there and watch basketball wise you see jay-z's crib and how many cars he has and it's the great kind of pacifier i wrote a book called empire of illusion the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle which is about the danger of unplugging yourself from a print-based culture so i actively resist the attempts by popular culture which of course is largely dominated by for-profit corporations to give me a language by which i speak and an understanding of the world underneath the guise of consumerism is unadulterated hedonism i mean it's infected everything including spirituality which in its real form has nothing to do with us it has to do with our i mean the whole point of and again i speak as a seminarian a life of commitment is picking up a cross it's not a pleasant experience it's it's one that gives one uh a sense of meaning a sense of purpose so you know i think that again it goes back to values which are largely an anathema to the consumer society those are our values that are rooted in self-sacrifice it's about giving it's about self-effacement it's about understanding that a life of fulfillment comes through service not through the attainment and acquisition of money wealth and things and i think that that wisdom which sort of crosses all religious traditions is real [Music] i mean creating community and and freud wrote about it carl papa wrote about it brings with it a kind of anxiety and a kind of responsibility and you know freud would argue even a level of neurosis because there's always that tension between individual desire and community responsibility and i think that that tension is real but one that's necessary and the consumer society plays very well on that magnifies that anxiety to push people into behavior which is not only destructive to the community but finally deeply self-destructive i covered the revolutions in eastern europe i saw how lonely acts of defiance to totalitarian regimes which at the moment were considered futile kept alive another narrative ironic points of light that's what acts of conscience acts of rebellion do it appears often at the moment that it's meaningless but when you stand up to decayed systems of power systems of evil and you speak a truth even people within those systems hear your voice and that's why the state is pushing through one draconian law after another whether it's the wholesale spine and eavesdropping monitoring photographing of every american citizen whether it's the use of the espionage act to shut down whistleblowers whether it's the national defense authorization acts and section 1021 for which i sued the president federal court in one which permits the us military to seize u.s citizens and hold them indefinitely without due process and military facilities they're all doing this for a reason they know what's coming and i've covered uprisings all over the world you know when the tinder is there you never know what's going to trigger it you never know when it's going to come you never know how it's going to express itself but you know it's there and it's definitely here [Music] the corporate state knows no limits at this point it has no regulation it has no government control it writes its own laws it writes its own legislation so that the rise of popular culture and the obliteration of real culture is part of this entire corporate totalitarian assault on beauty and truth and that's what they have to seek to eradicate because those forces are ones that remind us about how we should live and about what it means to be human you know going into sarajevo which i did during the war or 2 000 children i've been shot 45 my own colleagues have been killed four to five dead a day two dozen wounded a day constant sniper fire wasn't pleasant but it was meaningful and one i think has to begin to make that decision whether they want a life that means something or whether they want to leap from one hedonistic high to another you can't talk about hope if you can't see reality and reality is pretty bleak but that's the starting point [Music] you

Channel: UNM

Views: 395,752

Rating: 4.8562431 out of 5

Keywords: psykosis, klimate, hedes, merican, psychosis, american, chris hedges, narcissism, trump, cult, narcissist, abuse, gaslighting, gaslight, psychology, spirituality, apocalypse, armeggedon

Id: ythOLteROK0

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/fattycakesfaker]

Listening to Chris Hedges is not for the faint of heart. I always want to swallow a bottle of pills immediately afterwards.

(No, not really. Please don’t send the suicide bot to my inbox).

[u/juicesance]

I'd like to comb my fingers through Chris's hedge.

[u/totallyabsurd3]

SS: Friday ?

This got 'pulled' the other day ...mod's gonna mod , and God bless them ! ... Chris has some great quotes here ... It's not just America folks !

( from the youtube blurb : " Chris Hedges on the US empire of narcissism and psychopathy. Directed by Amanda Zackem (http://www.americancanary.org) Short film by American Canary. )

Have a great day !

[u/blueskiesandclover]

Is this from a longer interview? I'd like to hear it if possible

[u/BakaTensai]

This guy says literally the same thing in every video I’ve ever seen with him. Not saying he’s wrong but… he’s got his “brand” and he’s sticking to it