What happens to a society that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion? We are locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, we as 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], enthrals the country … despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class. Our culture of flagrant self-exaltation, hardwired in the western 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 queue’s , the prisons and the soup kitchens. It is the cult of self that is killing us. 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. Chris Hedges - Western Psychosis Edited. (thanks Barbara Kane)
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 23:54:02 +0000
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