UFPPC ( www.ufppc.org ) — Digging Deeper XCIV: September 7, 2009, 7:00 p.m.

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, July 2009).

[Thesis. America is only a shell of what it was; its core values have been betrayed by an oligarchic elite that has fostered an ever more pervasive culture of illusion that serves its interests while it distracts those it exploits. The culture of illusion is an aspect of imperial decline and manifests itself in many complementary ways, ultimately undermining democracy and rendering Americans incapable to responding to reality.]

Ch. 1: The Illusion of Literacy. World Wrestling Entertainment bouts are “virtualized battles” in which those in “small stations in life . . . engage in a heroic battle to fight back” (5; 1-6). From the 1950s to the 1980s, bouts evoked evil foreigners; then they shifted to evoke class disparities (6-8). Now they are “all about winning . . . about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood” (10; 8-11). Authorities are sleazy and corrupt (11-12). Women are sexually objectified (12-14). Celebrity culture is like Plato’s cave (14-15). Daniel Boorstin’s The Image (1961) foresaw the danger of living within illusory images (15). Neil Gabler argues that celebrity culture is a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture (16). Hollywood and the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in L.A. suggest that “in American society our gods are celebrities” (17; 16-20). The exploitation of three soldiers (Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley) in the famous photo of Iwo Jima shows how “[i]llusion, especially as presented in movies, can replace reality” (20; 20-22). It “worked because it was what the public wanted to believe about themselves. It was what the government and the military wanted to promote” (21-

22). The internet culture of connectivity has common roots in the contemporary “terror of anonymity” (22-24). Exaltations of superficiality, cosmetic surgery, New Age mysticism, pop psychology, motivational speakers, success gospel evangelism, and TV shows like American Idol and The Swan, are expressions of celebrity culture, which condemns reality “as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as inhibiting our inner essence and power” (27; 23-29). Survivor expresses the moral nihilism of celebrity culture, in which human beings become commodities (29-34). Degradation as entertainment, as in The Jerry Springer Show, is the “squalid underside to the glamour of celebrity culture” (34; 34-37). Using distraction from reality, celebrities sell products we do not need (37-38). “The fame of celebrities, wrote [C. Wright] Mills, disguises those who possess true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite” (38). Brave New World was a more prescient dystopia than 1984 (39). Reality TV (39-40). Jade Goody, a British ignoramus made a celebrity by Big Brother 3, whose death from cancer was marketed for entertainment (42-44). American culture is giving up the tools to deal with complexity; illiteracy is rampant (7m illiterate; 27m can’t complete a job application; 30m can’t read a simple sentence; 50m read at 4th- or 5th-grade level; nearly 1/3 of the U.S. population “is illiterate or barely literate”) (44). “A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read or a book” (44). Television dominates (44-45). Celebrity culture produces “junk politics” that

markets feelings and narratives, which need not be true (45-48). “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring” (49). An expression of democracy, celebrity culture has undermined democracy by making it defenseless against propaganda (49-53). “The flight into illusion sweeps away the core values of the open society” (52). “Blind faith in illusions is our culture’s secular version of being born again” (53).

Ch. 2: The Illusion of Love. A porn industry convention in Los Vegas; pornography promotes masturbation, not sex (55-57). The U.S. pornography industry makes 13,000 films a year in the U.S.; “worldwide porn revenues” are $97bn (58). The trauma of women involved in the industry (58-60). Scripts turned to “greater male control and cruelty” in the 1980s (61). Degradation (61-63). Las Vegas is “the corrupt, willfully degenerate heart of America,” a “monument to pseudo-events” (63; 63-66). Many porn films evoke reality TV or sitcoms (66-67). Stars are expensive prostitutes on the side (67-68). An example: Arianna Jollee (68-72). Porn has “devolved” into “the physical abuse, even torture, of women”; it expresses “the endemic cruelty of our society” (72; 72-74). Male porn professionals (75-78). Medical problems (78-79). The Internet as “the curse and salvation of the industry,” providing easy access but constantly upping the ante (79; 79-82). “Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about necrophilia” (82). Silicone dolls, $7500 each (82-85). “Porn has evolved to its logical conclusion” (86). It shares in what war glorifies: domination and cruelty (87). “[Porn] is the disease of corporate and imperial power” (87).

Ch. 3: The Illusion of Wisdom. Our elite universities are to blame for the nation’s multiple failures to sustain its values (89). They “disdain honest intellectual inquiry” and instead “organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such answers” (89). Specialization fragments (90). Adorno’s essay, “Education after Auschwitz” (90). Interview with Henry Giroux, author of The University in Chains (90-92). Corporations have tamed and now exploit UC Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement (92-96). Our academic specialists in the humanities are “illiterate” by “any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western civilization” (John Ralston Saul) (96). Our elites use “a private dialect that is a barrier to communication as well as common sense” (97). Professors of literature are “disempowering and emasculating the very works they study” (97). Though literature is “a tool to enlighten societies about their ills,” academics have “eviscerated and destroyed” its works (97). Classics is neglected (97-98). The elite educational system instills the delusion of superiority and entitlement in its products (98-100). Hedges admires more the values of his “working-class family in Maine” (101). Supposedly interested in diversity, elite institutions ignore class and favor their own (101-02). Having neglected and then undermined the humanities, the elites lack a capacity for critical reflection (103). They are “products of a moral void” (103). They exalt analytic, morally neutral intelligence, and determine worth by wealth (104). Students are socialized to obey and seek good grades (105). They internalize competitiveness and the need to network (106-07). Only a minority see education as an intellectual journey (108). “Only 8 percent of college graduates, or about 110,000 students, now receive degrees in the humanities” (108, citing Frank

Donoghue’s The Last Professors). Higher education has been under assault by corporate forces for a century (109). At least 200 small liberal-arts colleges have folded since 1990 (110). Employment of adjunct professors is undermining the integrity of the faculty (110). Expert professionals have replaced a humanistically educated elite (110-12). Elite institutions produce not morally autonomous individuals but manipulative characters (112-13). Barack Obama and his cabinet are products of this system (113). They won’t know how to save us when “our rotten financial system . . . implodes” and “our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat” (113-14).

Ch. 4: The Illusion of Happiness. The ideology of positive thinking serves corporate interests; the quack science of “positive psychology” mirrors it and serves them (115-19). Realism is regarded as an illness; people are encouraged to change their attitude, not their real circumstances (119-20). Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness (2002) (120-21). Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, author of Flow (121-22). Psychologists (Shelley Taylor, Dacher Keltner, Barbara Frederickson, Christopher Peterson & Nansook Park, Kim Cameron) who believe that happiness can be measured are promoting self-delusion as beneficial (122-28). “Most positive psychologists belong to the 148,000-member American Psychological Association (APA), which has lent its services for decades to the military and intelligence communities to research and perfect techniques for interrogation and control” (128; 128-29). Positive psychology, like the “New Industrial Relations” of the 1980s that was used by GM and Toyota, is an “assault on community and individualism” by an oppressive system of power (129-35). Its use at FedEx Kinko’s (135-37). Like celebrity culture, positive psychology “feeds off the

unhappiness that comes from isolation and the loss of community” (137-38). In a culture where, as Robert Lane showed in The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (2000), happiness is in decline, it has “a dark, insidious quality” that comforts “totalitarian and authoritarian structures” (138-39).

Ch. 5: The Illusion of America. Hedges no longer lives in the America he “used to live in” and that he “loved and honored” despite its “imperfections,” he lives in a “shell” of that country, which has been “hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests,” having “systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system” (141-42). The government “has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions” (143). Corporate power holds the government “hostage,” using it for “technical expertise” (143). Infrastructure decay (144). War and militarism (144-45). Outsourcing of jobs (145). Totalitarianism in America is a real possibility; many observers have seen it coming (Wolin, Saul, Bacevich, Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Korten, Naomi Klein, McKibbin, Berry, Nader, Riesman, Mills, William H. White, Mellman, Boorstin, Niebuhr) (146). Interview with Sheldon Wolin (Democracy Incorporated, 2008) (146-50). The American empire is in decline (150-51). Corporate forces will not allow true reform (151-52). The military-industrial complex has the system in a firm grip, having created a “permanent war economy” (Seymour Mellman’s phrase) (152-55). Corporations dictate the government’s activity in every sector of the economy (155-57). Democrats have abdicated just as much as Republicans (157-59). It is the less well-off who pay “[t]he cost of our empire of

illusion” (159; 159-62). The nature of the corporation; corporate personhood (162-64). We are falling into a depression that is disguised by the manipulation of statistics (164-68). Dislocation is little reported; instead, we are “ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers” of Washington, “our Versailles,” who use media figures (Jim Cramer, Tim Russert) who are celebrities posing as journalists to lie manipulatively, then paint themselves later as innocent and unfortunate victims of deception (169, 168-77). The political consequences will be grave; DNI Dennis Blair revealed in congressional testimony in March 2009 that the U.S. government fears and is preparing to respond to social unrest and violent extremism with “martial law and a de facto government run and administered by the Department of Defense” (180; 177-81). Dissidents and resisters will be blamed and targeted (181). The corporate state lies with statistics (181-82). At present, most are meekly submitting, “blinded, enchanted, and finally enslaved by illusion” (182). Jared Diamond’s Collapse puts his finger on our situation: “the dislocation between the short-term interests of elites and the longer-term interests of the societies the elites dominate and exploit” (183). We should be prepared for right-wing radicals from the Christian Right to emerge (183-84). America put its faith in the “capitalist ideology of unlimited growth,” and this has “failed” (184). Karl Polanyi considered such a situation to be the root of fascism (184). Environmental meltdown is also upon us (185). Democracy is antagonistic to capitalism (185). The financial bailouts demonstrate the moral as well as the financial bankruptcy of the system (186-87). Dependence on foreign borrowing will probably provide a sudden “bullet to the head” (187; 187-89). We face imperial decline; the more we embrace illusion, “the more we are destined to

implode” (190). Mass culture is “a Peter Pan culture,” retreating “into illusion” (190). Our salvation lies in love, which will ultimately triumph over our “culture of illusion [which] is, at its core, a culture of death” (191-92). But there is hope: “The power of love is greater than the power of death. It cannot be controlled. It is about sacrifice for the other—something nearly every parent understands—rather than exploitation. It is about honoring the sacred. . . . Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains” (193).

Notes. 9 pp.

Acknowledgments. Wife Eunice, The Nation Institute, Jonathan Schell, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Rev. Coleman Brown (Hedges’s former teacher at Colgate), John Timpane, Chris Hebdon, son Thomas, Robert Jensen, inter alia.

Bibliography. 86 books, 27 essays and articles, 4 websites, 1 TV show, 1 personal communication.

Index. 16 pp.

About the Author. Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He worked for twenty years as a journalist (fifteen years for the New York Times), often as a war correspondent. He is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) and American Fascists (2007). He writes Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Granta, and Mother Jones. He is a columnist for Truthdig. He lives in Princeton, NJ.

[Additional information. Chris Hedges holds a B.A. in Eng. Lit. from Colgate and an M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School. He has worked as a journalist in more than fifty countries. He is also the author of What Every Person Should Know about War (2003),

Losing Moses on the Freeway (2005), When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalism (2008; orig. publ. as I Don’t Believe in Atheists), and the co-author, with Leila Al-Arian, of Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians (2008).]

[Critique. Written in late 2008 and early 2009 as the Great Recession (Hedges believes it is a depression [164]) worsened, Empire of Illusion takes a dark view of the American predicament that will appear exaggerated to most readers. Hedges’s ill-defined notion of celebrity culture is very expansive, including all kinds of status seeking. His chapter on pornography may limit the book’s reach by being both sickening and X-rated.

The chapter on elite higher education is a somewhat exaggerated jeremiad. Chapter 4, on positive psychology, also paints with a broad brush. Hedges final chapter expresses from the left what we are also hearing from the right: I want my country back. Each side regards the country has having been “hijacked” by those on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Hedges reserves till his final chapter some overtly left themes in an attempt to persuade those on the right that the corporations and oligarchic elites they exalt and support are really to blame for a betrayal of core American values. Perhaps because he does not ascribe to any form of American exceptionalism, Hedges differs from critics like William Greider and Naomi Wolf in dismissing [152] all hope of real reform.]