Bokelskere.no

"this dystopian era" -

"..how hopelessness and fear
can easily be manipulated by governments to create cults of personality
and fragmented communities filled with distrust
of each other.
From there, it’s a small step toward violence and even genocide. (..)

..undoubtedly a staggeringly fragmented society in which dissent
against your ideological “team” is not tolerated --
and “truth”, as R.Giuliani said, is not “truth”
if it doesn’t subscribe to your world view. ...

..a slow decline over the last 40 years which are now bearing fruit
in our discourse and our culture.

..look at the chapter headings to see where Hedges believes this
decline is manifesting itself --
“Decay”, “Heroin”, “Work”, “Sadism”, “Hate”, “Gambling”,
and “Freedom”

all look at individual areas of American society where despair
and economic inequality have created bleak landscapes
that leave people feeling without agency in their lives.

This breeds a kind of nihilism
where people feel their lives cease to matter,
becoming unmoored from the sense of community
that holds societies together.

It’s a nihilism based primarily in a lack of being invested in
a community

and in the need to feel something, anything, regardless of whether
it is based in fact - or will negatively impact those around us.

Be it through drugs, gambling, kinship with nationalist or racial
groups, hate groups, or sadomasochism,
in a world that feels empty, these things make us “feel”,

even as we know it will result in our destruction.

Hedges believes that we do this to ourselves primarily because of
economic exploitation. Struggling to feed your family or
living in poverty is not as some would have us believe, the result
of moral weakness and laziness. Rather, .. inequality is ensconced in
America’s very system of government
which depends on those with power, maintaining it any cost
through the exploitation of the poor.

America’s history is littered of examples of the disenfranchised
(Suffragists, Black Americans, Native Americans, workers,
to name but a few) taken to a breaking point
at which they refuse to accept their fate and rise up.
Often after bloody struggle, cosmetic changes are conceded
by the wealthy who are afraid of losing it all ...

..men who have given up the pretense of even giving scraps back
to the exploited in society:
What was once a fear of unrest among the poor is now open
rapaciousness and contempt. Hedges argues that this represents
for most societies its last days.
It is Nero playing his fiddle. It is Russia invading Afghanistan.
It is the French in Vietnam and Algeria. (..)

..Increasing violence in our streets as frustration boils over?
An overburdened social safety net
unable to contain the exploding health crisis as more people
medicate themselves numb?
A collapse of democracy itself into a kind of Chinese style
authoritarian/capitalist hybrid?

..options seem frightening but can we say they seem impossible?
After touring the American prison system, talking to its prostitutes,
sharing stories with its opioid addicts, its gamblers and conspiracy
theorists, Hedges believes that ... it is the most likely ending
to America’s story."

/

.."[newspeak concept] Freedom, is self-mocking:
when a government watches you 24 hours day, you cannot use the word
“liberty”, he says:
The “toxic brew” of American exceptionalism means all our institutions
are corrupt and cannot be relied on for anything that doesn’t fit the
corporate agenda.

The solutions are hard. We need to build our own service/protest groups,
open up to our communities,
stay away from government and corporate grants,
and keep actively building resistance.

But not resistance for the sake of resistance; there must be a goal.
..Prison strikes for better working conditions can succeed because of
all the contracts states have with corporations
to deliver goods and services. Hedges says:
“As long as personal violent catharsis masquerades as acts of resistance,
the corporate state is secure.
Indeed, the corporate state welcomes this violence,
because violence is a language it can speak with a proficiency and
ruthlessness that none of these groups can match.” -
Hedges gives sickening examples of the state putting plants
[provokatører] in protests
to start the violence that will allow for live fire
by the militarized police. "

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"the U.S. government, subservient to corporate power,
has become a burlesque.
The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating.
The kleptocrats openly pillage and loot.

Programs instituted to protect the common good — public education,
welfare and environmental regulations — are being dismantled.
The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation,
is unassailable.
Poverty is a nightmare for half the population.

Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets.
Our prison system, the world's largest, is filled with the destitute.

There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers,
from Martin Buber and George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us
that this dystopian era was fast approaching.

But in our disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images,
cult of the self and willful illiteracy,
we did not listen.
We will pay for our negligence."

"..take away a person's dignity, agency, and self-esteem
and this is what you get :
As political power devolved into a more naked form of corporate
totalitarianism,
as unemployment and underemployment expand,
so will extremist groups.

They will attract more sympathy and support as the wide population
realizes, correctly,
that americans have been stripped of all ability to influence
the decisions that affect their lives —
lives that are getting steadily worse.

/

"They blamed it on globalism, but that was the result, not the cause.
Gone are the days of any corporate sense of responsibility
to the employees, the collective good,
or the communities in which they operate
and whose many services they enjoy.

It is the corporate and financial elite, and they are now one
and the same, who have defined the “me” world in which we now live.
"

/ / /

Fr.Schaeffer sr. analyserte vår moderne tids 'despair'
i skrifter fra tidlig på 1970-tallet