Reign
of Idiots
By Chris
Hedges
May 02,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- The idiots take over in the final days of
crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage
endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the
nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes
for the rich and cutting social service programs
for the poor, and project economic growth on the
basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the
water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and
depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on
self-created financial bubbles and impose
crippling debt peonage on the citizens. Idiot
journalists and public intellectuals pretend
despotism is democracy. Idiot intelligence
operatives orchestrate the overthrow of foreign
governments to create lawless enclaves that give
rise to enraged fanatics. Idiot professors,
“experts” and “specialists” busy themselves with
unintelligible jargon and arcane theory that
buttresses the policies of the rulers. Idiot
entertainers and producers create lurid
spectacles of sex, gore and fantasy.
There
is a familiar checklist for extinction. We are
ticking off every item on it.
The idiots know only one word—“more.” They are
unencumbered by common sense. They hoard wealth
and resources until workers cannot make a living
and the infrastructure collapses. They live in
privileged compounds where they eat chocolate
cake and order missile strikes. They see the
state as a projection of their vanity. The
Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov,
Wilhelmine,
Pahlavi and
Soviet dynasties crumbled because the whims and
obsessions of ruling idiots were law.
Donald Trump is the face of our collective
idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our
professed civility and rationality—a sputtering,
narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac. He
wields armies and fleets against the wretched of
the earth, blithely ignores the catastrophic
human misery caused by global warming, pillages
on behalf of global oligarchs and at night sits
slack-jawed in front of a television set before
opening his “beautiful” Twitter account. He is
our version of the Roman emperor Nero, who
allocated vast state expenditures to attain
magical powers, the Chinese emperor
Qin Shi Huang,
who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical
island of immortals to bring back the potion
that would give him eternal life, and a decayed
Russian royalty that sat around reading tarot
cards and attending séances as their nation was
decimated by war and revolution brewed in the
streets.
This
moment in history marks the end of a long, sad
tale of greed and murder by the white races. It
is inevitable that for the final show we vomited
a grotesque figure like Trump. Europeans and
Americans have spent five centuries conquering,
plundering, exploiting and polluting the earth
in the name of human progress. They used their
technological superiority to create the most
efficient killing machines on the planet,
directed against anyone and anything, especially
indigenous cultures, that stood in their way.
They stole and hoarded the planet’s wealth and
resources. They believed that this orgy of blood
and gold would never end, and they still believe
it. They do not understand that the dark ethic
of ceaseless capitalist and imperialist
expansion is dooming the exploiters as well as
the exploited. But even as we stand on the cusp
of extinction we lack the intelligence and
imagination to break free from our evolutionary
past.
The more the warning signs are
palpable—rising temperatures, global
financial meltdowns, mass human migrations,
endless wars, poisoned ecosystems, rampant
corruption among the ruling class—the more
we turn to those who chant, either through
idiocy or cynicism, the mantra that what
worked in the past will work in the future,
that progress is inevitable. Factual
evidence, since it is an impediment to what
we desire, is banished. The taxes of
corporations and the rich, who have
deindustrialized
the country and turned many of our cities
into wastelands, are cut, and regulations
are slashed to bring back the supposed
golden era of the 1950s for white American
workers. Public lands are opened up to the
oil and gas industry as rising carbon
emissions doom our species. Declining crop
yields stemming from heat waves and droughts
are ignored. War is the principal business
of the kleptocratic state.
Walter Benjamin
wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European
fascism and looming world war:
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A Klee
painting named
Angelus Novus
shows an angel looking as though he is
about to move away from something he is
fixedly contemplating. His eyes are
staring, his mouth is open, his wings
are spread. This is how one pictures the
angel of history. His face is turned
towards the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single
catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of
his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has
been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise; it has got caught in his
wings with such violence that the angel
can no longer close them. The storm
irresistibly propels him into the future
to which his back is turned, while the
pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress.
Magical thinking is not limited to the
beliefs and practices of pre-modern
cultures. It defines the ideology of
capitalism. Quotas and projected sales can
always be met. Profits can always be raised.
Growth is inevitable. The impossible is
always possible. Human societies, if they
bow before the dictates of the marketplace,
will be ushered into capitalist paradise. It
is only a question of having the right
attitude and the right technique. When
capitalism thrives, we are assured, we
thrive. The merging of the self with the
capitalist collective has robbed us of our
agency, creativity, capacity for
self-reflection and moral autonomy. We
define our worth not by our independence or
our character but by the material standards
set by capitalism—personal wealth, brands,
status and career advancement. We are molded
into a compliant and repressed collective.
This mass conformity is characteristic of
totalitarian and authoritarian states. It is
the Disneyfication of America, the land of
eternally happy thoughts and positive
attitudes. And when magical thinking does
not work, we are told, and often accept,
that we are the problem. We must have more
faith. We must envision what we want. We
must try harder. The system is never to
blame. We failed it. It did not fail us.
All of
our systems of information, from self-help
gurus and Hollywood to political
monstrosities such as Trump, sell us this
snake oil. We blind ourselves to impending
collapse. Our retreat into self-delusion is
a career opportunity for charlatans who tell
us what we want to hear. The magical
thinking they espouse is a form of
infantilism. It discredits facts and
realities that defy the glowing cant of
slogans such as “Make America great again.”
Reality is banished for relentless and
baseless optimism.
Half the country may live in poverty, our
civil liberties may be taken from us,
militarized police may murder unarmed
citizens in the streets and we may run the
world’s largest prison system and murderous
war machine, but all these truths are
studiously ignored. Trump embodies the
essence of this decayed, intellectually
bankrupt and immoral world. He is its
natural expression. He is the king of the
idiots. We are his victims.
This article was first published by
Truthdig -
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
