Diseases of Despair
By
Chris Hedges
September 04, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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The opioid
crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the
rising rates of suicide, especially among
middle-aged white males,
the morbid obesity, the obsession with
gambling, the investment of our emotional
and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles
and the allure of
magical thinking,
from the absurd promises of the Christian
right to the belief that reality is never an
impediment to our desires, are the
pathologies of a diseased culture. They have
risen from a decayed world where
opportunity, which confers status,
self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for
most Americans. They are expressions of
acute desperation and morbidity.
A
loss of income causes more than financial
distress. It severs, as the sociologist
Émile Durkheim pointed out, the vital social
bonds that give us meaning. A decline in
status and power, an inability to advance, a
lack of education and health care and a loss
of hope are crippling forms of humiliation.
This humiliation fuels loneliness,
frustration, anger and feelings of
worthlessness. In short, when you are
marginalized and rejected by society, life
often has little meaning.
“When life is not worth living, everything
becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of
it … ,” Durkheim wrote. “There is a
collective mood, as there is an individual
mood, that inclines nations to sadness. …
For individuals are too closely involved in
the life of society for it to be sick
without their being affected. Its suffering
inevitably becomes theirs.”
White men, more easily seduced by the myth
of the American dream than people of color
who understand how the capitalist system is
rigged against them, often suffer feelings
of failure and betrayal, in many cases when
they are in their middle years. They expect,
because of notions of white supremacy and
capitalist platitudes about hard work
leading to advancement, to be ascendant.
They believe in success. When the American
dream becomes a nightmare they are
vulnerable to psychological collapse. This
collapse, more than any political agenda,
propelled Donald Trump into power. Trump
embodies the decayed soul of America. He,
like many of those who support him, has a
childish yearning to be as omnipotent as the
gods. This impossibility, as the cultural
anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote, leads to
a dark alternative: destroying like the
gods.
In “Hitler
and the Germans”
the political philosopher Eric Voegelin
dismissed the myth that Hitler—an uneducated
mediocrity whose only strength was an
ability to exploit political
opportunities—mesmerized and seduced the
German people. The Germans, he wrote, voted
for Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal
figures” surrounding him because he embodied
the pathologies of a diseased society, one
beset by economic collapse, hopelessness and
violence. This sickness found its expression
in the Nazis, as it has found its expression
in the United States in Trump.
Hannah Arendt
said the rise of radical evil is caused by
collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to
escape from the prison of a failed society,
willing to do anything and abuse anyone to
advance, those who feel trapped see the
people around them as objects to be
exploited for self-advancement. This
exploitation mirrors that carried out by
corrupt ruling elites. Turning people into
objects to be used to achieve wealth, power
or sexual gratification is the core practice
espoused by popular culture, from reality
television to casino capitalism. Trump
personifies this practice.
Plato wrote that the moral character of a
society is determined by its members. When
the society abandons the common good it
unleashes amoral lusts—violence, greed and
sexual exploitation—and fosters magical
thinking. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus
called those who severed themselves from the
moral and reality-based universe idiotes.
When these idiotes, whose worldview
is often the product of relentless
indoctrination, form a majority or a
powerful minority, the demagogue rises from
the morass.
The
demagogue is the public face of collective
stupidity. Voegelin defined stupidity as a
“loss of reality.” This loss of reality
meant people could not “rightly orient his
[or her] action in the world, in which he
[or she] lives.” The demagogue, who is
always an idiote, is not a freak or a
social mutation. The demagogue expresses the
society’s demented zeitgeist. This was true
in Nazi Germany. It is true in the United
States.
“The fool in
Hebrew, the nabal, who because of his
folly, nebala, creates disorder in
the society, is the man who is not a
believer, in the Israelite terms of
revelation,” Voegelin wrote. “The amathes,
the irrationally ignorant man, is for Plato
the man who just does not have the authority
of reason or who cannot bow to it. The
stultus for
Thomas [Aquinas]
is the fool, in the same sense as the
amathia of Plato and the nebala
of the Israelite prophets. This stultus
now has suffered loss of reality and acts on
the basis of a defective image of reality
and thereby creates disorder. … If I have
lost certain sectors of reality from my
range of experience, I will also be lacking
the language for appropriately
characterizing them. That means that
parallel to the loss of reality and to
stupidity there is always the phenomenon of
illiteracy.”
A
society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as
Voegelin pointed out, elevates and even
celebrates the morally degenerate, those who
are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and
violent. In an open society these attributes
are despised and criminalized. Those who
exhibit them are condemned as stupid—“a man
[or woman] who behaves in this way,”
Voegelin notes, “will be socially
boycotted.” But the social, cultural and
moral norms in a diseased society are
inverted. The attributes that sustain an
open society—a concern for the common good,
honesty, trust and self-sacrifice—are
detrimental to existence in a diseased
society. Today, those who exhibit these
attributes are targeted and silenced.
The deep
alienation experienced by most Americans,
the loss of self-esteem and hope, has
engendered what Durkheim referred to as a
collective state of anomie. Anomie
is a psychological imbalance that leads to
prolonged despair, lethargy and yearnings
for self-annihilation. It is caused by a
collapse of societal norms, ideals, values
and standards. It is, in short, a loss of
faith in the structures and beliefs that
define a functioning democracy. The result
is an obliteration of purpose and direction.
It leads to what
Friedrich Nietzsche
called an aggressive despiritualized
nihilism. As Durkheim wrote in his book “On
Suicide”:
It
is sometimes said that, by virtue of his
psychological make-up, man cannot live
unless he attaches himself to an object
that is greater than himself and
outlives him, and this necessity has
been attributed to a supposedly common
need not to perish entirely. Life, they
say, is only tolerable if one can see
some purpose in it, if it has a goal and
one that is worth pursuing. But the
individual in himself is not sufficient
as an end for himself. He is too small a
thing. Not only is he confined in space,
he is also narrowly limited in time. So
when we have no other objective than
ourselves, we cannot escape from the
feeling our efforts are finally destined
to vanish into nothing, since that is
where we must return. But we recoil from
the idea of annihilation. In such a
state, we should not have the strength
to live, that is to say to act and
struggle, since nothing is to remain of
all the trouble that we take. In a word,
the state of egoism is in contradiction
with human nature and hence too
precarious to endure.
Pope John Paul
II in 1981 issued an encyclical titled “Laborem
exercens,”
or “Through Work.” He attacked the idea,
fundamental to capitalism, that work was
merely an exchange of money for labor. Work,
he wrote, should not be reduced to the
commodification of human beings through
wages. Workers were not impersonal
instruments to be manipulated like inanimate
objects to increase profit. Work was
essential to human dignity and
self-fulfillment. It gave us a sense of
empowerment and identity. It allowed us to
build a relationship with society in which
we could feel we contributed to social
harmony and social cohesion, a relationship
in which we had purpose.
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The
pope castigated unemployment,
underemployment, inadequate wages,
automation and a lack of job security as
violations of human dignity. These
conditions, he wrote, were forces that
negated self-esteem, personal satisfaction,
responsibility and creativity. The
exaltation of the machine, he warned,
reduced human beings to the status of
slaves. He called for full employment, a
minimum wage large enough to support a
family, the right of a parent to stay home
with children, and jobs and a living wage
for the disabled. He advocated, in order to
sustain strong families, universal health
insurance, pensions, accident insurance and
work schedules that permitted free time and
vacations. He wrote that all workers should
have the right to form unions with the
ability to strike.
The
encyclical said:
[In spite
of toil]—perhaps, in a sense, because of
it—work is a good thing for man. Even
though it bears the mark of a
bonum arduum,
in the terminology of Saint Thomas, this
does not take away the fact that, as
such, it is a good thing for man. It is
not only good in the sense that it is
useful or something to enjoy; it is also
good as being something worthy, that is
to say, something that corresponds to
man’s dignity, that expresses this
dignity and increases it. If one wishes
to define more clearly the ethical
meaning of work, it is this truth that
one must particularly keep in mind. Work
is a good thing for man—a good thing for
his humanity—because through work man
not only transforms nature, adapting
it to his own needs, but he also
achieves fulfillment as a human
being and indeed, in a sense, becomes
“more a human being.”
Work, the pope pointed out, “constitutes a
foundation for the formation of family
life, which is a natural right and
something that man is called to. These two
spheres of values—one linked to work and the
other consequent on the family nature of
human life—must be properly united and must
properly permeate each other. In a way, work
is a condition for making it possible to
found a family, since the family requires
the means of subsistence which man normally
gains through work. Work and industriousness
also influence the whole process of
education in the family, for the very
reason that everyone ‘becomes a human being’
through, among other things, work, and
becoming a human being is precisely the main
purpose of the whole process of education.
Obviously, two aspects of work in a sense
come into play here: the one making family
life and its upkeep possible, and the other
making possible the achievement of the
purposes of the family, especially
education. Nevertheless, these two aspects
of work are linked to one another and are
mutually complementary in various points.”
“It
must be remembered and affirmed that the
family constitutes one of the most important
terms of reference for shaping the social
and ethical order of human work,” the
encyclical continued. “The teaching of the
Church has always devoted special attention
to this question, and in the present
document we shall have to return to it. In
fact, the family is simultaneously a
community made possible by work and the
first school of work, within the
home, for every person.”
We
will not bring those who have fled a
reality-based world back into our fold
through argument. We will not coerce them
into submission. We will not find salvation
for them or ourselves by supporting the
Democratic Party. Whole segments of American
society are bent on self-immolation. They
despise this world and what it has done to
them. Their personal and political behavior
is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy,
even if destruction leads to death. We must
organize our communities to create a new
socialist order and overthrow the corporate
state through sustained acts of mass civil
disobedience. We must achieve full
employment, guaranteed minimum incomes,
health insurance, free education at all
levels, robust protection of the natural
world and an end to militarism and
imperialism. We must create the possibility
for a life of dignity, purpose and
self-esteem. If we do not, the idiotes
will ensure our obliteration.
Chris Hedges, spent nearly two decades as a
foreign correspondent in Central America,
the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He
has reported from more than 50 countries and
has worked for The Christian Science
Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas
Morning News and The New York Times, for
which he was a foreign correspondent for 15
years.
