By Chris Hedges
February 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - If what happens in
courtrooms across the country to poor people of
color is justice, what is happening in the Senate is
a trial. If the blood-drenched debacles and endless
quagmires in the Middle East are victories in the
war on terror, our military is the greatest on
earth. If the wholesale government surveillance of
the public, the revoking of due process and having
the world’s largest prison population are liberty,
we are the land of the free. If the president, an
inept, vulgar and corrupt con artist, is the leader
of the free world, we are a beacon for democracy and
our enemies hate us for our values. If Jesus came to
make us rich, bless the annihilation of Muslims by
our war machine and condemn homosexuality and
abortion, we are a Christian nation. If
formalizing an apartheid state in Israel is a
peace plan, we are an honest international mediator.
If a meritocracy means that three American men
have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the U.S.
population, we are the land of opportunity. If the
torture of kidnapped victims in black sites and the
ripping of children from their parents’ arms and
their detention in fetid, overcrowded warehouses,
along with the gunning down of unarmed citizens by
militarized police in the streets of our urban
communities, are the rule of law, we are an exemplar
of human rights.
The rhetoric we use to describe ourselves is so
disconnected from reality that it has induced
collective schizophrenia. America, as it is
discussed in public forums by politicians, academics
and the media, is a fantasy, a Disneyfied world of
make-believe. The worse it gets, the more we retreat
into illusions. The longer we fail to name and
confront our physical and moral decay, the more
demagogues who peddle illusions and fantasies become
empowered. Those who acknowledge the truth—beginning
with the stark fact that we are no longer a
democracy—wander like ghosts around the edges of
society, reviled as enemies of hope. The mania for
hope works as an anesthetic. The hope that Donald
Trump would moderate his extremism once he was in
office, the hope that the “adults in the room” would
manage the White House, the hope that the Mueller
report would see Trump disgraced, impeached and
removed from office, the hope that Trump’s December
2019 impeachment would lead to his Senate conviction
and ouster, the hope that he will be defeated at the
polls in November are psychological exits from the
crisis—the collapse of democratic institutions,
including the press, and the corporate corruption of
laws, electoral politics and norms that once made
our imperfect democracy possible.
The embrace of collective self-delusion marks the
death spasms of all civilizations. We are in the
terminal stage. We no longer know who we are, what
we have become or how those on the outside see us.
It is easier, in the short term, to retreat inward,
to celebrate nonexistent virtues and strengths and
wallow in sentimentality and a false optimism. But
in the end, this retreat, peddled by the hope
industry, guarantees not only despotism but, given
the climate emergency, extinction.
“The result of a consistent and total
substitution of lies for factual truth is not that
the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be
defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we
take our bearings in the real world—and the category
of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means
to this end—is being destroyed,”
Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarianism.