Patriotic duty and the disease of nationalism lure us to deny our common humanity
Chris HedgesThis magical thinking, this idea that human and personal progress is somehow inevitable, leads to political passivity. … It has turned whole nations, such as the United States, into self-consuming machines of death.
Chris HedgesWe’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
Chris HedgesStichwörter: education
Premda zvuči kao ironija, ali činjenica je da su sveučilišta stotine tisuća ljudi obučila za poslove koji će uskoro jednostavno nestati.Obučila su ljude da održavaju ustroj koji se ne može održati. Elita, jednako kao i oni koji su stekli uske, specijalizirane, gotovo zanatske vještine, znaju jedino kako hraniti zvijer sve dok ne umre. A, kad jednom umre, ostat će bespomoćni. Ne očekujte da će nas spasiti. Ne znaju kako. Ne znaju čak ni kako postavljati valjana pitanja. A kad se sve uruši, kad naš truli financijski sustav s tim tisućama milijardi bezvrijedne aktive doživi imploziju i naši imperijalni ratovi završe poniženjem i porazom, elita moćnika razotkrit će se kao bespomoćna i samozaluđena jednako kao i svi mi ostali.
Chris HedgesStichwörter: elita sveučilišta
Pozitivistička psihologija, poput celebrity kulture, nezadrživ nagon da se kupuje i privlačnosti masovne zabave kao sredstva odvraćanja pozornosti, pothranjuje se osjećajem nesretnosti što ga izaziva izolacija i gubitak osjećaja zajedništva. Korporativistička postavka kako se sreća može pronaći kroz prilagodbu i podčinjavanje korporativnoj kulturi okrutan je trik zato što upravo korporativna kultura podržava i hrani u ljudi tu veliku boleštinu i odvojenost od stvarnog kao obilježje kulture opsjene.
Chris HedgesStichwörter: pozitivistička-psihologija
Što se više udaljavamo i raskidamo veze sa svijetom pismenosti, svijetom napisane riječi, svijetom složenosti i nijanse, svijetom ideja i pojmova i zamjenjujemo ga oku ugodnim, umirujućiim slikama, fantazijama, sloganima, celebrityjima, pohlepom za nasiljem, to smo sve bliži urušavanju i imploziji. Kako nastavljamo propadati, a patnje nam narastaju, poput ljubitelja hrvačkih spektakla što se organiziraju u sklopu World Wresting Entertainmenta, ili ljudi što brkaju pornografiju s ljubavlju, počinjemo žudjeti za ugodom, umirenjem i ljepotom opsjene. Opsjene u nama bude osjećaj ugode. To postaje naša stvarnost.
Chris HedgesStichwörter: opsjene
But this new class seeks to reduce the American working class to the levels of this global serfdom. After all, anything that drains corporate coffers is a loss of freedom--the God-given American freedom to exploit other human beings to make money. The marriage of this gospel of prosperity with raw, global capitalism, and the flaunting of the wealth and privilege it brings, are supposedly blessed and championed by Jesus Christ. Compassion is regulated to private, individual acts of charity or left to the churches. The callousness of the ideology, the notion that it in any way reflects the message of the gospels, which were preoccupied with the poor and the outcasts, illustrates how the new class has twisted Christian scripture to serve America's god of capitalism and discredited the Enlightenment values we once prized.
Chris HedgesThe triviality of American popular culture, its emptiness and gossip, accelerates this destruction of critical thought. It expands the void, the mindlessness that makes the magic, mythology, and irrationality of the Christian Right palatable. Television, the movement’s primary medium, allows viewers to preoccupy themselves with context-free information. The homogenized empty chatter on the airwaves, the banal amusement and clichés, the bizarre doublespeak endlessly repeated on cable news channels and the huge spectacles in sports stadiums have replaced America’s political, social and moral life, indeed replaced community itself. Television lends itself perfectly to this world of signs and wonders, to the narcissism of national and religious self-exaltation. Television discourages real communication. Its rapid frames and movements, its constant use of emotional images, its sudden shifts from one theme to an unrelated theme, banish logic and reason with dizzying perplexity. It, too, makes us feel good. It, too, promises to protect and serve us. It, too, promises to life us up and thrill us. The televangelists have built their movement on these commercial precepts. The totalitarian creed of the Religious Right has found in television the perfect medium. Its leaders know how television can be used to seduce and encourage us to walk away from dwindling, less exciting collectives that protect and nurture us. They have mastered television’s imperceptible, slowly induced hypnosis. And they understand the enticement of credo quia absurdum—I believe because it is absurb.
Chris HedgesThe belief that rational and quantifiable disciplines such as science can be used to perfect human society is no less absurd than a belief in magic, angels, and divine intervention.
Chris HedgesStichwörter: science atheism logic rational
I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers- historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state- all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.
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