https://scheerpost.com/2021/06/29/chris-hedges-speaks-on-american-sadism/
Chris Hedges Speaks on ‘American Sadism’
Sadism defines nearly every cultural, social,
and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the
unchecked greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase
during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the
sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years. It is
expressed in the wanton killings by police of unarmed citizens in cities
such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in the “enhanced interrogation
techniques” used by the CIA at secret black sites, Guantánamo Bay, and
our prisons at home. It is expressed in the separation of children from
their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a
kennel.
It is expressed in the pornification of American society, where women
are tortured, beaten, degraded, and sexually violated, often by
numerous men, in porn films, and then discarded after a few weeks or
months with severe trauma, along with sexually transmitted diseases and
vaginal and anal tears that must be repaired surgically. It is
expressed in the “incel” movement that perpetrates violent assaults
against women by men who say they have been spurned or ignored by women.
It is expressed in the predatory health care system where, as Steven
Brill writes, a trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turn out
to be indigestion can exceed the cost of a semester of college, simple
lab work done during a few days in a hospital can be more expensive than
a new car, and a drug that requires $300 to make and that the
manufacturer sells to a hospital for $3,000 to 3,500 can cost the
patient to whom it is prescribed $13,702. It is legally permissible in
the United States for corporations to hold sick children hostage while
their parents bankrupt themselves to save their sons or daughters.
This sadism is expressed in payday loans, for-profit prisons, the
privatization of public education and public utilities and the rise of
for-profit mercenary armies. It is expressed in the cultural
glorification of violence by mass media, the state and the entertainment
and the gaming industries. It is expressed in the nihilistic mass
shootings at schools, including elementary schools, and workplaces. And
it is expressed in the murderous and futile wars we prosecute or support
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the
Middle Ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced to cope
with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a
common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into hedonism and the cult
of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or popular
reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths:
superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant
stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the
incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can,
before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of
all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social
disintegration, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.” It is a world in which the powerful, men like
Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, reduce the bodies and selfhoods of
their victims to nothing.
We know what this sadism looks like. It looks like Derek Chauvin
nonchalantly choking to death George Floyd as his police colleagues
watch impassively. It looks like Andrew Brown Jr. shot five times by
police in North Carolina, including once in the back of the head. It
looks like Abner Louima, who had a broomstick pushed up his rectum by
police in a bathroom at the 70th Precinct station house in Brooklyn,
requiring three major operations to repair the internal injuries. It
looks like Navy Seal Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher randomly
shooting to death unarmed civilians and using a hunting knife to
repeatedly stab to death an injured, sedated 17-year-old Iraqi prisoner
and then photographing himself with the corpse. It looks like Iraqi
civilians, few of whom had anything to do with the insurgency, naked,
bound, beaten and sexually humiliated and raped, and at times murdered,
by army guards and private contractors in Abu Ghraib. It looks like the
prisoners in Abu Ghraib who were routinely dragged across the prison
floor by a rope tied to their penises and were sodomized by chemical
lights or had the lights snapped open so the phosphoric liquid could be
poured over their naked bodies. The leaked pictures from Abu Ghraib are
the true face of America, the hooded Man, a dark-caped figure standing
on a box, arms outstretched, wires attached to his fingers or the naked
leashed man lying at the feet of the female American soldier in
camouflage pants who holds his leash, one end wrapped around his neck,
in her hand.
Why is the malaise of a dying civilization expressed through sadism
rather than a kind of righteous anger? Here we must turn to Friedrich
Nietzsche. Nietzsche warned that those who are humiliated and
disempowered are poisoned by ressentiment. Because they have
been stripped of agency, they lack the power to harm those who they
believe harmed them. In short, there is no cathartic release. Ressentiment
is bred from damaged self-esteem. It festers and corrodes the soul.
The powerless, and here Nietzsche is writing about Christianity as a
slave religion, must expresses their ressentiment obliquely and
surreptitiously, hence the coded racism, Islamophobia and supposed
yearning for a return of the traditional family and “Christian” values.
Ressentiment is produced by feelings of inferiority, failure, and worthlessness. And this ressentiment,
fueled by self-loathing, expresses itself through sadism, what
Nietzsche calls “wrecking the will” of those who are weaker or more
vulnerable. Nietzsche understood that this “wrecking the will” of
others imparts a perverted, sadistic pleasure. He writes in On the Genealogy of Morals,
that “to see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even
more. . . . Without cruelty there is no festival . . . and in punishment
there is so much that is festive!”
The ressentiment in American society, the political
scientist Wendy Brown writes, is born not only from feelings of
powerlessness and worthlessness, but feelings of dethronement and lost
entitlement. It explains what she calls the “permanent politics of
revenge, of attacking those blamed for the dethronement white
maleness—feminists, multiculturalists, globalists, who both unseat and
disdain them.” For this reason, the rage cannot, as it could be in
Christian theology, sublimated into self-abnegation and a call to love
of thy neighbor. There is, in short, nothing to mitigate or redirect
this ressentiment. It’s pure expression is nihilism and
sadism. Trump embodied this dark ethic. Revenge is his sole philosophy
of life. Those gripped by ressentiment no longer able to create. They can only destroy. They gleefully ignite their own funeral pyre.
Laws, institutions, and bureaucratic structures are deformed to serve
the interests of a tiny cabal, a rapacious elite, which enriches itself
at the expense of everyone else. All are made to bow before the
dictates of what Max Weber called the “inanimate machine.” The inanimate
machine forces the vast majority into the mass, but it allows a
selected few, willing to do its dirty work, to rise above the multitude.
These privileged few are given the license and authority to carry out
the acts of sadism that have become the primary forms of social control.
These enforcers do this work vigorously, for their greatest fear is
being pushed back into the mass. The more these foot soldiers for the
elite insult, persecute, torture, humiliate and kill, the more they seem
to magically widen the divide between themselves and their victims.
This is why Black police and corrections officers can be as cruel, and
sometimes crueler, than their white counterparts.
The sadism eradicates, at least momentarily, the sadist’s feelings of
worthlessness, vulnerability and susceptibility to pain and death. It
imparts feelings of omnipotence. It is pleasurable. I was beaten by
Saudi military police and later by Saddam Hussein’s secret police when I
was taken prisoner in Basra shortly after the first Gulf War. Those who
beat me enjoyed their work. I could see it on their faces. Israel’s
abuse of the Palestinians, the assaults of Muslims and girls and women
in India and the denigration of Muslims in the countries we occupy are
part of the scourge of sadism in service to an “inanimate machine” that
has become global.
Feminists have long understood that sadism runs like an electric
current through male sexual desire. Pornography is about the fantasy of
men who are omnipotent, who have the power to torture and physically
abuse girls and women who in porn beg to be degraded. “Sexual fun and
sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable
from the brutality of male history,” Andrea Dworkin writes. “The private
world of sexual dominance that men demand as their right and their
freedom is the mirror image of the public world of sadism and atrocity
that men consistently and self-righteously deplore. It is in the male
experience of pleasure that one finds the meaning of male history.”
Women, of course, are not immune from acts of sadism. Ilse Koch,
known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” with her husband, the commandant of
the death camp, used to throw prisoners into bears’ cages to watch them
get ripped apart and devoured. The Chilean Adriana Rivas, facing
extradition to Chile from Australia, reportedly tortured prisoners by
strapping them to metal bunk beds rigged with electrical current and
sending shocks throughout their bodies or suffocated them to death with
plastic bags during the regime of August Pinochet. But Dworkin is right
to highlight sadism as inherent in male expressions of total and
unaccountable power, which is why sadism is the chief characteristic of
imperialism.
Jean Amery, who was in the Belgian resistance in World War II and who
was captured and tortured by the Gestapo in 1943, defines sadism “as
the radical negation of the other, the simultaneous denial of both the
social principle and the reality principle. In the sadist’s world,
torture, destruction, and death are triumphant: and such a world clearly
has no hope of survival. On the contrary, he desires to transcend the
world, to achieve total sovereignty by negating fellow human
beings—which he sees as representing a particular kind of ‘hell.’”
Amery’s point is important. A sadistic society is about collective
self-destruction. It is the apotheosis of a society deformed by
overwhelming experiences of loss, alienation and stasis. The only way
left to affirm yourself in failed societies is to destroy. Johan
Huizinga in his book “Waning of the Middle Ages” noted that that the
dissolution of medieval society provoked “the violent tenor of life.”
Today, this “violent tenor of life” drives people to carry out wanton
police murders, evictions of families, court-ordered bankruptcies, the
denial of medical care to the sick, suicide bombings and mass shootings.
Sadism imparts the rush and pleasure, often with heavy sexual
overtones, which lures us towards what Sigmund Freud called the death
instinct, the instinct to destroy all forms of life, including our own.
When enveloped by a death-saturated world death, ironically, is embraced
as the cure.
Joseph Conrad saw enough of the world as a sea captain to know the
irredeemable corruption of humanity. The noble virtues that drove
characters like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness into the jungle
veiled the abject self-interest, unchecked greed, and murder that
defines all imperial projects. Conrad was in the Congo in the late
nineteenth century when the Belgian monarch King Leopold, in the name of
Western civilization and antislavery, was plundering the country. The
Belgian occupation, which turned the Congo into a rubber plantation,
resulted in the death by disease, starvation, and murder of some ten
million Congolese.
In Conrad’s short story “An Outpost of Progress,” he writes of two
white, European traders, Carlier and Kayerts, who are sent to a remote
trading station in the Congo. The mission is endowed with a great moral
purpose—to export European “civilization” to Africa. But the boredom and
lack of constraints swiftly turn the two men into savages. They trade
slaves for ivory. They get into a feud over dwindling food supplies, and
Kayerts shoots and kills his unarmed companion Carlier.
“They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals,” Conrad wrote of Kayerts and Carlier:
whose existence is only rendered
possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men
realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their
capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their
belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure,
the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every
insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd;
to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its
institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its
opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive
nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the
heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear
perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to
the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the
affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things
vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion
excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish
and the wise alike.
The Managing Director of the Great Civilizing Company—for, as Conrad
notes, “civilization” follows trade—arrives by steamer at the end of the
story. He is not met at the dock by his two agents. He climbs the steep
bank to the trading station with the captain and engine driver behind
him. The director finds Kayerts, who, after the murder, committed
suicide by hanging himself by a leather strap from a cross that marked
the grave of the previous station chief. Kayerts’s toes are a couple of
inches above the ground. His arms hang stiffly down “and, irreverently,
he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director.”
Sadism is carried out in the name of a moral good, to protect western
civilization, “Christian” values, democracy, the master race, liberté, égalité, fraternité,
the worker’s paradise, the new man, or scientific rationalism. Sadism
will mend the flaws in the human species. The jargon varies. The dark
sentiment is the same.
“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no
converts,” Conrad writes. “There are only people, without knowing,
understanding or feeling, who intoxicate themselves with words, shout
them out, imaging they believe them without believing in anything else
but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”
“Man is a cruel animal,” Conrad wrote. “His cruelty must be
organized. Society is essentially criminal—or it wouldn’t exist. It is
selfishness that saves everything—absolutely everything—everything that
we abhor, everything that we love.”
Bertrand Russell said of Conrad: “I felt, though I do not know
whether he would have accepted such an image, that he thought of
civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin
crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the
unwary sink into fiery depths.”
Kurtz, the self-deluded megalomaniac ivory trader in Heart of Darkness,
ends by planting the shriveled heads of murdered Congolese on pikes
outside his remote trading station. But Kurtz is also highly educated
and refined. Conrad describes him as an orator, writer, poet, musician,
and the respected chief agent of the ivory company’s Inner Station. He
is “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress.” Kurtz was a
“universal genius” and “a very remarkable person.” He is a prodigy, at
once gifted and multitalented. He went to Africa fired by noble ideals
and virtues. He ended his life as a self-deluded tyrant who thought he
was a god.
“His mother was half-English, his father was half-French,” Conrad writes of Kurtz:
All Europe contributed to the
making of Kurtz; and by-the-by I learned that, most appropriately, the
International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had
entrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. . .
. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of
development we had arrived at, “must necessarily appear to them
[savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the
might as of a deity,” and so on, and so on. “By the simple exercise of
our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,” etc.,
etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was
magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the
notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me
tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of
words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt
the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the
last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be
regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the
end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at
you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky:
“Exterminate all the brutes!”
The violence and exploitation, which has long defined imperial
projects abroad, now defines existence a home. Empires, in the end,
cannibalize themselves. The tyranny we long imposed on others we now
impose on ourselves. The dark pleasure derived from exploiting others is
all that is left. As Nietzsche wrote in On the Genealogy of Morals:
Let’s clarify the logic of this
whole method of compensation—it is weird enough. The equivalency is
given in this way: Instead of an advantage making up directly for the
harm (hence, instead of compensation in gold, land, possessions of some
sort or another), the creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment
and compensation—the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on
a powerless person without having to think about it, the delight in “de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire” [doing
wrong for the pleasure of doing it], the enjoyment of violation. This
enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in
the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious
mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the
“punishment” of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right
belonging to the masters. Finally, he himself for once comes to the
lofty feeling of despising a being as someone “below himself,” as
someone he is entitled to mistreat—or at least, in the event that the
real force of punishment, of inflicting punishment, has already been
transferred to the “authorities,” the feeling of seeing the debtor
despised and mistreated. The compensation thus consists of a permission
for and right to cruelty.
Social sadism and murder, as Friedrich Engels noted in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working-Class in England is
built into the capitalist system. The ruling elites, Engels writes,
those that hold “social and political control,” were well aware that the
harsh working and living conditions during the industrial revolution
doomed workers to “an early and unnatural death.” The formation of
unions and socialism were in direct response to these malevolent
forces. As Engels wrote:
When one individual inflicts
bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call his deed
murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a
position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death,
one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or
bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places
them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the
strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death
ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of
victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its
deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual;
disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend
himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the
murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the
offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it
remains.
The ruling class devotes tremendous resources to mask this social
sadism and murder. It controls the narrative in the press. It floods
our screens with friendly, feel-good images and propaganda, perfected by
the public relations and advertising industries. These electronic
hallucinations distract us from the limitations of our own lives. They
obfuscate the fundamental nature of corporate capitalism. They attack
our self-esteem and create an embarrassing self-consciousness about our
appearance, social standing and bodily functions. They falsify science
and data, as the fossil fuel, animal agriculture and tobacco industries,
have for decades. They create, as Guy DuBord writes, the “spectacular
commodity society” that is a seductive substitute to participatory
democracy. This entrepreneurial tyranny reduces political choice to the
sadistic prescriptions provided by corporate power. It creates a
society where there is an absence of nearly all positive social and
political constructs. Even social change, reduced to identity politics
and multiculturalism, has been effectively emasculated by corporate
propaganda. A sense of agency, personal power and social status comes
almost exclusively from, as Nietzsche foresaw, serving the sadistic
machinery.
Enron energy traders, in a dialogue that could have come from any
large corporation, were caught on tape in 2000 discussing “stealing”
from California, sticking it to “Grandma Millie.” Two traders,
identified as Kevin and Bob, dismissed demands by California regulators
for refunds because of the company’s constant price-gouging.
Kevin: So the rumor’s true? They’re fucking takin’
all the money back from you guys? All those money you guys stole from
those poor grandmothers in California?
Bob: Yeah, Grandma Millie, man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fucking vote on the butterfly ballot.
Kevin: Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged for fucking $250 a megawatt hour.
Bob: You know—you know—you know, Grandma Millie, she’s the one that Al Gore’s fightin’ for, you know?
Later in the same conversation, Kevin and Bob denigrate Californians.
Kevin: Oh, best thing that could happen is fucking an earthquake, let that thing float out to the Pacific and put ’em fucking candles.
Bob: I know. Those guys—just cut ’em off.
Kevin: They’re so fucked and they’re so like totally . . .
Bob: They are so fucked.
The obscene avarice of the very rich now dwarfs the hedonism and
excesses of the world’s most heinous despots and wealthiest capitalists
of the past. In 2015, shortly before he died, Forbes estimated David
Rockefeller’s net worth was $3 billion. The Shah of Iran looted an
estimated $1 billion from his country. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos
amassed between $5 and $10 billion. And the former Zimbabwean President
Robert Mugabe was worth about a billion. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are
each worth $180 billion.
Yes, the decorum of the Biden presidency differs from that of the
Trump presidency. But the underlying mercenary exploitation and sadism
of American society remains untouched. Biden’s American Jobs Plan will
never create “millions of good paying jobs—jobs Americans can raise
their families on” any more than NAFTA, which he supported, would, as
was also promised, create millions of good paying jobs. His mantra of
“buy American” is worthless. The vast majority of our consumer
electronics, apparel, furniture and industrial supplies are made in
China by workers who earn an average of one or two dollars an hour and
lack unions and basic labor rights. His call to lower deductibles and
prescription drug costs in the Affordable Care Act will never be
permitted by the corporations that profit from health care. His promises
of fair taxation, despite the world’s richest men—Jeff Bezos, Elon
Musk, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, Michael Bloomberg and George
Soros—paying a true tax rate of 3.4 percent will not be altered. The
corporate subsidies and tax incentives he proposes as a solution to the
climate crisis will do nothing to halt oil and gas fracking, shut down
coal-fired plants or halt the construction of new pipelines for
gas-fired power plants. His money for infrastructure projects is
destined for large corporations and state governments.
The health system will remain privatized, meaning the insurance and
pharmaceutical corporations will reap a windfall of tens of billions of
dollars with the American Rescue Plan, and this when they are already
making record profits. The profits the big banks, Wall Street and the
predatory global speculators make from the massive levels of debt
peonage imposed on an underpaid working class, including those who owe
student loans, will continue to funnel money upwards into the hands of a
tiny, oligarchic cabal. There will be no campaign finance reform to end
our system of legalized bribery. The giant tech monopolies will remain
intact. The censorship imposed by digital media platforms, the
obliteration of our civil liberties and the wholesale government
surveillance will continue to be enforced. Biden’s request for $715
billion for the Defense Department in fiscal year 2022, a $11.3 billion
(1.6 percent) increase over 2021, will exacerbate the military
provocations with China and Russia, the endless wars in the Middle East
and the bloated defense industry. The industries that were shipped
overseas and the well-paying unionized jobs will not return. The 81
million Americans that struggle to meet basic household expenses, the 22
million that lack enough food and the 11 million that can’t make their
next house payment are about to hit a wall as the meager benefits from
the COVID relief bills run out and the moratorium is lifted on evictions
and foreclosures. The grinding machinery of predatory capitalism, and
the sadism that defines it, will poison the society as mercilessly under
Biden as it did when Trump was conducting his Twitter presidency. These
so-called reforms have no more weight than those peddled by Bill
Clinton and Barack Obama, who Biden slavishly served and who also
promised social equality while betraying working men and women.
Biden is the epitome of the empty, amoral creature produced by our
system of legalized bribery, those who built our culture of sadism. His
long political career in Congress was defined by representing the
interests of big business, especially the credit card companies based in
Delaware. He was nicknamed Senator Credit Card. He has always glibly
told the public what it wants to hear and then sold them out. He was a
prominent promoter and architect of a generation of federal “tough on
crime” laws that militarized the nation’s police and more than doubled
the population of the prison system, the world’s largest, with harsh
mandatory sentencing guidelines and laws that put people in prison for
life for nonviolent drug crimes, even as his son struggled with
addiction. He was a principal author of the Patriot Act. And there has
never been a weapons system, or a war, he did not support. Nothing
substantial will change under Biden, despite the hyperventilating about
him being the next FDR.
The Biden administration resembles the ineffectual German government
formed by Franz von Papen in 1932 that sought to recreate the ancien régime,
a utopian conservatism that ensured Germany’s drift into fascism. Biden
is bereft, like von Papen, of new ideas and programs. He will keep the
machinery of repression well oiled, a machinery he was instrumental
throughout his political career in constructing. Those that resist will
be attacked as agents of a foreign power and censored, as many already
are being censored, through algorithms and deplatforming on social
media. The most ardent dissidents, such as Julian Assange, will be
criminalized.
The established elites pretend that Trump was a freakish anomaly.
They naively believe they can make Trump and his most vociferous
supporters disappear by banishing them from social media. The ancien régime,
will, they assert, return with the decorum of its imperial presidency,
respect for procedural norms, elaborately choreographed elections, and
fealty to neoliberal and imperial policies. But what the established
ruling elites have yet to grasp, despite the narrow electoral victory
Joe Biden had over Trump and the storming of the capital on January 6 by
an enraged mob, is that the credibility of the old order is dead. The
Trump era, if not Trump himself, is, unless we break the stranglehold of
corporate power, the future. The ruling elites, embodied by Biden and
the Democratic Party and the polite wing of the Republican Party
represented by Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, is headed for the dustbin of
history.
The growing ressentiment of the dispossessed is stoked and
fed by a mass media that has divided the public into competing
demographics. Media platforms target one demographic, feeding its
opinions and proclivities back to it, while shrilly demonizing the
demographic on the other side of the political divide. This has proved
commercially successful. But it has also split the country into
irreconcilable warring factions that can no longer communicate. Truth
and verifiable fact have been sacrificed. The Democratic Party, in a
desperate bid to control the media narrative, has built an alliance with
social media industry giants such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook,
Patreon, Substack and Spotify to curtail or censor its critics. The goal
is to herd the public back to Democratic Party allied news
organizations such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.
But these media outlets, which service corporate advertisers, have
rendered the lives of the working class and the poor invisible. They are
as reviled as the ruling elites themselves.
The loss of credibility has also given rise to new, often spontaneous
groups, as well as the lunatic fringe that embraces conspiracy theories
such as QAnon. They traffic in emotional outrage, often replacing one
outrage with another. They provide new forms of identity to replace the
identities lost by tens of millions of Americans who have been cast
aside. This emotional outrage can be harnessed for laudable causes, such
as ending police abuse, but it is too often ephemeral. It transforms
political debate into grievance protests, at best, and more often
televised spectacle. These flash mobs pose no threat to the elites
unless they build disciplined organization structures, which takes
years, and articulate a vision of what can come next. This is why I
support Extinction Rebellion, which has a large grassroots network,
especially in Europe, carries out effective sustained acts of civil
disobedience and has a clearly stated goal of overthrowing the ruling
elites and building a new governing system through people’s committees
and sortition. But this emotional outrage, which put Trump in the White
House, can also stoke the fires of American sadism, especially among a
white working class that feels dethroned and abandoned.
The breakdown of our society is not only political. It is
ecological. Scientists have long warned that as global temperatures
rise, increasing precipitation and heat waves in many parts of the
world, infectious diseases spread by animals will plague populations
year-round and expand into northern regions. Zoonotic diseases—diseases
that jump from animals to humans—such as HIV/AIDS, which has killed
approximately 36 million people, Avian flu, Swine flu, Ebola and
COVID-19, which has already killed some 4 million, will ripple across
the globe in ever more virulent strains, often mutating beyond our
control. The misuse of antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry,
which accounts for 80 percent of all antibiotic use, has produced
strains of bacteria that are antibiotic resistant and fatal. A modern
version of the Black Death, which in the 14th century killed
between 75 and 200 million people, wiping out perhaps half of Europe’s
population, is probably inevitable as long as the pharmaceutical and
medical industries are configured to make money rather than protect and
save lives.
Even with vaccines, we lack the national infrastructure to distribute
them efficiently because profit supersedes health. And those in the
global south are, as usual, abandoned, as if the diseases that kill them
will never reach us. Israel’s decision to distribute COVID-19 vaccines
to as many as 19 countries while refusing to vaccinate the 5 million
Palestinians living under its occupation is emblematic of the ruling
elite’s stunning myopia, not to mention immorality.
What is taking place is not neglect. It is not ineptitude. It is not
policy failure. It is social murder. It is murder because it is
premeditated. It is murder because a conscious choice was made by the
global ruling classes to extinguish life rather than protect it. It is
murder because profit, despite the hard statistics, the growing climate
disruptions, and the scientific modeling, is deemed more important than
human survival.
The global elites thrive in this system, as long as they serve the
dictates of what Lewis Mumford called the “megamachine,” the convergence
of science, economy, technology and political power unified into an
integrated, bureaucratic structure whose sole goal is to perpetuate
itself. This structure, Mumford noted, is antithetical to
“life-enhancing values.” But to challenge the megamachine, to name and
condemn its death wish, is to be expelled from its inner sanctum. There
are, no doubt, some within the megamachine who fear the future, who are
appalled by the social murder, who worry what will happen to their
children, but they do not want to lose their jobs and their social
status to become pariahs.
The U.S. military—which accounts for 38 percent of military spending
worldwide—is, of course, incapable of combating the grave existential
crisis before us.. The fighter jets, satellites, aircraft carriers,
fleets of warships, nuclear submarines, missiles, tanks and vast
arsenals of weaponry are useless against pandemics and the climate
crisis. The war machine, which is spending $ 1.2 trillion to modernize
our nuclear arsenal, does nothing to mitigate the human suffering caused
by degraded environments that sicken and poison populations or make
life unsustainable. Air pollution already kills an estimated 200,000
Americans a year while children in decayed cities such as Flint,
Michigan are damaged for life with lead contamination from drinking
water. And, on top of all this, the U.S. military emitted 1.2 billion
metric tons of carbon emissions between 2001 and 2017, twice the annual
output of the nation’s passenger vehicles.
Future generations, if there are any, will look back at the current
global ruling class as the most criminal in human history, willfully
dooming billions of people to mass death. These crimes are being
committed in front of us. And, with few exceptions, we are being herded
like sheep to the slaughter.
The radical evil that makes this social murder possible is
perpetrated by the colorless bureaucrats and technocrats churned out of
business schools, law schools, management programs and elite
universities. Demonic nonentities. These systems managers carry out the
incremental tasks that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation
and death work. They collect, store, and manipulate our personal data
for digital monopolies and the security and surveillance state. They
grease the wheels for ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They write the
laws passed by the bought-and-paid-for political class. They pilot the
aerial drones that terrorize the poor in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and
Pakistan. They profit from the endless wars. They are the corporate
advertisers, public relations specialists and television pundits that
flood the airwaves with lies. They run the banks. They oversee the
prisons. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food
stamps and medical coverage to some and unemployment benefits to others.
They carry out the evictions. They enforce the laws and the
regulations. They do not ask questions. They live in an intellectual
vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the
hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without
color,” the poet writes. “Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.”
These systems managers made possible the genocides of the past They
kept the trains running. They filled out the paperwork. They seized the
property and confiscated the bank accounts. They did the processing.
They rationed the food. They administered the concentration camps and
the gas chambers. They enforced the law. They did their jobs. These
systems managers, uneducated in all but their tiny technical specialty,
lack the language and moral autonomy to question the reigning
assumptions or structures.
The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing”
observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic,
inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not
even require servants—just clerks.” This metaphysical ignorance, a
product of an educational system that is primarily vocational, greases
the cogs for the culture of sadism and social murder.
We will not extract ourselves from predatory capitalism and its
culture of sadism with meager government handouts. We will not extract
ourselves because Biden’s slick speech writers and public relations
specialists, who use polls and focus groups to feed back to us what we
want to hear, can make us feel the administration is on our side. There
is no good will in the Biden White House, the Congress, the courts, the
media—which has become an echo chamber of the privileged classes—or
corporate boardrooms. They are the enemy.
We will extract ourselves from this culture of sadism the way the
dispossessed extracted themselves from the stranglehold of crony
capitalism during the Great Depression, by organizing, protesting, and
disrupting the system until the ruling elites are forced to grant a
measure of social and economic justice. The Bonus Army, World War I
veterans who had been denied pension payments, set up huge encampments
in Washington, which were violently dispersed by the army. Neighborhood
groups, many of them members of the Wobblies or the Communist Party, in
the 1930s physically prevented sheriff departments from evicting
families. In 1936 and 1937, the United Auto Workers union carried out a
sit-down strike inside factories that crippled General Motors, forcing
the company to recognize the union, raise wages and meet union demands
for job protection and safe working conditions. Farmers, forced into
bankruptcy and foreclosures by the big banks and Wall Street, founded
the Farmer’s Holiday Association to protest the seizure of family farms,
one of the reasons bank robbers such as John Dillinger, Bonnie and
Clyde and the Barker Gang were folk heroes. The farmers blocked roads
and destroyed mountains of farm products, reducing supply, and raising
prices.
The farmers, like unionized auto workers, endured widespread
government surveillance and violent attacks from the FBI, company goons,
hired gun thugs, militias, and sheriff’s departments. But the militancy
worked. The farmers forced the state to accept a de facto moratorium on
farm foreclosures. Mass demonstrations outside state capitals at the
same time pressured state legislatures to block the collection of
overdue mortgage payments. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers in the south
unionized. The Department of Labor called their collective action a
“miniature civil war.” The unemployed and the hungry throughout the
country squatted in vacant homes and on vacant land forming shantytowns
that were known as Hoovervilles. The destitute took over public
buildings and public utilities. This constant pressure, not the good
will of FDR, created the New Deal. He and his fellow oligarchs
eventually understood that if there was not reform there would be
revolution, something Roosevelt acknowledged in his private
correspondence.
It is not until people are reintegrated into the society, not until
corporate and oligarchic control over our educational, political and
media systems are removed, not until we recover the ethic of the common
good, that we have any hope of rebuilding the positive social bonds that
foster a healthy society. History has amply illustrated how this
process works. It is a game of fear. And until we make the ruling elites
afraid, until a terrified Joe Biden and the oligarchs he serves look
out on a sea of pitchforks, we will not blunt the culture of sadism and
social murder they have engineered.
Rebellion, however, must be its own justification. It is a moral
imperative, not a practical one. It not only erodes, however
imperceptibly, the structures of oppression, it sustains the embers of
empathy and compassion, as well as justice, within us that defy the
sadism that colors every layer of our existence. In short, it keeps us
human. Rebellion must be embraced, finally, not only for what it will
achieve, but for what it will allow us to become. In that becoming we
find hope.
