In the continuation of Paul Jayâs Reality Asserts Itself interview with Chris Hedges, they discuss the fantasy that we can have everything we want and the reality of the grave dangers facing us. This episode was produced on July 18, 2013.
TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to our new show, Reality Asserts Itself.
The writer Chris Hedges, talking about the reverend Daniel Berriganâa life he says we should emulateâwrote this. âBerrigan is one of the nationâs most courageous voices for justice.â And then, quoting Berrigan, Hedges writes, âFaith always starts with oneself. It means an overriding sense of responsibility for the universe, making sure that universe is left in good hands and the belief that things will finally turn out right if we remain faithful.â
Now joining us in Baltimore is Chris Hedges.
Thanks for joining us again.
CHRIS HEDGES, JOURNALIST AND WRITER: Sure.
JAY: So watch part one and part two. Youâll see the introduction down below is the full introduction of Chris. But by now everybody knows Chris is a great writer. He wrote for The New York Times for 15 years, and now he writes for Truthdig.
So if we remain faithful, it will turn out alright. Do you still have that faith? Do you still believe that?
HEDGES: In an existential sense, yes. In a practical sense, perhaps not. We are emulating, as anthropologists like Tainter or Redmond or others have chronicled in the collapse of past civilizations, all of the mistakes that complex societies have made over the centuries, 5,000 years of human civilization. And the difference is that this time when our civilization goes down, the whole planetâs going to go down with us. The folly of allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine our relationship to the ecosystem, the folly of embracing an ideology of limitless expansion and consumption, you know, at this point itâs quite clear what the consequences of that will be, and yet we cannot wrest ourselves from these systems or from the benefits that those of us in the wealthy industrialized world derive from these systems.
And I think that Berrigan certainly sees all of that, and yet he makes that leap, which I also make, from the practical to the moral. And as Father Berrigan says, weâre called to do the good, or at least the good insofar as we can determine it, and then we have to let it go, that the Buddhists call it karma, that for us itâs the belief that the good draws to it the good, that rebellion and resistance itself is a moral imperative. And even though empirically everything around us may appear to deteriorate, it doesnât invalidate that act of resistance.
But, you know, in terms ofâyou know, I read the climate science reports, including one not long ago by the World Bank which is pretty apocalyptic. I have, I think, you know, especially looking at how past societies and past civilizations have crumbledâ. I was studying classics at Harvard. You know, you can look at the fall of the Roman Empire or the Mesopotamian Empire, the Mayan Empire. At the end, your elites retreat into self-protected enclaves, forbidden cities, Versailles, just as our elite has utterly unplugged itself from day-to-day reality. I think a New Yorker writer called it Richistan. They donât fly commercial airlines. Thereâs one set of laws and regulations for the 99 percent and a whole ânother set of laws and regulations which their lobbyists write for themselves. They live in a kind of parallel universe. They donât understand. And yet they are the ones who are relentlessly exploiting both human capital and, finally, the environment for short-term profit. I mean, 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice melts and Shell oil looks at it as a business opportunity. Weâre talking about the death throes of the planet. And theyâre dropping one half-billion-dollar drill bit after another. Thereâs a scramble for the last vestiges of fish stocks, oil, gas, minerals. Itâs utter insanity. I wrote a column last week that said, you knowâand Melvilleâs the most prescient sort of oracle in American culture because weâre all on the Pequod, weâre all headed off on this insane quest, which I think in rational moments we even understand will kill us. And yet we canât free ourselves from it.
JAY: Hereâs what Chris wrote. âAnd so we plunge forward in our doomed quest to master the forces that will finally smite us. Those who see where we are going lack the fortitude to rebel. Mutiny was the only salvation for the Pequodâs crew. It is our only salvation. But moral cowardice turns us into hostages. Moby Dick rams and sinks the Pequod. The waves swallow up Ahab and all who follow him, except one. A vortex formed by the shipâs descent collapses,â quote, ââand the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled 5,000 years ago.ââ
Itâs pretty gloomy, the outlook. Some people have critiqued some of your writing, especially more recently, that itâs kind of gloomy, that people are left feeling like the sea is going to sort of overtake us and there isnât much we could do.
Just one more thing. In the same article about Berrigan, you wrote, â⌠the failure by large numbers of citizens to carry out mass acts of civil disobedience, will only ensure that we remain hostages to corporate power.â Youâre disappointed in not seeing more civil disobedience.
HEDGES: Because the formal mechanisms of power donât work. Weâve undergone with John Ralston Saul calls correctly a coup dâĂŠtat, a corporate coup dâĂŠtat in slow-motion. And itâs over. Theyâve won.
We live in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a system of inverted totalitarianism. And by that he means itâs not classical totalitarianism. It doesnât find its expression through a demagogue or a charismatic leader, but through the anonymity of the corporate state, that in classical totalitarian regimes you have a reactionary or revolutionary party that replaces one structure with another. In inverted totalitarianism, you have corporate forces that purport to be loyal to the Constitution, electoral politics, the iconography and language of American patriotism, and yet internally have seized all of the levers of power to render the citizen impotent, and so that this political theater which we are witnessing is a charade. The Democrats are as beholden to corporate power as the Republicans. The judiciary has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate state.
And our only hope left is to build mass movements of dissentâand I covered the revolutions in Eastern Europeâthat can wrest power back from this rapacious corporate elite that quite literally will kill us.
And I seeâof course itâs bleak. And, you know, Iâm sorry. The climate science reports are bleak. Iâm not making it up. And this kind of mania for hope is really a kind of sickness, because it prevents us from seeing how dire and catastrophic the situation is if we donât radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and to the ecosystem. And so of course people donât want to hear it. You know, they want to become entranced or mesmerized with the trivia that dominates the airwaves and the sagas and soap operas, and, you know, we are fed this mantra that is really fiction. And the mantra goes that we can have everything we want, that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. And thatâs given to us by Oprah, and itâs given to us by Hollywood, and [crosstalk]
JAY: Thatâs why weâre calling this show Reality Asserts Itself, âcause you can think that, butâ.
HEDGES: Right. And itâs justâitâs a lie. Itâs not true. And I think we canât even use the word hope until we confront reality and begin to resist against the real. If weâre resisting against a fantasy or fiction, if we believe that Barack Obama is going to save us, then, you know, itâs like writing letters to uncle Joe Stalin: if he only knew what they were doing here out in, you know, the Ukrainian wheat fields, where of course millions of people died in the famine, then everything we do is futile. So I think itâs fundamental that we grasp reality in order to build effective resistance. And, unfortunately, reality at this moment in human history is pretty bleak.
JAY: Well, letâs pick that up in the next segment.
So please join us for the next part of this series of interview with Chris Hedges on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
