A culture,” the poet W. H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods.
We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” – the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement.
The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.
All of the movements that opened up the democratic space in America – the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists, and the civil rights movement – developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality, and democracy are just that. Only when ruling elites become worried about survival do they react. Appealing to the better nature of the powerful is useless.
The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures. The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood. It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection. It.
Fascism is aided and advanced by the apathy of those who are tired of being conned and lied to by a bankrupt liberal establishment, whose only reason to vote for a politician or support a political party is to elect the least worst. This, for many voters, is the best Clinton can offer.
People don’t want the illusion of their manufactured personalities, their political saviors, shattered; personalities created by public relations industries. They don’t want to do the hard work of truly understanding how power works and organizing to bring it down.
When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.
There is no moral equivalency between antifa and the alt-right. But by brawling in the streets, antifa allows the corporate state, which is terrified of a popular anticapitalist uprising, to use the false argument of moral equivalency to criminalize the work of all dissidents.
Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.
The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.
The cri de coeur of this lost generation, orphans of global capitalism, rises up from deindustrialized cities across the nation. This generation has been cast aside by a society that views them as cogs, menial wage slaves who will do the drudgery that plagues the working poor in postindustrial America.
All cults are personality cults. All cults are really extensions of whoever the cult leader is. So, whatever the prejudices, the worldview and the ideas of the cult leader are they will be chanted back at him by the crowd. Until massive social and economic inequality as well as the betrayal of the country by the elite are confronted and remedied, this yearning for a cult leader will not go away. Desperate people are looking for somebody to save them.
Real life, our own life, is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and inauthentic.
More than the divides of race, class, or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, our culture has been carved up into radically distinct, unbridgeable, and antagonistic entities that no longer speak the same language and cannot communicate. This is the divide between a literate, marginalized minority and those who have been consumed by an illiterate mass culture.
Divisions among the oppressed, Hasan said, are gifts to the oppressor.
Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you are treated like the oppressed.
Prisons are prototypes for the future, an example of the disempowerment and exploitation corporations seek to inflict on all workers.
Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory, there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war... The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.
They failed to grasp the central Socratic paradox: that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
But reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives – truth.