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Socialist Progressives
Related: About this forumChris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum
from truthdig:
Welcome to the Asylum
Posted on Apr 30, 2012
By Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snookis pregnancy, Hulk Hogans sex tape and Kim Kardashians denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. At times when the page is turning, Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in Castle to Castle, when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern societys version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depressionwhich seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of primitive societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planets ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx is a series of observations derived from Marxs reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that lands (were) owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants. He wrote of the Aztecs, Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families. He went on, reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household. Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engels vision of communism. ...................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430/
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Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Asylum (Original Post)
marmar
Apr 2012
OP
TBF
(32,090 posts)1. I liked a lot about this article - but particularly
this sentence: "Rebuilding this older vision of community, one based on cooperation rather than exploitation, will be as important to our survival as changing our patterns of consumption, growing food locally and ending our dependence on fossil fuels."
Rebuilding community based upon cooperation rather than exploitation - that is critical. This is where we turn to Occupy's organization strategy. Jackpine has had some really good thoughts on this - how we go forward with a leaderless or flat type organization.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)2. ty Marmar...
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)3. Love this bit:
"one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depressionwhich seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. "
I cannot argue with that at all.
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)4. k and r