UFPPC (www.ufppc.org) — Digging Deeper XCIV: September 7, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle (New York: Nation Books, July 2009).
[Thesis. America is only a shell of what
it was; its core values have been
betrayed by an oligarchic elite that has
fostered an ever more pervasive culture
of illusion that serves its interests while it
distracts those it exploits. The culture of
illusion is an aspect of imperial decline
and manifests itself in many
complementary ways, ultimately
undermining democracy and rendering
Americans incapable to responding to
reality.]
Ch. 1: The Illusion of Literacy. World
Wrestling Entertainment bouts are
“virtualized battles” in which those in
“small stations in life . . . engage in a
heroic battle to fight back” (5; 1-6). From
the 1950s to the 1980s, bouts evoked
evil foreigners; then they shifted to evoke
class disparities (6-8). Now they are “all
about winning . . . about personal pain,
vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of
revenge, while inflicting pain on others.
It is the cult of victimhood” (10; 8-11).
Authorities are sleazy and corrupt (11-
12). Women are sexually objectified (12-
14). Celebrity culture is like Plato’s cave
(14-15). Daniel Boorstin’s The Image
(1961) foresaw the danger of living
within illusory images (15). Neil Gabler
argues that celebrity culture is a hostile
takeover of religion by consumer culture
(16). Hollywood and the Hollywood
Forever Cemetery in L.A. suggest that “in
American society our gods are
celebrities” (17; 16-20). The exploitation
of three soldiers (Rene Gagnon, Ira
Hayes, and John Bradley) in the famous
photo of Iwo Jima shows how “[i]llusion,
especially as presented in movies, can
replace reality” (20; 20-22). It “worked
because it was what the public wanted to
believe about themselves. It was what
the government and the military wanted
to promote” (21-22). The internet culture
of connectivity has common roots in the
contemporary “terror of anonymity” (22-
24). Exaltations of superficiality,
cosmetic surgery, New Age mysticism,
pop psychology, motivational speakers,
success gospel evangelism, and TV
shows like American Idol and The Swan,
are expressions of celebrity culture,
which condemns reality “as the work of
Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as
inhibiting our inner essence and power”
(27; 23-29). Survivor expresses the
moral nihilism of celebrity culture, in
which human beings become
commodities (29-34). Degradation as
entertainment, as in The Jerry Springer
Show, is the “squalid underside to the
glamour of celebrity culture” (34; 34-37).
Using distraction from reality, celebrities
sell products we do not need (37-38).
“The fame of celebrities, wrote [C.
Wright] Mills, disguises those who
possess true power: corporations and the
oligarchic elite” (38). Brave New World
was a more prescient dystopia than 1984
(39). Reality TV (39-40). Jade Goody, a
British ignoramus made a celebrity by
Big Brother 3, whose death from cancer
was marketed for entertainment (42-44).
American culture is giving up the tools to
deal with complexity; illiteracy is
rampant (7m illiterate; 27m can’t
complete a job application; 30m can’t
read a simple sentence; 50m read at 4th-
or 5th-grade level; nearly 1/3 of the U.S.
population “is illiterate or barely
literate”) (44). “A third of high-school
graduates never read another book for
the rest of their lives, and neither do 42
percent of college graduates. In 2007,
80 percent of the families in the United
States did not buy or read or a book”
(44). Television dominates (44-45).
Celebrity culture produces “junk politics”
that markets feelings and narratives,
which need not be true (45-48). “In an
age of images and entertainment, in an
age of instant emotional gratification, we
neither seek nor want honesty or reality.
Reality is complicated. Reality is boring”
(49). An expression of democracy,
celebrity culture has undermined
democracy by making it defenseless
against propaganda (49-53). “The flight
into illusion sweeps away the core values
of the open society” (52). “Blind faith in
illusions is our culture’s secular version of
being born again” (53).
Ch. 2: The Illusion of Love. A porn
industry convention in Los Vegas;
pornography promotes masturbation, not
sex (55-57). The U.S. pornography
industry makes 13,000 films a year in the
U.S.; “worldwide porn revenues” are
$97bn (58). The trauma of women
involved in the industry (58-60). Scripts
turned to “greater male control and
cruelty” in the 1980s (61). Degradation
(61-63). Las Vegas is “the corrupt,
willfully degenerate heart of America,” a
“monument to pseudo-events” (63; 63-
66). Many porn films evoke reality TV or
sitcoms (66-67). Stars are expensive
prostitutes on the side (67-68). An
example: Arianna Jollee (68-72). Porn
has “devolved” into “the physical abuse,
even torture, of women”; it expresses
“the endemic cruelty of our society” (72;
72-74). Male porn professionals (75-78).
Medical problems (78-79). The Internet
as “the curse and salvation of the
industry,” providing easy access but
constantly upping the ante (79; 79-82).
“Porn is about reducing women to
corpses. It is about necrophilia” (82).
Silicone dolls, $7500 each (82-85). “Porn
has evolved to its logical conclusion”
(86). It shares in what war glorifies:
domination and cruelty (87). “[Porn] is
the disease of corporate and imperial
power” (87).
Ch. 3: The Illusion of Wisdom. Our
elite universities are to blame for the
nation’s multiple failures to sustain its
values (89). They “disdain honest
intellectual inquiry” and instead
“organize learning around minutely
specialized disciplines, narrow answers,
and rigid structures designed to produce
such answers” (89). Specialization
fragments (90). Adorno’s essay,
“Education after Auschwitz” (90).
Interview with Henry Giroux, author of
The University in Chains (90-92).
Corporations have tamed and now
exploit UC Berkeley, home of the Free
Speech Movement (92-96). Our
academic specialists in the humanities
are “illiterate” by “any standard
comprehensible within the tradition of
Western civilization” (John Ralston Saul)
(96). Our elites use “a private dialect
that is a barrier to communication as well
as common sense” (97). Professors of
literature are “disempowering and
emasculating the very works they study”
(97). Though literature is “a tool to
enlighten societies about their ills,”
academics have “eviscerated and
destroyed” its works (97). Classics is
neglected (97-98). The elite educational
system instills the delusion of superiority
and entitlement in its products (98-100).
Hedges admires more the values of his
“working-class family in Maine” (101).
Supposedly interested in diversity, elite
institutions ignore class and favor their
own (101-02). Having neglected and
then undermined the humanities, the
elites lack a capacity for critical reflection
(103). They are “products of a moral
void” (103). They exalt analytic, morally
neutral intelligence, and determine worth
by wealth (104). Students are socialized
to obey and seek good grades (105).
They internalize competitiveness and the
need to network (106-07). Only a
minority see education as an intellectual
journey (108). “Only 8 percent of college
graduates, or about 110,000 students,
now receive degrees in the humanities”
(108, citing Frank Donoghue’s The Last
Professors). Higher education has been
under assault by corporate forces for a
century (109). At least 200 small liberal-
arts colleges have folded since 1990
(110). Employment of adjunct professors
is undermining the integrity of the faculty
(110). Expert professionals have
replaced a humanistically educated elite
(110-12). Elite institutions produce not
morally autonomous individuals but
manipulative characters (112-13).
Barack Obama and his cabinet are
products of this system (113). They
won’t know how to save us when “our
rotten financial system . . . implodes”
and “our imperial wars end in humiliation
and defeat” (113-14).
Ch. 4: The Illusion of Happiness. The
ideology of positive thinking serves
corporate interests; the quack science of
“positive psychology” mirrors it and
serves them (115-19). Realism is
regarded as an illness; people are
encouraged to change their attitude, not
their real circumstances (119-20). Martin
Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness
(2002) (120-21). Mihály
Csíkszentmihályi, author of Flow (121-
22). Psychologists (Shelley Taylor,
Dacher Keltner, Barbara Frederickson,
Christopher Peterson & Nansook Park,
Kim Cameron) who believe that
happiness can be measured are
promoting self-delusion as beneficial
(122-28). “Most positive psychologists
belong to the 148,000-member American
Psychological Association (APA), which
has lent its services for decades to the
military and intelligence communities to
research and perfect techniques for
interrogation and control” (128; 128-29).
Positive psychology, like the “New
Industrial Relations” of the 1980s that
was used by GM and Toyota, is an
“assault on community and
individualism” by an oppressive system
of power (129-35). Its use at FedEx
Kinko’s (135-37). Like celebrity culture,
positive psychology “feeds off the
unhappiness that comes from isolation
and the loss of community” (137-38). In
a culture where, as Robert Lane showed
in The Loss of Happiness in Market
Democracies (2000), happiness is in
decline, it has “a dark, insidious quality”
that comforts “totalitarian and
authoritarian structures” (138-39).
Ch. 5: The Illusion of America.
Hedges no longer lives in the America he
“used to live in” and that he “loved and
honored” despite its “imperfections,” he
lives in a “shell” of that country, which
has been “hijacked by oligarchs,
corporations, and a narrow, selfish,
political, and economic elite, a small and
privileged group that governs, and often
steals, on behalf of moneyed interests,”
having “systematically destroyed our
manufacturing sector, looted the
treasury, corrupted our democracy, and
trashed the financial system” (141-42).
The government “has become the
greatest illusion in a culture of illusions”
(143). Corporate power holds the
government “hostage,” using it for
“technical expertise” (143).
Infrastructure decay (144). War and
militarism (144-45). Outsourcing of jobs
(145). Totalitarianism in America is a real
possibility; many observers have seen it
coming (Wolin, Saul, Bacevich, Chomsky,
Chalmers Johnson, Korten, Naomi Klein,
McKibbin, Berry, Nader, Riesman, Mills,
William H. White, Mellman, Boorstin,
Niebuhr) (146). Interview with Sheldon
Wolin (Democracy Incorporated, 2008)
(146-50). The American empire is in
decline (150-51). Corporate forces will
not allow true reform (151-52). The
military-industrial complex has the
system in a firm grip, having created a
“permanent war economy” (Seymour
Mellman’s phrase) (152-55).
Corporations dictate the government’s
activity in every sector of the economy
(155-57). Democrats have abdicated just
as much as Republicans (157-59). It is
the less well-off who pay “[t]he cost of
our empire of illusion” (159; 159-62).
The nature of the corporation; corporate
personhood (162-64). We are falling into
a depression that is disguised by the
manipulation of statistics (164-68).
Dislocation is little reported; instead, we
are “ruled, entertained, and informed by
courtiers” of Washington, “our
Versailles,” who use media figures (Jim
Cramer, Tim Russert) who are celebrities
posing as journalists to lie
manipulatively, then paint themselves
later as innocent and unfortunate victims
of deception (169, 168-77). The political
consequences will be grave; DNI Dennis
Blair revealed in congressional testimony
in March 2009 that the U.S. government
fears and is preparing to respond to
social unrest and violent extremism with
“martial law and a de facto government
run and administered by the Department
of Defense” (180; 177-81). Dissidents
and resisters will be blamed and targeted
(181). The corporate state lies with
statistics (181-82). At present, most are
meekly submitting, “blinded, enchanted,
and finally enslaved by illusion” (182).
Jared Diamond’s Collapse puts his finger
on our situation: “the dislocation
between the short-term interests of elites
and the longer-term interests of the
societies the elites dominate and exploit”
(183). We should be prepared for right-
wing radicals from the Christian Right to
emerge (183-84). America put its faith in
the “capitalist ideology of unlimited
growth,” and this has “failed” (184). Karl
Polanyi considered such a situation to be
the root of fascism (184). Environmental
meltdown is also upon us (185).
Democracy is antagonistic to capitalism
(185). The financial bailouts
demonstrate the moral as well as the
financial bankruptcy of the system (186-
87). Dependence on foreign borrowing
will probably provide a sudden “bullet to
the head” (187; 187-89). We face
imperial decline; the more we embrace
illusion, “the more we are destined to
implode” (190). Mass culture is “a Peter
Pan culture,” retreating “into illusion”
(190). Our salvation lies in love, which
will ultimately triumph over our “culture
of illusion [which] is, at its core, a culture
of death” (191-92). But there is hope:
“The power of love is greater than the
power of death. It cannot be controlled.
It is about sacrifice for the other—
something nearly every parent
understands—rather than exploitation. It
is about honoring the sacred. . . . Love
will endure, even if it appears darkness
has swallowed us all, to triumph over the
wreckage that remains” (193).
Notes. 9 pp.
Acknowledgments. Wife Eunice, The
Nation Institute, Jonathan Schell, Katrina
vanden Heuvel, Rev. Coleman Brown
(Hedges’s former teacher at Colgate),
John Timpane, Chris Hebdon, son
Thomas, Robert Jensen, inter alia.
Bibliography. 86 books, 27 essays and
articles, 4 websites, 1 TV show, 1
personal communication.
Index. 16 pp.
About the Author. Chris Hedges is a
senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He
worked for twenty years as a journalist
(fifteen years for the New York Times),
often as a war correspondent. He is the
author of War Is a Force That Gives Us
Meaning (2002) and American Fascists
(2007). He writes Harper’s, the New York
Review of Books, Granta, and Mother
Jones. He is a columnist for Truthdig. He
lives in Princeton, NJ.
[Additional information. Chris
Hedges holds a B.A. in Eng. Lit. from
Colgate and an M.Div. from Harvard
Divinity School. He has worked as a
journalist in more than fifty countries. He
is also the author of What Every Person
Should Know about War (2003), Losing
Moses on the Freeway (2005), When
Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s
New Fundamentalism (2008; orig. publ.
as I Don’t Believe in Atheists), and the
co-author, with Leila Al-Arian, of
Collateral Damage: America’s War
against Iraqi Civilians (2008).]
[Critique. Written in late 2008 and early
2009 as the Great Recession (Hedges
believes it is a depression [164])
worsened, Empire of Illusion takes a dark
view of the American predicament that
will appear exaggerated to most readers.
Hedges’s ill-defined notion of celebrity
culture is very expansive, including all
kinds of status seeking. His chapter on
pornography may limit the book’s reach
by being both sickening and X-rated. The
chapter on elite higher education is a
somewhat exaggerated jeremiad.
Chapter 4, on positive psychology, also
paints with a broad brush. Hedges final
chapter expresses from the left what we
are also hearing from the right: I want my
country back. Each side regards the
country has having been “hijacked” by
those on the opposite side of the political
spectrum. Hedges reserves till his final
chapter some overtly left themes in an
attempt to persuade those on the right
that the corporations and oligarchic elites
they exalt and support are really to
blame for a betrayal of core American
values. Perhaps because he does not
ascribe to any form of American
exceptionalism, Hedges differs from
critics like William Greider and Naomi
Wolf in dismissing [152] all hope of real
reform.]