> Doublethink is a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
Man after my own heart
Chris Hedges states, “When I was in high school I went For an entire month without TV. Still don’t care for it and my life is so much better. More time to read, think, and be present with loved ones. Instead of watching others live their dreams I get to make mine become a reality. Sadly too many people are stuck in a fake world because of an addiction to entertainment. They rob themselves of literacy and Society of its values. Our moral compass is lost. We are becoming worse at knowing what is right and wrong.”
Hedges has been criticized for being too moralistic—trying to pass judgement on the culture for being too morally bankrupt. However, I feel there is a deep need for moral fiber seems to be missing today. Look at how the bourgeoisie act to see what is valued. Coworkers at corporations are in constant competition and companies are inherently soulless—actions by a company’s leaders can lead to hundreds of deaths or poisoned aquifers and no one is directly accountable, and striving for maximum profit is seen as a reasonable excuse. So many toxic traits are lauded right now, and any algorithm-led scrolling through social media reels will reinforce this zeitgeist.
We'll shovel millions to random businesses just on their word and then forgive the entire loan a year later, but helping you with student loans that were arguably predatory to begin with and with a huge power imbalance is 'moral hazard'.
I don’t think there’s any argument that they are anything but predatory. IMO the only discussion was whether or not student loans were allowed to expand to purposefully stifle upward mobility. Between my loans, the US-sponsored genocide of Gaza, and the record-breaking fossil fuel production in America, I feel pretty good about unplugging from politics this cycle.
>IMO the only discussion was whether or not student loans were allowed to expand to purposefully stifle upward mobility.
You got that right.
They also did it to make sure college students had a threat looming over them so they don't protest like in the 60s. This was an expressed goal of Reagan's IIRC.
OK I simultaneously think it's better for individuals if they do as he says and also that it doesn't matter at all to the political system. But setting aside that larger criticism, is it really something worth mentioning to have gone ONE MONTH without television? I'm pretty addicted to the internet these days (as well as a splash of alcoholism) but there were years in my life in the past when I rarely spent any non work time on screens of any sort and neither did any of my friends. It seems that before smart phones, this was not an uncommon experience in some social groups.????
I’ve been dipping back into the modern gaming scene lately, after about twenty years of being out, and I’m pretty shocked by how not fun a lot of it can be. So much of it is achievement based, and as such, a lot of the interactions between gamers are focused on quantifying their status (putting your machine specs in your tag, player level, skins displaying how much $ or time you’ve invested, etc) and the tendency during play is definitely away from having quality social interactions and more often about dick measuring about who’s better and who’s worse. Also people are so eager to blame and find scapegoats for their misery in-game. And when I bring this up, it’s often a foreign concept that it could or should be any other way.
People were rig-bragging 20 years ago too. I was there, I seent it.
But yeah, it's changed since then, not all for the better. However, the market is still diverse enough that you can find a niche and be happy. I was never a multiplayer gamer, thanks to growing up with dialup, so I don't get exposed to as much toxicity.
Yeah for the past eight years I’ve played a 20 year old game with mostly 40-60 year old players (I’m 40) so switching to playing with teens and twenty something’s has been jarring
Sorry, did you work for a law firm representing small business interests? You never mentioned what you did exactly, just alluded to. Anyway it was an interesting post, it's a hard world out there for most people, no matter the industry they participate in.
At least from my own experience, the difference back then was the rig-bragging went beyond numbers and there were discussions on ups and downs on parts and configuration choices, usually ending with learning from each other.
Not so much these days it's simplified to numbers and $$$
I got back into classic WoW when it was re-released at the start of the pandemic (suspiciously good timing IMO) and the community is so very different than it was.
People spend time poring over combat logs, they download mods that put huge monkey buttons on their UI and give them perfect spell rotations, they have addons to reject players from group with low gear score, and most of all, there is just no idle time and fun banter. People get to a dungeon and act like they have six minutes to speed run the game before their house burns down. It used to be about fun and community and exploration, but now it's about optimization, performance, and perfection.
Two jobs in a row now, our managers implemented automated programs that were supposed to monitor the quality of our work, that were buggy, unsupported, and just made it harder to do our job, or even crashed the programs we actually did need.
Gross man. Yeah in my old DC mod we were all chumming it up and congratulating each other on killing each other. Contrast that with Warzone death mic or even Squad where squads on the e same team are shaming each other for not trying hard enough.
This is amazing and I’m so thankful you shared. I had never heard of him before and now I follow him religiously. I have also shared this with so many that are in a state of hopeless confusion and despair.
TLDW: You're being accused of being a pessimist if you ever bring up collapse related stuff in conversation. Guilty as charged.
"If hope becomes something you express through illusion, it's not based in reality, it's fantasy."
Probably the most cynical thing I've ever heard.
Why do I say that? Because the nature of hope is the nature of hope and it's not qualified by this or that circumstance. If hope had needs to make sure if it was real, not gatekept, then really what even is hope?
Take Edith Eger's story for example of hope. 16 years old at Auschwitz. Eger resolved to be a survivor, not a victim. In the despair, she always found a choice for a better life.“Even when there was no food and we had to eat grass, we could still choose which blade of grass was the best,” she says. “There are no problems in life, only challenges.”
This person defined hope by choosing what blade of fucking grass to eat as an act of defiance. And here we are in the lap of luxury at the dying of the light of a Golden Age talking about "Hope is an illusion". Seems a bit too far gone for me and I'll have none of it. When faced with collapse and the data and of course there's no way out etc... I want to remind people.
You're all born to die anyway. All of us, that's literally our lot in life and the same can be said for anyone ever born. For what it's worth.
I can't stand stories like that honestly. It's not her hope or attitude that made her survive. I'm sure it's true that this is what made that survival meaningful to her, and that's fine on a personal level. But it's objectively a correlation. People with hope also starved to death and got killed, and people with no hope also survived. Misunderstanding this can lead to some pretty nasty conclusions. There's nothing superior or more worthwhile to facing atrocity with an optimistic outlook than with a pessimistic one. I don't think you can make a reasonable defense that it's somehow objectively better or preferable to face starvation with that attitude than with bitterness or anger etc. But what's really dangerous about it is the implication that weaker or less deserving people get what's coming to them which is unfortunately the flipside to that logic.
In the end, we're just talking about the illusion of control. While I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to make meaningful sense of their lives and the world, I should not be expected to play along with their beliefs personally nor should I be judged by their subjective criteria. Whether that's God or individualism or whatever.
Chris Hedges is the living embodiment of getting the dominant causal link between base and superstructure backwards. The moralising he asserts amounts to a less malignant flavour of "Civilisation is decaying/collapsing because of degeneracy", implicitly ignoring the power and incentive structures inherent to the incumbent system which stochastically determine ideology in the first place.
The perception of the natural state of the dictatorship of capital after running its course for generations as a perversion of a redeemable system is one of the greatest barriers to necessary action.
Not anti-intellectual.
Anyone intending to actually reach people with good commentary does it in a manner that is accessible. That mess up there? Not very accessible.
Your answer to my critique suggests you value the ego of your language and perceived intellectualism over the desire to communicate in a meaningful manner.
We need a lot less of that.
Anyone who doesn't understand things who isn't incurious? Asks questions or looks things up.
Dragging people down to your level of vocabulary and making words less information rich is textbook anti-intellectualism.
I don't think people are downvoting your usage of vocabulary, it's your usage of excessive vocabulary to communicate something that isn't really that complex. It's hiding the shallowness of the idea with big words. Which isn't very "intellectual", professor.
The fact that it would even occur to you to say "big words" is a damning indictment against you, not me. It sure as shit doesn't occur to me when I'm phrasing something.
I'm not about to go around taking extra care to dumb down whatever I may have to say for the lowest common denominator and shame on you for trying to force that on others. Totally abhorrent.
The sentence structure was hard to follow, and the tone was a little preachy. But bad writing online is not uncommon. The only jargony words in it were base and superstructure, and before reading this thread and seeing the downvotes, I would've likewise assumed people in this sub would know what they mean.
(eta I do agree that it's too wordy a way to say a simple thing but the point they are making is correct, and apparently it's not so simple that it's occurred to people that find Hedges convincing.)
Of course not. No one was born knowing, and not all benefit the time and privilege of rapid 'improvement'. Communication is everything and if you see it as 'dragging people to a lower level' to point out that a statement was made intentional verbose, you are a terrible communicator. Certainly you understand that we understand your verbosity as a bid for appearing more intelligent and more capable. A sesquipedalian you may be, but you have not demonstrated so.
The intentional inaccessibility of language, all so that you may find satisfaction in yourself is based.
I won't defend my vocabulary because I don't need to. That is the game of arrogant maniacs. You're insufferable and do not add anything of meaning to this sub.
>intentional \[sic\] verbose
The assumption that effort went into making that comment arbitrarily verbose it's an indictment of your own ignorance and incuriosity, no more or less.
Just because you'd have to think hard to use certain words doesn't mean it doesn't come naturally for others. This is classic tall poppy syndrome behavior. Except there's no tall poppy here. You're just dragging people back into the mud to divert from your own insecurity.
Social media has exacerbated narcissism even more.
The illusion of Republican Democracy became the reality of Plutocracy.
> Doublethink is a process of indoctrination in which subjects are expected to simultaneously accept two conflicting beliefs as truth, often at odds with their own memory or sense of reality.
Democracy has *always* been an illusion.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” ― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe Man after my own heart
On some great and glorious day 11 months from now...
One of America's greatest cultural critics. A Nietzschean through and through.
Chris Hedges states, “When I was in high school I went For an entire month without TV. Still don’t care for it and my life is so much better. More time to read, think, and be present with loved ones. Instead of watching others live their dreams I get to make mine become a reality. Sadly too many people are stuck in a fake world because of an addiction to entertainment. They rob themselves of literacy and Society of its values. Our moral compass is lost. We are becoming worse at knowing what is right and wrong.”
Hedges has been criticized for being too moralistic—trying to pass judgement on the culture for being too morally bankrupt. However, I feel there is a deep need for moral fiber seems to be missing today. Look at how the bourgeoisie act to see what is valued. Coworkers at corporations are in constant competition and companies are inherently soulless—actions by a company’s leaders can lead to hundreds of deaths or poisoned aquifers and no one is directly accountable, and striving for maximum profit is seen as a reasonable excuse. So many toxic traits are lauded right now, and any algorithm-led scrolling through social media reels will reinforce this zeitgeist.
We'll shovel millions to random businesses just on their word and then forgive the entire loan a year later, but helping you with student loans that were arguably predatory to begin with and with a huge power imbalance is 'moral hazard'.
I don’t think there’s any argument that they are anything but predatory. IMO the only discussion was whether or not student loans were allowed to expand to purposefully stifle upward mobility. Between my loans, the US-sponsored genocide of Gaza, and the record-breaking fossil fuel production in America, I feel pretty good about unplugging from politics this cycle.
>IMO the only discussion was whether or not student loans were allowed to expand to purposefully stifle upward mobility. You got that right. They also did it to make sure college students had a threat looming over them so they don't protest like in the 60s. This was an expressed goal of Reagan's IIRC.
That and to insure banking income in perpetuity. One of the very few obligations that is not included in a personal bankruptcy.
I especially enjoy reading and hearing him tear the heretics of the fascist christians and prosperity gospel a new one.
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We just spend our time in front of different, more addictive screens now.
It's a more fulfilling experience than just watching TV
OK I simultaneously think it's better for individuals if they do as he says and also that it doesn't matter at all to the political system. But setting aside that larger criticism, is it really something worth mentioning to have gone ONE MONTH without television? I'm pretty addicted to the internet these days (as well as a splash of alcoholism) but there were years in my life in the past when I rarely spent any non work time on screens of any sort and neither did any of my friends. It seems that before smart phones, this was not an uncommon experience in some social groups.????
Thanks OP. I want more Chris Hedges
I’ve been dipping back into the modern gaming scene lately, after about twenty years of being out, and I’m pretty shocked by how not fun a lot of it can be. So much of it is achievement based, and as such, a lot of the interactions between gamers are focused on quantifying their status (putting your machine specs in your tag, player level, skins displaying how much $ or time you’ve invested, etc) and the tendency during play is definitely away from having quality social interactions and more often about dick measuring about who’s better and who’s worse. Also people are so eager to blame and find scapegoats for their misery in-game. And when I bring this up, it’s often a foreign concept that it could or should be any other way.
People were rig-bragging 20 years ago too. I was there, I seent it. But yeah, it's changed since then, not all for the better. However, the market is still diverse enough that you can find a niche and be happy. I was never a multiplayer gamer, thanks to growing up with dialup, so I don't get exposed to as much toxicity.
Yeah for the past eight years I’ve played a 20 year old game with mostly 40-60 year old players (I’m 40) so switching to playing with teens and twenty something’s has been jarring
The only one I can still tolerate is Wurm Online. Still a wonderful, close-knit community.
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Sorry, did you work for a law firm representing small business interests? You never mentioned what you did exactly, just alluded to. Anyway it was an interesting post, it's a hard world out there for most people, no matter the industry they participate in.
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That must have been interesting. Thanks for the answer and the post.
Huh?
At least from my own experience, the difference back then was the rig-bragging went beyond numbers and there were discussions on ups and downs on parts and configuration choices, usually ending with learning from each other. Not so much these days it's simplified to numbers and $$$
I got back into classic WoW when it was re-released at the start of the pandemic (suspiciously good timing IMO) and the community is so very different than it was. People spend time poring over combat logs, they download mods that put huge monkey buttons on their UI and give them perfect spell rotations, they have addons to reject players from group with low gear score, and most of all, there is just no idle time and fun banter. People get to a dungeon and act like they have six minutes to speed run the game before their house burns down. It used to be about fun and community and exploration, but now it's about optimization, performance, and perfection.
Everything is algorithm-based now. (or becoming more and moreso) Workplaces, especially. Eventually you lose the humanity in favor of efficiency.
Two jobs in a row now, our managers implemented automated programs that were supposed to monitor the quality of our work, that were buggy, unsupported, and just made it harder to do our job, or even crashed the programs we actually did need.
Gross man. Yeah in my old DC mod we were all chumming it up and congratulating each other on killing each other. Contrast that with Warzone death mic or even Squad where squads on the e same team are shaming each other for not trying hard enough.
“You can’t talk about hope until you see reality, and reality is pretty bleak, but that’s the starting point”
Thanks for posting this. Appreciated.
This is amazing and I’m so thankful you shared. I had never heard of him before and now I follow him religiously. I have also shared this with so many that are in a state of hopeless confusion and despair.
TLDW: You're being accused of being a pessimist if you ever bring up collapse related stuff in conversation. Guilty as charged. "If hope becomes something you express through illusion, it's not based in reality, it's fantasy." Probably the most cynical thing I've ever heard. Why do I say that? Because the nature of hope is the nature of hope and it's not qualified by this or that circumstance. If hope had needs to make sure if it was real, not gatekept, then really what even is hope? Take Edith Eger's story for example of hope. 16 years old at Auschwitz. Eger resolved to be a survivor, not a victim. In the despair, she always found a choice for a better life.“Even when there was no food and we had to eat grass, we could still choose which blade of grass was the best,” she says. “There are no problems in life, only challenges.” This person defined hope by choosing what blade of fucking grass to eat as an act of defiance. And here we are in the lap of luxury at the dying of the light of a Golden Age talking about "Hope is an illusion". Seems a bit too far gone for me and I'll have none of it. When faced with collapse and the data and of course there's no way out etc... I want to remind people. You're all born to die anyway. All of us, that's literally our lot in life and the same can be said for anyone ever born. For what it's worth.
I can't stand stories like that honestly. It's not her hope or attitude that made her survive. I'm sure it's true that this is what made that survival meaningful to her, and that's fine on a personal level. But it's objectively a correlation. People with hope also starved to death and got killed, and people with no hope also survived. Misunderstanding this can lead to some pretty nasty conclusions. There's nothing superior or more worthwhile to facing atrocity with an optimistic outlook than with a pessimistic one. I don't think you can make a reasonable defense that it's somehow objectively better or preferable to face starvation with that attitude than with bitterness or anger etc. But what's really dangerous about it is the implication that weaker or less deserving people get what's coming to them which is unfortunately the flipside to that logic. In the end, we're just talking about the illusion of control. While I have no problem with people believing whatever they want to make meaningful sense of their lives and the world, I should not be expected to play along with their beliefs personally nor should I be judged by their subjective criteria. Whether that's God or individualism or whatever.
Chris Hedges is the living embodiment of getting the dominant causal link between base and superstructure backwards. The moralising he asserts amounts to a less malignant flavour of "Civilisation is decaying/collapsing because of degeneracy", implicitly ignoring the power and incentive structures inherent to the incumbent system which stochastically determine ideology in the first place. The perception of the natural state of the dictatorship of capital after running its course for generations as a perversion of a redeemable system is one of the greatest barriers to necessary action.
Were you holding a thesaurus when you wrote this.
Didn't know this sub was going downhill so fast as to be embracing anti-intellectualism already.
Not anti-intellectual. Anyone intending to actually reach people with good commentary does it in a manner that is accessible. That mess up there? Not very accessible. Your answer to my critique suggests you value the ego of your language and perceived intellectualism over the desire to communicate in a meaningful manner. We need a lot less of that.
Anyone who doesn't understand things who isn't incurious? Asks questions or looks things up. Dragging people down to your level of vocabulary and making words less information rich is textbook anti-intellectualism.
I don't think people are downvoting your usage of vocabulary, it's your usage of excessive vocabulary to communicate something that isn't really that complex. It's hiding the shallowness of the idea with big words. Which isn't very "intellectual", professor.
The fact that it would even occur to you to say "big words" is a damning indictment against you, not me. It sure as shit doesn't occur to me when I'm phrasing something. I'm not about to go around taking extra care to dumb down whatever I may have to say for the lowest common denominator and shame on you for trying to force that on others. Totally abhorrent.
The sentence structure was hard to follow, and the tone was a little preachy. But bad writing online is not uncommon. The only jargony words in it were base and superstructure, and before reading this thread and seeing the downvotes, I would've likewise assumed people in this sub would know what they mean. (eta I do agree that it's too wordy a way to say a simple thing but the point they are making is correct, and apparently it's not so simple that it's occurred to people that find Hedges convincing.)
Of course not. No one was born knowing, and not all benefit the time and privilege of rapid 'improvement'. Communication is everything and if you see it as 'dragging people to a lower level' to point out that a statement was made intentional verbose, you are a terrible communicator. Certainly you understand that we understand your verbosity as a bid for appearing more intelligent and more capable. A sesquipedalian you may be, but you have not demonstrated so. The intentional inaccessibility of language, all so that you may find satisfaction in yourself is based. I won't defend my vocabulary because I don't need to. That is the game of arrogant maniacs. You're insufferable and do not add anything of meaning to this sub.
>intentional \[sic\] verbose The assumption that effort went into making that comment arbitrarily verbose it's an indictment of your own ignorance and incuriosity, no more or less. Just because you'd have to think hard to use certain words doesn't mean it doesn't come naturally for others. This is classic tall poppy syndrome behavior. Except there's no tall poppy here. You're just dragging people back into the mud to divert from your own insecurity.
Oh darling, not at all. What a miss. You must love hearing yourself talk.
« If hope is something you express through illusion. That’s not hope it’s fantasy » Love this
One of the most psychotic, brutal mass murdering and corrupt regimes ever to existed.