We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us

Excerpt from Chris Hedges Empire of Illusion p.91-92

The moral nihilism embraced by elite universities would have terrified Adorno.  He knew that radical evil was possible only with the collaboration of a timid, cowed, and confused population, a system of propaganda and mass media that offered little more than spectacle and entertainment, and an educational system that did not transmit transcendent values or nurture the capacity for individual conscience.  He feared a culture that banished the anxieties and complexities of moral choice and embraced a childish hyper masculinity.

 

"This educational ideal of hardness, in which many may believe without reflection about it, is utterly wrong," Adorno wrote.  "The idea that virility consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism."

 

Sadism dominates the culture.  It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective.  Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective.  This hyper masculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick.

 

"The political and economic forces fueling such crimes against humanity--whether they are unlawful wars, systemic torture, practiced indifference to chronic starvation, and disease or genocidal acts--are always mediated by educational forces," Girouz says.  "Resistance to such acts cannot take place without a degree of knowledge and self-reflection.  We have to name these acts and transform moral outrage into concrete attempts to prevent such human violations from taking place in the first place."

 

But we do not name them.  We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it.  We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

 

 

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