• Hedges: How Our Demented Capitalist System Made America Insane | Economy | AlterNet

  • 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 Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s 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.
  • The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s 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 depression—which 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.
  • 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 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.
  • Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies
  • Marx, though he placed a naive faith in the power of the state to create his workers’ utopia and discounted important social and cultural forces outside of economics, was acutely aware that something essential to human dignity and independence had been lost with the destruction of pre-modern societies.
  • The Iroquois Council of the Gens, where Indians came together to be heard as ancient Athenians did, was, Marx noted, a “democratic assembly where every adult male and female member had a voice upon all questions brought before it.” Marx lauded the active participation of women in tribal affairs, writing, “The women [were] allowed to express their wishes and opinions through an orator of their own election. Decision given by the Council. Unanimity was a fundamental law of its action among the Iroquois.” European women on the Continent and in the colonies had no equivalent power.
  • 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.
  • Seventeenth century European philosophy and the Enlightenment, meanwhile, exalted the separation of human beings from the natural world, a belief also embraced by the Bible.
  • The demented project of endless capitalist expansion, profligate consumption, senseless exploitation and industrial growth is now imploding. Corporate hustlers are as blind to the ramifications of their self-destructive fury as were Custer, the gold speculators and the railroad magnates. They seized Indian land, killed off its inhabitants, slaughtered the buffalo herds and cut down the forests. Their heirs wage war throughout the Middle East, pollute the seas and water systems, foul the air and soil and gamble with commodities as half the globe sinks into abject poverty and misery. The Book of Revelation defines this single-minded drive for profit as handing over authority to the “beast.”
  • The conflation of technological advancement with human progress leads to self-worship. Reason makes possible the calculations, science and technological advances of industrial civilization, but reason does not connect us with the forces of life. A society that loses the capacity for the sacred, that lacks the power of human imagination, that cannot practice empathy, ultimately ensures its own destruction.
  • The Native Americans understood there are powers and forces we can never control and must honor. They knew, as did the ancient Greeks, that hubris is the deadliest curse of the human race. This is a lesson that we will probably have to learn for ourselves at the cost of tremendous suffering.
  • The anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who in 1846 was “adopted” by the Seneca, one of the tribes belonging to the Iroquois confederation, wrote in “Ancient Society” about social evolution among American Indians. Marx noted approvingly, in his “Ethnological Notebooks,” Morgan’s insistence on the historical and social importance of “imagination, that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind.” Imagination, as the Shakespearean scholar Harold C. Goddard pointed out, “is neither the language of nature nor the language of man, but both at once, the medium of communion between the two. … Imagination is the elemental speech in all senses, the first and the last, of primitive man and of the poets.”
  • All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished by our corporate state. Art. Education. Literature. Music. Theater. Dance. Poetry. Philosophy. Religion. Journalism. None of these disciplines are worthy in the corporate state of support or compensation. These are pursuits that, even in our universities, are condemned as impractical. But it is only through the impractical, through that which can empower our imagination, that we will be rescued as a species. The prosaic world of news events, the collection of scientific and factual data, stock market statistics and the sterile recording of deeds as history do not permit us to understand the elemental speech of imagination. We will never penetrate the mystery of creation, or the meaning of existence, if we do not recover this older language. Poetry shows a man his soul, Goddard wrote, “as a looking glass does his face.” And it is our souls that the culture of imperialism, business and technology seeks to crush.
  • Walter Benjamin argued that capitalism is not only a formation “conditioned by religion,” but is an “essentially religious phenomenon,” albeit one that no longer seeks to connect humans with the mysterious forces of life. Capitalism, as Benjamin observed, called on human societies to embark on a ceaseless and futile quest for money and goods. This quest, he warned, perpetuates a culture dominated by guilt, a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing. It enslaves nearly all its adherents through wages, subservience to the commodity culture and debt peonage.
  • The suffering visited on Native Americans, once Western expansion was complete, was soon endured by others, in Cuba, the Philippines, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The final chapter of this sad experiment in human history will see us sacrificed as those on the outer reaches of empire were sacrificed.
  • There is a kind of justice to this. We profited as a nation from this demented vision, we remained passive and silent when we should have denounced the crimes committed in our name, and now that the game is up we all go down together.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Why listen to this most influential pamphlet?

Well, there are a number of important reasons.  First, if you have not noticed, we are losing liberty at the speed of light.  The coming economic collapse is about to make that woefully clear.  Thomas Jefferson said, “Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”  Only when a critical mass of people understand the simple truths that make for liberty will we regain ground in the cause of freedom.  When people feel the pain of tyranny but have their minds refreshed with these freedom friendly truths they will be guided out of their distress rather than remain under it to suffer further injury.  This will benefit us all.

Second, America is predominantly Christian, but this is in name only.  Most so called Christians are controlled by a mindless and destructive thought process that endangers us all.  Many so called Christians believe it is our duty to submit to government without any limits.  Not only do they practice this godless form of submission, but they advocate others to do the same resulting in many falling into the pit after them.  Common Sense has a very effective Bible Study in it dispelling this dangerous mindset.  To encourage Christians to read it I ask them, “Did you know that Common Sense has a Bible Study in it on kings?  It does, it really does.  Read it and tell me it doesn’t.”  After reading it, most “Christians” will begin to change their way of thinking.  I know because I was such a Christian and Common Sense changed my way of thinking.

Finally, Common Sense may be an old document but many of the problems we face today were dealt with in that eternal document.  One such problem is apathy.  Widespread apathy is probably the biggest cause of discouragement for those that care about the course of our nation, but apathy posed the same dilemma 230 years ago as well.  In fact Thomas Jefferson alluded to apathy in the Declaration of Independence when he said, “that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  And Common Sense wasn’t the only pamphlet to be circulated in its day.  In fact, over 2000 other pamphlets were written and distributed in an attempt to wake the people up and move them from despondency to action.  Although Common Sense reached only 20% of the people, this seemingly small readership, along with the help of the other pamphlets, proved to be good enough.

So, if I could I would move April Fool’s Day to April 15 and make April 1^st Common Sense Day and challenge people to read the pamphlet.  In doing this I wonder what creative ways we could celebrate the new April Fool’s Day on April 15.  Maybe we could show the Aaron Russo movie, America: Freedom to Fascism.  It is an excellent documentary on the Federal Reserve and our Tax System that somberly points out that there is no law for the average person to pay federal income taxes.  As a nation of laws this little fact surely paints us out to be a nation of fools.  I’m not to happy about that; knowing this kind of takes the fun out of the day, but maybe it will ultimately lead to something better.

So, can I ask you to do something?

1. For April 1^st, proclaim it Common Sense Day and listen to Thomas Paine’s influential message, Common Sense.
2. On April 15^th watch America: Freedom to Fascism.
3. Let others know so they can update their calendars too.

Interesting Facts and Figures

If you listened to Common Sense, and then forwarded this message to 3 others who did the same tomorrow and so on each day until April 15, do you realize how many people you would have exposed to this important information?  In just 16 days you will have reached 20% of the American population.  (I wonder what Thomas Paine would have thought about that.)  And just 3 days after that you will have reached 20% of the world population!  A pretty mighty click of the mouse wouldn’t you say?  Maybe this is going to be a BIG revolution.

Oddly enough, my conscience was awoken to this when I was reading the Lord’s Prayer and noted Jesus teaching his disciples how to pray. He said “forgive US our debts”. I was accustom to praying in the singular, for myself, “Father forgive ME for my debts”. Jesus was about 30 years old at the time and about 40 years removed from the collapse of his nation. It goes without question He saw the destructive path his nation was on.

clipped from etext.virginia.edu “A nation, as a society, forms a moral person, and every member of it is personally responsible for his society.” –Thomas Jefferson to George Hammond, 1792. ME 16:263 “It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.” –Thomas Jefferson to George Logan, 1816. FE 10:68 “If the morality of one man produces a just line of conduct in him acting individually, why should not the morality of one hundred men produce a just line of conduct in them acting together?” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1789. ME 7:450, Papers 15:367 “The laws of humanity make it a duty for nations, as well as individuals, to succor those whom accident and distress have thrown upon them.” –Thomas Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 1807. ME 11:144 “Moral duties [are] as obligatory on nations as on individuals.” –Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1808. ME 1:480