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Real News Network – September 5, 2010
Chris Hedges: “When you have bankrupt liberalism you descend into moral nihilism”
This is Part 1. I’ll post each part of this interview as they become available.
No transcript yet for this – if one is published by TRNN I’ll add it to this post.
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meant to say “organized” liberalism.
both party leaderships have such disdain for liberals, what exactly do the American people deserve? Do the American people really deserve programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid etc? I’m beginning to wonder.
Hedges is a favorite. Look forward to hearing his prescriptions as promised by the interviewer.
culture semiotically set on autocratic autopilot in large part due to historical illiteracy and the manipulation of language by the elite. The language of politics derives from the dominant Western culture of authority, and our founders were certainly not the Transcendentalist types.
Speaking of those Transcendentalists, we could sure use them again today. Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman made a simple case for modifying our language, bringing the natural processes of nature into it: Man working with nature not against it. Thoreau warned that growth through political violence was ultimately self destructive. He and Whitman saw introspection and personal fulfillment as liberating forces necessary for an authentic democracy built upon an inquisitive intellect, a joyous spirit and satisfied body.
Getting back to the topic, so called American Liberalism
is presently buried under the dominant, rational religion of capitalism. Political Liberalism literally needs Transcendental qualities in order to give it life. Such are the obligations of poets, artists, activists, intellectuals and all others who seek to interpret and transform “reality”.
Talking abstractly about the American People certainly has general descriptive value, but IMHO they are not political animals as Artistotle suggests. Masses of people maybe able to communicate political frustrations, but they cannot collectively formulate non-authoritarian principles and policy e.g. economics built on humanism and limited resources. It seems to me to be culturally impossible without a new Transcendental movement (far greater than the 60’s), a spontaneous, universal recognition that our survival as a civilized community depends entirely on cooperation and living harmoniously with nature and ourselves.
This is not to say that political involvement is not important, but with 300 million people compared to 3 million at our founding just a few generations back, I see great sociological and zoological problems if political and legal changes are not constructed upon new foundations of cultural idealism, a term that is an anathema to the beneficiaries of the status quo and their brainwashed followers.
your lifeline reaching directly from God to You, You are free to do whatever You please, within or without the bounds of logic, and You have Carte Blanche to ridicule Your opponents as they know not the truth of political or physical reality. On this score, I am very sorry to say that Obama and Beck are basically doing the same thing!
from that portrait hanging on the wall?
Maybe it’s just me.