Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He spent nearly two decades as a correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, with fifteen years at the New York Times.

The book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle is an excellent book and highly recommended reading.

The author Chris Hedges takes his customary, Pulitzer award winning analysis and reporting style to analyze how a politically and morally "illiterate mass culture" has become addicted to spectacle of feel-good spiritual entertainment and moral self indulgence.

While we are distracted by the spectacle of illusions, the ruling powers have looted and hollowed out our economy and communities.

The future that awaits us is where "we will see our freedoms curtailed and widespread economic deprivation". It will be a "painful and difficult" future as reality hits us more and more.


We have become a simplistic, binary(right or wrong), self-isolated, self-centered, comfort and pleasure addicted society and culture that cannot handle anything that is morally or intellectually complex or difficult.

The educated fake intellectuals blindly serve the ruling powers. They ask questions, but do not question.

The ruling powers themselves also live in a world of self delusion with grandiose beliefs of their abilities as the world crumbles from climate crisis, bio-diversity loss, and risk of world war.

The politically illiterate masses, the educated classes and the ruling powers themselves, all live in an empire of illusion, where spectacle, entertainment, and self-delusion triumphs. Even the best of us are pacified by this spiritual entertainment and moral self-indulgence. No real change is likely.

We ourselves are to blame for this because we have shunned the "literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence".

We are "destined to implode" because of our actions which in turn are driven by our character, which in turn is driven by our upbringing.

The implosion and collapse will be slow and carefully managed so we do not feel it. There will be no grand-finale to this decay. Just a slow death. It is only when we look over a decade, will we see the major decline in every sphere of our life.

Governments and Corporations will use the same spectacle of celebrity culture for "perception management". We will be distracted in grand spectacles by god-like celebrities while the world around us collapses.

The only hope lies with "senseless kindness" of "dumb blind love" that still exists in some of us. They will remind us what it means to be human in these end times of social-economic-political collapse that awaits us in the Empire of Illusion we live in.

The Illusion of Wisdom

In the chapter "The Illusion of Wisdom", the author Chris Hedges talks about how pseudo-elites in thinktanks and academia serve the ruling classes instead of the people and the community.

"THE MULTIPLE FAILURES that beset the country, from our mismanaged economy to our shredding of Constitutional rights to our lack of universal health care to our imperial debacles in the Middle East, can be laid at the door of institutions that produce and sustain our educated elite. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Toronto, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, along with most elite schools, do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think. They focus instead, through the filter of standardized tests, enrichment activities, AP classes, high-priced tutors, swanky private schools, entrance exams, and blind deference to authority, on creating hordes of competent systems managers.

Responsibility for the collapse of the global economy runs in a direct line from the manicured quadrangles and academic halls in Cambridge, New Haven, Toronto, and Paris to the financial and political centers of power.""

"The elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive."

"They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers, and rigid structures designed to produce such answers. Too many students and professors are distracted, specialized, atomized, and timid. They follow trends, prestige, and money, and so rarely act outside the box. "

The author talks about why it is important to have "honest intellectual inquiry": "If we do not grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms,” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society, and wields power through naked repression."

"Ironically, the universities have trained hundreds of thousands of graduates for jobs that soon will not exist. They have trained people to maintain a structure that cannot be maintained. The elite as well as those equipped with narrow, specialized vocational skills, know only how to feed the beast until it dies. Once it is dead, they will be helpless. Don’t expect them to save us. They don’t know how. They do not even know how to ask the questions. And when it all collapses, when our rotten financial system with its trillions in worthless assets implodes and our imperial wars end in humiliation and defeat, the power elite will be exposed as being as helpless, and as self-deluded, as the rest of us."

The distracted masses

The author uses examples from the Holocaust by the Nazis. It is not just the truely evil leaders but thousands of seemingly normal average people who collaborated. The author says:

"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 hypermasculinity."

"these people are illiterate. They cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality."

Inverted totalitarian - Who rules the world?

"Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not we, pick who runs for president, Congress, judgeships, and most state legislatures. You cannot, in most instances, be a viable candidate without their blessing and money. These corporations, including the Commission on Presidential Debates (a private organization), determine who gets to speak and what issues candidates can or cannot challenge, from universal, not-for- profit, single-payer health care to Wall Street bailouts to NAFTA. If you do not follow the corporate script, you become as marginal and invisible as Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, or Cynthia McKinney."

"In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. 'Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,' Wolin writes. 'Economics dominates politics —and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.''"

Quackery and snake oil - The Illusion of Happiness

In the chapter "The Illusion of Happiness", the author Chris Hedges talks about how psychological techniques and medicines are used to promote a quick fix for deeper social problems; and to destroy alternate viewpoints to prepare people to become compliant corporate slave drones.

"Positive psychology... is a quack science".

"It throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed."

Psychological techniques "...are awash in such insincere and coercive techniques. The goal, replicated in the corporate workshops where managers are taught how to speak to employees, is not to communicate but to control."

"Psychologists, in and out of the government, have learned how to manipulate social behavior. The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders."

"that most oppressive systems of power, including classical Western colonialism and proponents of globalization, all use the idea of social harmony as a control mechanism."

"Positive psychology is only the latest incarnation of this assault on community and individualism."

The author details incidents where government trainees were "“psychologically abused” and subjected to sessions resembling “cult programming” during management and diversity training sessions".

"Corporatism, aided by positive psychology, relies on several effective coercive persuasion techniques, similar to those often employed by cults, to meld workers into a “happy” collective."

"There is a dark, insidious quality to the ideology promoted by the positive psychologists."

"Its false promise of harmony and happiness only increases internal anxiety and feelings of inadequacy."

"Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. Here, we are all happy."

Signs of collapse of this Empire of Illusion

"The dying gasps of all empires, from the Aztecs to the ancient Romans to the French monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, have been characterized by a disconnect between the elites and reality. The elites were blinded by absurd fantasies of omnipotence and power that doomed their civilizations. We have been steadily impoverished by our own power elites—legally, economically, spiritually, and politically. And unless we radically reverse this tide, unless we wrest the state away from corporate hands, we will be dragged down by the dark and turbulent undertow of globalization. In this world there are only masters and serfs. We are entering an era in which workers may become serfs, no longer able to earn a living wage to sustain themselves or their families, whether in sweatshops in China or the industrial waste-land of Ohio."

"The country’s moral decay is manifested in its physical decay. It is no coincidence that our infrastructure—roads, bridges, sewers, airports, trains, mass transit—is overburdened, outdated, and in dismal repair. It is not so elsewhere."

"Half of all bankruptcies in America occur because families are unable to pay their medical bills."

Coping with decline

"How will we cope with our decline? Will we cling to the absurd dreams of a superpower and the fantasies of a glorious tomorrow, or will we responsibly face our stark, new limitations? Will we heed those who are sober and rational, those who speak of a new simplicity and humility, or will we follow the demagogues and charlatans who rise up in moments of crisis and panic to offer fantastic visions of escape? Will we radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent?"

Predictions for the future

These are the predictions from the author Chris Hedges given in 2010. Almost all of them have become true at the time of writing in 2023, and are likely to intensify even more in the future.

"a failure to dismantle our overextended imperial projects, coupled with the economic collapse, is likely to result in a full-blown inverted totalitarianism."

"the response to mounting discontent and social unrest will probably lead to greater state control and repression. There will be, he warned, a huge “expansion of government power.”"

"in inverted totalitarianism, consumer goods, and a comfortable standard of living, along with a vast entertainment industry that provides spectacles and appealing diversions, keep the citizenry politically passive."

"political passivity bred by a culture of illusion is exploited by demagogues who present themselves to a submissive population as saviors."

"corporate state has successfully blocked public debate about alternative forms of power. Corporations determine who gets heard and who does not, he said. And those, such as Wolin, who critique corporate power are excluded from the national dialogue. Pundits on television news programs discuss politics as a horse race or compare the effectiveness of pseudo- events staged by candidates. They do not discuss ideas, issues, or meaningful reform."

"In the 1930s... There was a range of different approaches. But what I am struck by now is the narrow range within which palliatives are being modeled. We are supposed to work with the financial system. So the people who helped create this system are put in charge of the solution. There has to be some major effort to think outside the box."

There is unlikely to be major social unrest or mass protests because of "political passivity" of the masses, and "ways [corporate/governmental authorities] can isolate protests and prevent it from [becoming] a contagion are formidable"

Ruling powers will not be able to fix any global issues. "The economic difficulties are more profound than we had guessed and because of globalization more difficult to deal with."

No long term fix is possible, and things will not get magically better. "They have to begin structural changes that involve a very different approach from a market economy. I don’t think this will happen."

Comments about USA

"This country once prided itself on its experimentation and flexibility. It has become rigid. It is probably the most conservative of all the advanced countries."

"We have a few voices here, a magazine there, and that’s about it. It goes nowhere."

"The decline of American empire began... when we shifted, in the words of the historian Charles Maier, from an “empire of production” to an “empire of consumption.” We started borrowing to maintain a lifestyle we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil."

"The problems we face are structural. The old America is not coming back."

"The corporate forces that control the state will never permit real reform."

Living in an Empire of Illusion

"We are diverted by spectacle and pseudo-events. We are fed illusions."

"We are given comforting myths—the core of popular culture—that exalt our nation and ourselves(Positive psychology?), even though ours is a time of collapse, and moral and political squalor."

"Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers—and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games."
There is a real cost to living in an Empire of Illusion.

"The cost of our empire of illusion... is being paid on the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing towns, and in depressed rural enclaves. This cost transcends declining numbers and statistics and speaks the language of human misery and pain."

We ourselves are to blame

"The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans, celebrities, and a lust for violence, the more we are destined to implode."

We are addicted to feel-good spiritual entertainment and moral self-indulgence. "As the collapse continues and our suffering mounts, we yearn...for the comfort, reassurance, and beauty of illusion. The illusion makes us feel good. It is its own reality."

"The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip, and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization."

George Monbiot says "Almost universally we now seem content to lead a proxy life, a counter life, of vicarious, illusory relationships, of secondhand pleasures, of atomisation without individuation".

Hope

"The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning."

"Blind and dumb, indifferent to the siren calls of celebrity, unable to bow before illusions, defying the lust for power, love constantly rises up to remind a wayward society of what is real and what is illusion."

Authors gives example of "the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti, on whose body, found in a mass grave, were poems that condemned his fascist killers and are today taught to schoolchildren in Hungary".


99% of people cannot think for themselves.

People would rather give themselves electric shock than think.

People don’t think, they don’t want to think, and they can’t think even if they want to.

How will you make sense of this changing world? How will you know how to thrive in this changing world?

You won’t, and you can’t.

Thinking is hard. It requires several traits: knowledge, ability to read, intelligence, hard work, discipline, a certain mindset, and more. Most people would do anything to avoid thinking.

Find your leader and support him. He will have the answers and know what to do.

It is to such people that we need to Rally around. Rally to your King.


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