The Folly of Empire
By Chris Hedges
The final days of empire give ample employment and power to
the feckless, the insane and the idiotic. These politicians and court
propagandists, hired to be the public faces on the sinking ship, mask the real
work of the crew, which is systematically robbing the passengers as the vessel
goes down. The mandarins of power stand in the wheelhouse barking ridiculous
orders and seeing how fast they can gun the engines. They fight like children
over the ship’s wheel as the vessel heads full speed into a giant ice field.
They wander the decks giving pompous speeches. They shout that the SS America
is the greatest ship ever built. They insist that it has the most advanced
technology and embodies the highest virtues. And then, with abrupt and
unexpected fury, down we will go into the frigid waters.
The last days of empire are carnivals of folly. We are in
the midst of our own, plunging forward as our leaders court willful economic
and environmental self-destruction. Sumer and Rome went down like this. So did
the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Men and women of stunning mediocrity
and depravity led the monarchies of Europe and Russia on the eve of World War
I. And America has, in its own decline, offered up its share of weaklings,
dolts and morons to steer it to destruction. A nation that was still rooted in
reality would never glorify charlatans such as Sen. Ted Cruz, House Speaker
John Boehner and former Speaker Newt Gingrich as they pollute the airwaves. If
we had any idea what was really happening to us we would have turned in fury
against Barack Obama, whose signature legacy will be utter capitulation to the
demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry, the military-industrial
complex and the security and surveillance state. We would have rallied behind
those few, such as Ralph Nader, who denounced a monetary system based on
gambling and the endless printing of money and condemned the willful wrecking
of the ecosystem. We would have mutinied. We would have turned the ship back.
The populations of dying empires are passive because they
are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward
oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that
are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it
will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian
novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and
glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and
economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus
like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will
always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical
thinking.
“The American citizen
thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image
has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book “The
Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We hardly dare face our
bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and
the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become
eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play
on ourselves.”
Education is primarily
vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a
living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at
universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out
academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may
successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of
Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the
national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are
replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero
inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his honesty,
was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off. His severed
head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the
speaker’s platform in the Forum. The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat
on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the
modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and
gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour
cycles.Political life has fused into celebrity worship.Sensual pleasure and eternal youth are our overriding
obsessions. The Roman emperor Tiberius, at the end, fled to the island of Capri
and turned his seaside palace into a house of unbridled lust and violence.
“Bevies of girls and young men, whom he had collected from all over the Empire
as adepts in unnatural practices, and known as spintriae, would copulate before
him in groups of three, to excite his waning passions,” Suetonius wrote in “The
Twelve Caesars.” Tiberius trained small boys, whom he called his minnows, to
frolic with him in the water and perform oral sex. And after watching prolonged
torture, he would have captives thrown into the sea from a cliff near his
palace. Tiberius would be followed by Caligula and Nero.
“At times when the
page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when
History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and
heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter in his book “The Collapse
of Complex Societies” looked at the collapse of civilizations from the Roman to
the Mayan. He concluded that they disintegrated because they finally could not
sustain the bureaucratic complexities they had created. Layers of bureaucracy
demand more and more exploitation, not only of the environment but the laboring
classes. They become calcified by systems that are unable to respond to the
changing reality around them. They, like our elite universities and business
schools, churn out systems managers, people who are taught not to think but to
blindly service the system. These systems managers know only how to perpetuate
themselves and the system they serve, although serving that system means
disemboweling the nation and the planet. Our elites and bureaucrats exhaust the
earth to hold up a system that worked in the past, failing to see that it no
longer works. Elites, rather than contemplate reform, which would jeopardize
their privilege and power, retreat in the twilight of empire into walled
compounds like the Forbidden City or Versailles. They invent their own reality.
Those on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms have replicated this behavior.
They insist that continued reliance on fossil fuel and speculations will
sustain the empire. State resources, as Tainter notes, are at the end
increasingly squandered on extravagant and senseless projects and imperial
adventures. And then it all collapses.
Our collapse will take the whole planet with it.
It is more pleasant, I admit, to stand mesmerized in front
of our electronic hallucinations. It is easier to check out intellectually. It
is more gratifying to imbibe the hedonism and the sickness of the worship of
the self and money. It is more comforting to chatter about celebrity gossip and
ignore or dismiss what is reality.
Thomas Mann in “The Magic Mountain” and Joseph Roth in
“Hotel Savoy” brilliantly chronicled this peculiar state of mind. In Roth’s
hotel the first three floors house in luxury the bloated rich, the amoral
politicians, the bankers and the business owners. The upper floors are crammed
with people who struggle to pay their bills and who are steadily divested of
their possessions until they are destitute and cast out. There is no political
ideology among decayed ruling elites, despite choreographed debates and
elaborate political theater. It is, as it always is at the end, one vast
kleptocracy.
Just before World War II, a friend asked Roth, a Jewish
intellectual who had fled Nazi Germany for Paris, “Why are you drinking so
much?” Roth answered: “Do you think you are going to escape? You too are going
to be wiped out.”
