Madame:
Hedges has a loathing for positive psychology, one for the very reason that he sees it as further divorcing us from reality. From the many examples he gives in his book, one can see that far from achieving any notable positive effect on the American psychological profile and productivity, it has served to distance us even more from reality. The elites love it because it not only excuses them, but even makes those they trod upon think it’s their own fault. Hedges should be congratulated for laying bare the mechanisms and institutional frameworks used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, physical, health, emotional, and ethical/moral collapse around us. He is right to, as one fellow has put it, expose the absurd idea that we can always draw on inner resources and strengths to have everything we desire, that reality can be overcome by human will if one just believes it so. And the equal absurdity that even if the present is not so great, the future is going to be better just because we believe it will. Positive psychology could have its place, perhaps even a beneficial one, in the realm of human self-improvement, but it sought too often to effectively make itself its own religion, and was used in the service of those who care nothing but for themselves and their own control.
Your examples and links have pointed out quite well how neurotic we are as a society. We are the addicts, and furthermore, we are doubly so because we are culturally addicted, not just individually. That we have become the culture of self only illustrates in monstrous waves how little concerned we have become with what our Framers fretted about: the public good.
The world, and especially America, spend excessive amounts of life-energy on Facebook and similar electronic connections. Like many things in this digital age, it has gone from being a useful tool, or entertaining and occasional pastime, to being an addiction. The same about YouTube. I know of one place that had to ban access to it because it was taking up so much bandwith from people and their “hey, look at this video on YouTube.” No longer apparently is it the occasional thing, but a constant 3 or 4(+) a day per person in some instances. Rather than connect it, it seems to only make us more shallow.
It is not just the productivity lost from this, it’s the diversion. We the people fiddle while society and the world spin downward. Who is doing the job of preserving the civilization, let alone providing vision for its continuance and advancement? The powerful? They seem to care only for their own advantages, not the common good, and any “vision” they have is a sick one.
War is packaged and sold to us, and with the high-tech allure and all-volunteer force, sold to us as something most people get to feel as external, rather than as a real part of (with all that would really entail). Further distancing us from reality and its true effects. Hedges’s description of the shock of reality displacing illusion while under fire should be required reading for all would-be soldiers—and those who send them in harm’s way. Not just to save their lives from the nonsense that has been ingrained into them, but to also save their spirits from the manipulation and illusions that would use them up and never care.
Illusions we have willingly embraced. Reality sucks, people think, so why not. It has made us a nation of lotus-eaters, perpetually disconnected from authentic lives, a collection of opium dens. It doesn’t have to be that way. Many resist the allure, but its presence is ever there, ever pounding on the will. We may not be the Matrix, but we are far from its opposite.
Americans’ obsession/addiction with entertainment makes us willing pseudo-worshippers of celebrities, athletes, and deceivingly charismatic politicians and clergy. Like many masses of the past, we idolize who should not be idolized because they seem to represent what we, in our dim and deluded state, might wish to be. Reality is complex, why deal with it; it makes our nutritionally depleted and shrunken brains hurt. Easier to live in fantasies and escapism manifested in the unreal panorama of celebrities, reality TV, and sports. As someone said, we want to be lied to, because the lies make us feel so much better about our lives. And as Hedges points out, our obsession carries even into the artifacts and relics of celebrity-dom: we covet the possessions of living or dead celebrities with the same religious zeal that people of the past did for their own religious icons, and we visit shrines of those personalities in a way not too dissimilar to the way religious pilgrimages were made in the not so distant past. Our own lives seem to have no meaning compared to their illustrious and glorious ones.
Hedges points out our narcissistic culture in many examples and explanations. And our manipulated one. We the people need rules to be enforced, but they are not, except when they can be used against us. The elites escape scot-free, except when their internecine squabbling claims one of their own.
This lack of rules enforcement leads to disrespect and disillusionment with them. And the law. The masses take their cue from the corrupt elites, who they watch do all manner of illegal and thoroughly unethical or even criminal things without consequence. Seeing these bad examples teaches that those who play by the rules are suckers and losers. “If the world is rigged against you, if those in power stifle your voice, outsource your job, and foreclose your house, cheat back.” (12)
We blandly accept this spectacle of the elites partly because we are embodying what Plato feared: “the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educated those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall…” (14)
Well that you have brought up Boorstin, who is quoted by Hedges, “We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live,; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.” (15)
The reader at this point may think that the Prof is merely a fan-boy of Hedges here, accepting all with the rapid nods of a yes-man. Not so. There will be places in the book that I disagree with Hedges, or feel that he’s painting with a broad or incomplete brush. For instance, while I agree that our celebrity culture makes too many people want to be like celebrities (and excessively so), I also believe that it can be too easy to merely give one’s self a pass too. Just because one might not lose enough weight or get enough plastic surgery to become some artificial definition of attractive, does not mean that excess pounds should not be shed, or that care and attention to one’s appearance is not warranted and beneficial.
Ah, a good deal more to say, and I’ve just begun! I guess I’m still taking in air! ;)
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