Madame M:
How telling of our society’s priorities that the top annual end of a full-time, established professor (usually 15-20+ years at the university—effectively, the very pinnacle of advancement in academia), that is, someone who is helping to form the citizens that will build and support the society by their future efforts, is only equal to the monthly compensation of a FIRED coach.
That business gets the money and the attention, and education and the humanities get neither, is further indication that producing compliant systems managers and workers is the rewarded objective, not critically thinking citizens who can save their civilization and chart a new course of sensible sustainability and visionary improvement.
I will take a moment here to quibble over semantics: “government regulated ‘morality’” about the now discarded Blue Laws, as it could imply that government is this entirely separated thing from the society. I quibble because our government is (or rather, is SUPPOSED to be) a reflection of the people’s collective will, and the laws made to benefit “the general welfare” (to use a phrase from our founding documents) are because the general citizenry believe that most people benefit (and no one is unduly punished in the process). Even if I perhaps wax nostalgic for bygone days, it is not with rose-colored glasses in this instance—it WAS a time when the people wagged the corporations and business (or at least held equal sway enough of the time), not the other way around. They even held more sway in the time of The Organization Man and Up the Organization!
Why don’t more of us stop playing the game of the real-life Potters of the world, stop being the pliant pawns in our own self-enfeeblement and self-destruction? Hedges has already laid out answers to that, in his words about how we adapt to our place in the corporate state, in our own self-made ghettos, in being part of the momentarily comfortable illusion rather than the hard reality with a chance to change. As someone put it, it’s part of the hemlock we readily and willingly keep drinking.
You bring up good exposure on how we go along with manipulating and being manipulated, that our priorities as individuals and culture are so out of whack, with such insanity in the guise of current cultural buzzwords (“networking”), that we just further illustrate the illusionary aspects of this society. Other cultures the world over have been trying to tell us for some time: this American OBSESSION with working (and materialism) is, in the globally competitive environment, making everyone’s lives a good deal more miserable, is making changes that are good at best for only the very few (the exploiters). And are not sustainable in the long run anyway, because humans were never meant to be that way, and our deep inward selves rebel against it.
The language of our elites, and their doublespeak (let alone the assumptions!) of things like “growth,” “profit,” “earnings,” and other supposed measures of financial and economic health, are much of the time mere part and parcel of the deception, deflection, diversion, and confusion served up to keep us off-balance, not questioning, and resigned to the fates corporations and oligarchs hand to us. Another thing that Hedges pointed out in that section you mention: that a specialist services “tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question.”
Hedges says that our elites “cannot recognize the vital relationship between power and morality. They have forgotten, or never knew, that moral traditions are the product of civilization. They have little or no knowledge of their own civilization and do not know, therefore, how to maintain it. ‘One of the signs of a dying civilization,’ John Ralston Saul writes, ‘is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible, literate elites is to aid and abet that communication.’” (96) Ours often do the opposite, and this is with this professor recognizing the complexities of our problems.
Chris Hedges wrote some powerful insights relatively recently, peeling away deeper layers than even his book. See the full piece here, and if you can, support the writing to the extent you are financially able: This Is What The Revolution Looks Like. Here in the next two paragraphs is a brief sample:
Tax havens alone cost us at least a trillion dollars every decade. “The political process no longer works in any meaningful way for anyone but the corporate elite and their allies. A fourth of the country’s largest corporations—including General Electric, ExxonMobil and Bank of America—paid no federal income taxes in 2010. But at the same time these corporations operate as if they have a divine right to hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies. They reinvest their proceeds overseas; they don’t bring them home to help Americans or provide capital here to use.
“We don’t need leaders. We don’t need directives from above. We don’t need formal organizations. We don’t need to waste our time appealing to the Democratic Party or writing letters to the editor. We don’t need more diatribes on the Internet. We need to physically get into the public square and create a mass movement. We need you and a few of your neighbors to begin it. We need you to walk down to your Bank of America branch and protest. We need you to come to Union Square. And once you do that you begin to create a force these elites always desperately try to snuff out—resistance.”
Hedges has put himself on the line. He may believe that this civilization is failing, with slim chance of saving itself, but he is living the fully authentic life, an intellectual Gandhi for our times.
And he says there are some faint signs that perhaps there are defections among the elites. For example, this Tweet: “Support Occupy Oakland. Not the 1% and its government facilitators.” From Dan Siegel, the Oakland mayor’s legal advisor and friend, upon resigning.
From the business sector comes yet another millionaire who wants to pay higher taxes. When asked why, this particular gentleman replied: “I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country.”
There’s someone who gets it. Who gets that feudalism is not really all that fun to live in, and depresses the real overall prosperity of a society.
Perhaps more will follow him.
Back to the book. The story of the protesters, who wanted to preserve a part of nature rather than surrender yet more of it to build another sports complex. How were those protesters, including a war veteran, treated by most students (and most who had never served in the military or gone to war) on campus? Hebdon tells that his “strongest memory is of a person selling rocks to throw at tree sitters. He had noticeable crowd support. When I see things like this, I think of how Berkeley, once known for conscientious objection, is training an inhumane, deeply frustrated, indifferent, game-driven people.” (95) He also goes on to remark that military service has become one of the few ways for students to pay their way without amassing large amounts of crushing debt. Hebdon decries the lack of critical thinking—ironically, bitterly ironically, in a place that hosts the annual international conference on critical thinking.
There is plenty of corruption at universities, yes, but the stale (or worse) mismanagement and ruinous policies manifest in other easily seen ways: obscenely (as we’ve shown) overpaid coaches, top-heavy, indulged, excessively bureaucratic, and self-perpetuating administrations that skirt laws and in any case care little for anyone but themselves and their image. This is obvious in the pre-occupation with fund raising—often to construct yet more buildings, complexes, and “centers” that do little if anything to further knowledge or education, but only make a name for the people who push them (or the wealthy donors who pay for them). Government (especially military and intelligence) contracts and influence are often prevalent, and the professors who once were the voices of reason and opposition are now servants of the corporate system—their research and promotion now rarely serve the general public, and are often unconnected to morality or the maintenance (let alone the advancement!) of this civilization.
It is not too much of stretch to say that the corporate state dictates the workers desired, and the educational “system” spits out some semblance of the narrow human (and perhaps narrowly human) material required. As one commentator put it, “The Humanities have been assaulted while the top universities crank out people like George W. Bush, ‘a man with severely limited intellectual capacity and no moral core.’"
Hedges keeps beating us about the head to wake up. We can either do so and respond to the pain, or numb ourselves with more shopping, more TV, more sports watching, more escapism. What we choose determines how history will judge us as a people.
Harsh words in the midst of the Christmas season! One would think I was the veritable killjoy! :) But truth can look like that to those still enraptured by those wall shadows…
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