by Chris Hedges
Snowden had watched as senior officials, including Obama, lied to the public about internal surveillance. He knew that the president was willfully dishonest when he assured Americans that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which meets in secret and hears only from the government, is “transparent.” He knew that the president’s statement that Congress was “overseeing the entire program” was false. He knew that everything Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the press, the Congress, and the public about the surveillance of Americans was a lie.
Snowden had access to the full roster of everyone working at the NSA. He could have made public the entire intelligence community and undercover assets worldwide. He could have exposed the locations of every clandestine station and their missions. He could have shut down the surveillance system, as he has said, “in an afternoon.”31 But this was never his intention. He wanted only to halt the wholesale surveillance that was being carried out, until he documented it, without our consent or knowledge.
He knew that the information he possessed could be made available to the public only through a few journalists whose integrity he could trust. There is no free press without the ability of reporters to protect the confidentiality of those who have the moral courage to make public the abuse of power. If we do not immediately dismantle the security and surveillance apparatus, there will be no investigative journalism or judicial oversight to address abuses of power. There will be no organized dissent. There will be no independent thought. Criticisms, however tepid, will be treated as acts of subversion.
Snowden had no choice, just as we now have no choice. He defied the formal institutions of government because they do not work. And all who seek reform must follow his example. Appealing to the judicial, legislative, or executive branches of government in the hope of reform is as realistic as accepting the offer made by the March Hare during the Mad Tea-Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland:
“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea.
“I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.
“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.32
The public’s inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic corporate elite makes it difficult to organize effective resistance. Compliant politicians, entertainers, and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture and news media hold up the elites as leaders to emulate. We are repeatedly assured that through diligence and hard work we can join them. We are taught to equate wealth with success. This narrative keeps us from seeing the truth.
“The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”
The exchange, although it never took place, does sum up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different. The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant and expendable workers, hangers-on, servants, and sycophants. Wealth, as Fitzgerald illustrated in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby—a tome on the depravity of the rich in the giddy world of speculation that would lead to the Depression—as well as his short story “The Rich Boy,” which appeared a year later, breeds a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities. Colleagues, business partners, clients, associates, shareholders, investors, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power, as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable. And that, in the eyes of the elite, is what we are.
“Let me tell you about the very rich,” Fitzgerald writes in “The Rich Boy.” “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”33
Aristotle, who saw extreme inequality as the fundamental cause of revolution, argues in Politics that the rise of an oligarchic state leads to one of two scenarios. The impoverished underclass can revolt and overthrow the oligarchs to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power, or it can submit to the tyranny of oligarchic rule.34
The public face of the oligarchic class is carefully crafted by publicists and a compliant media. It bears little resemblance to the private face. This is hard for those who have not been admitted into the intimate circles of the elite to grasp. I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust as a boy. I was sent to an exclusive New England boarding school at the age of ten as a scholarship student. I had classmates whose fathers—fathers they rarely saw otherwise—arrived at the school in their limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of dutiful dads. I spent time in the mansions of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies, and servants. When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble, there are always lawyers, publicists, and political personages to protect them—George W. Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a disdain for the poor—despite carefully publicized acts of philanthropy—and a haughty dislike of the middle class.
The lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances to be endured, sometimes placated, and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness, and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. I returned on summer breaks to the small town in Maine where my grandparents and relatives lived. They had more innate intelligence than most of my prep school classmates. I knew from a young age who my enemies were.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald writes of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”35
“Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle writes in Politics. “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”36
Oligarchs, as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation—subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case, neoliberalism and globalization—that conveniently justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”37
The blanket dissemination of the ideology of neoliberalism through the media and the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the industrial world’s largest income inequality gap. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, in a May 2011 article titled “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%” in Vanity Fair, warned of the damage caused by the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of an oligarchic elite. “In our democracy, 1% of the people take nearly a quarter
of the nation’s income,” he writes.
In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1% control 40%…. [As a result,] the top 1% have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99% live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1% eventually do learn. Too late.38
For every $1 that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980, they had an additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explains in his article “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.”39 In the same period, the bottom 90 percent, Johnston says, added only one cent. Nearly half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income.40 The real value of the minimum wage has fallen by $3.44 since 1968.41
Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice for the common good. They never have. They never will. And now that they have full control of the economy and the legal system, as well as the legislative and executive branches of government, along with our media outlets, they use power as a blunt instrument for personal enrichment and domination.
“We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are,” Wendell Berry writes.
Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.42
The ancient Greeks and Egyptians, the Romans, the Mayans, the Hapsburgs, even the inhabitants of Easter Island, all died because they were unable to control the appetites of their elites. The elites were able to exploit ecosystems and human beings until these civilizations self-destructed. The quest by a bankrupt elite in a civilization’s final days to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. As there is less and less to exploit, this quest leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, infrastructure collapse, and, finally, death.
It is the self-deluded on Wall Street and among the political elite—those who entertain and inform us and those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation—who are foolishly held up as exemplars of intelligence, success, and progress. This is the mark of a civilization that has gone insane. The National Alliance on Mental Illness calculates that “one in four adults—approximately 6.5 million Americans—experience mental illness in a given year,” which seems a reasonable reaction to the future being constructed for us by our corporate masters.43
The rich, throughout history, have found methods and subterfuges to subjugate and resubjugate the working class. And workers have cyclically awoken throughout history to revolt. The founding fathers, largely wealthy slaveholders, feared direct democracy and enthusiastically embraced the slaughter of indigenous peoples to seize their land and resources. They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The laboring classes were to be kept at bay. The electoral college, the original power of the states to appoint senators, and the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic. We had to fight for our rights and our voice. Hundreds of workers attempting to form unions were killed and thousands were wounded in our labor wars. Tens of thousands more were fired and blacklisted.
The democratic openings we achieved were fought and paid for with the blood of abolitionists, African Americans, suffragists, workers, and antiwar and civil rights activists. Our radical movements, repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the name of anticommunism, were the real engines of equality and social justice. Now that unions have been broken and sweatshops implanted in the developing world, the squalor and suffering inflicted on workers by the oligarchic class in the nineteenth century is mirrored in the present. Dissent is once again a criminal act. The Mellons, Rockefellers, and Carnegies at the turn of the last century sought to create a nation of masters and serfs. The modern corporate incarnation of this nineteenth-century oligarchic elite has created a worldwide neofeudalism under which workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass hundreds of millions in personal wealth.
Rebellion against this global oligarchic elite, however, percolates across the planet.
The China Labour Bulletin estimates that there were at least 373 strikes in China from January to June 24, 2014,44 and 1,171 strikes or worker protests from mid-2011 to 2013.45 Workers carried out strikes at factories that made products for multinationals such as IBM, Pepsi, Wal-Mart, Nike, and Adidas.46 In a single strike in April 2014, more than 40,000 workers walked off the job at a factory in Dongguan that produced shoes for Nike and Adidas.47 The workers went on strike after they discovered that their work contracts were fraudulent and the company had been underpaying the social insurance to which they were legally entitled for at least two decades.48 The monthly minimum wage for these production workers was 1,310 yuan, or $210.27, a month. Nike running shoes cost 1,469 yuan, or $235.79.49
Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs upward. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is either submission or revolt.
III/The Invisible Revolution
The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. But what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.1
—ALEXANDER HERZEN, ON THE
FAILURE OF THE 1848 REVOLUTIONS
“Did you ever ask yourself how it happens that government and capitalism continue to exist in spite of all the evil and trouble they are causing in the world?” the anarchist Alexander Berkman wrote in his essay “The Idea Is the Thing.” “If you did, then your answer must have been that it is because the people support those institutions, and that they support them because they believe in them.”2
Revolutions, when they begin, are invisible, at least to the wider society. They start with the slow discrediting and dismantling of an old ideology and an old language used to interpret reality and justify power. Human societies are captive to and controlled by language. When the old ideas are shattered, when it is clear that the official words and ideas no longer match the reality, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. Our battle is a battle over what the experimental psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker refers to as “mutual knowledge.”3
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society,” the linguist Edward Sapir writes.
It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.… We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.4
Our inability, as citizens, to influence power in a system of corporate or inverted totalitarianism, along with the loss of our civil liberties, weakens the traditional pol
itical vocabulary of a capitalist democracy. The descent of nearly half the country into poverty or near-poverty diminishes the effectiveness of the rhetoric about limitless growth and ceaseless material progress. It undermines the myth of American prosperity. The truths are dimly apparent. But we have yet to sever ourselves from the old way of speaking and formulate a new language to explain us to ourselves. Until this happens, the corporate state can harness the old language like a weapon and employ the institutions of power and organs of state security to perpetuate itself.
In the Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci calls such a moment in history an “interregnum”—a time when the reigning ideology is bankrupt but has yet to be replaced by a new one. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear,” Gramsci writes.5
We have been captivated in the modern age by what John Ralston Saul calls “a theology of pure power” built on “organization, technology and information.” Our new priest, he writes, is the technocrat, “the man who understands the organization, makes use of the technology and controls access to the information, which is a compendium of facts.” These technocrats have “rendered powerless the law,” which is no longer used, as it was designed, “to protect the individual from the unreasonable actions of others, especially those in power.” It is a weapon of injustice wielded by those who have married “the state and the means of production.” This marriage, Saul notes, makes it “almost impossible for the law to judge illegal that which is wrong.”6
The cult of rationality in the hands of technocrats has become an absolutist ideology. Technocrats, Saul notes, are “slaves to dogma” and “hedonists of power.” This cult presents itself as the solution to the problems it perpetuates—as if the fossil fuel industry could solve the energy crisis or global banks the financial crisis. Saul warns that if we do not free ourselves from this cult—and like Pinker and Berkman, he believes that this is only possible once we develop a new language to describe reality—we will be vanquished by these technocrats. “Their obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force—a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world,” he writes.7