by Chris Hedges
“The Machine Stops,” a story published by E.M. Forster in 1909, paints a futuristic world where people are mesmerized by virtual reality. In Forster’s dystopia, human beings live in isolated, tiny subterranean rooms, like hives, where they are captivated by instant messages and “cinematophoes”—machines that project visual images. The subterranean masses cut themselves off from the external world and are absorbed by a bizarre pseudoreality of voices, sounds, evanescent images, and abstract sensations that can be evoked by pressing a few buttons. The world of the Machine, which has replaced the real world with a virtual world, is accessed through an omniscient, impersonal voice.12
We are, as Forster understood, seduced and then enslaved by technology, from the combustion engine to computers to robotics. Human ingenuity is always hijacked by slave masters. They use the newest technologies to keep us impoverished, confused about our identity, and passive. The Internet, designed by defense strategists to communicate after a nuclear attack, has become the latest technological instrument of control. Technology is morally neutral. It serves the interests of those who control it. And those who control it today are destroying journalism, culture, and art while they herd the population into clans that fuel isolation, self-delusion, intolerance, and hatred.
“A common rationalization in the fledgling world of digital cultures back then was that we were entering a transitional lull before a creative storm—or were already in the eye of the storm,” Lanier writes in his book. “But we were not passing through a momentary calm. We had, rather, entered a persistent somnolence, and I have come to believe that we will escape it only when we kill the hive.”
The media, the arts, scholarship, and political and social movements must become conduits for unvarnished moral outrage and passion. We must defy systems, and even laws, that permit corporations to strangle our culture and the natural world. But, at the same time, all who speak in a moral voice, one tied to facts rather than illusions, will become freaks. It will be difficult to live with a conscience in an age of nihilism. Journalism will reach tiny audiences, just as the plays of Aristophanes or Racine attract small crowds in obscure theaters. Art and journalism will seek wealthy patrons who will come and go according to the dictates of their fortunes and their whims, but will not reach the larger society, which will be deluged with illusions and spectacles. A culture, once it no longer values truth and beauty, condemns its most creative and moral people to poverty and obscurity. And this is our destiny.
The French existentialist Albert Camus argued that our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die, and our individual beings will be obliterated. But we have a choice in how we live.
“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus wrote. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”13
The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants, and those locked away in our prison system.
The elites and their courtiers in the liberal class always condemn the rebel as impractical. They dismiss the stance of the rebel as counterproductive. They chastise the rebel for being angry. The elites and their apologists call for calm, reason, and patience. They use the hypocritical language of compromise, generosity, and understanding to argue that we must accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to compromise. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments, or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and the courage to change them. The rebel knows that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion justifies itself.
“You do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career,” Václav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia:
You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. . . . The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin—and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost.14
The corporate elite does not argue that the current system is just or good, because it cannot, but it has convinced the majority of citizens that there is no alternative. But we are not slaves. We have a choice. We can refuse to be either a victim or an executioner. We have the moral capacity to say no, to refuse to cooperate. Any boycott or demonstration, any occupation or sit-in, any strike, any act of obstruction or sabotage, any refusal to pay taxes, any fast, any popular movement, and any act of civil disobedience ignites the soul of the rebel and exposes the dead hand of authority.
“There is beauty and there are the humiliated,” Camus wrote. “Whatever difficulties the enterprise may present, I should like never to be unfaithful either to the second or the first.”15
“There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop,” Mario Savio said in 1964 during the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. “And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”16
The capacity to refuse to cooperate offers us the only route left to personal freedom and a life with meaning. Camus is right about the absurdity of existence. He is also right about finding meaning and self-worth in acts of rebellion that eschew the practical for the moral.
“Oh my soul,” the ancient Greek poet Pindar wrote, “do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.”
Acts of rebellion permit us to be free and independent human beings. Rebellion chips away, however imperceptibly, at the edifice of the oppressor. Rebellion sustains the capacity for human solidarity. Rebellion, in moments of profound human despair and misery, keeps alive the capacity to be human. Rebellion is not the same as revolution. Revolution works towards the establishment of a new power structure. Rebellion is about perpetual revolt and permanent alienation from power. And it is ony in a state of rebellion that we can hold fast to moral imperatives that prevent a descent into tyranny. Empathy must be our primary attribute. Those who retreat into cynicism and despair, like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, die spiritually and morally. If we are to be extinguished, let it be on our own terms.
The dispassionate, objective creed of the liberal class, which made them mere photographers of human reality, is useless to the rebel. It is an ideology that serves those we must defy. The cri de coeur for reason, logic, and truth, for a fact-based society, for political and social structures designed to protect the common good, will be the flag carried by forlorn and militant remnants of our dying civilization. Cicero did this in ancient Rome. But he was as despised by the crowd as he was by the power elite. When his severed head and hands were mounted on the podium in the Colosseum, and his executioner Mark Antony announced that Cicero wou
ld speak and write no more, the tens of thousands of spectators roared their approval. Tyranny in an age of chaos is often greeted with palpable relief. There often is no public outcry. The rebel must, for this reason, also expect to become the enemy, even of those he or she is attempting to protect.
The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. That state appeals to pleasure, as well as fear, to crush compassion. We will have to continue to fight the mechanisms of that dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve, through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the injustice visited on others, especially those we do not know. As distinct and moral beings, we will endure only through these small, sometimes imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what mass culture and mass propaganda seeks to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And, for now, this is the only victory possible.
Notes
EPIGRAPH:
1 George Orwell, “Freedom of the Press,” unprinted introduction to Animal Farm, first printed, ed. Bernard Crick, Times Literary Supplement, September 15, 1972: 1040.
CHAPTER 1: RESISTANCE
1 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 76.
2 Ernest Logan Bell, interview, Norwich, New York, March 30, 2010.
3 John Gray, Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 86.
4 C. Wright Mills, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 126-128.
5 Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10-11.
6 Irving Howe, “This Age of Conformity,” in The Partisan Review Anthology , eds. William Phillips and Philip Rahv (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961), 148.
7 Ibid., 148-149.
8 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Everyman 1993), 7.
CHAPTER 2: PERMANENT WAR
1 Reinhold Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 39.
2 Dwight Macdonald, The Root Is Man (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995), 81.
3 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90.
4 “Austin Plane Crash: Full Text of Joe Stack online suicide note posted on website embeddedart.com.” February 18, 2010, http:www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/02/18/2010-02-18_austin_plane_crash_full_text_joe_stack_manifesto_posted_on_website_embeddedartco.html.
5 Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), x.
6 Ibid., 162.
7 Ibid., 164.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 264.
10 Ibid., 265.
11 Palagummi Sainath, “Series on farmers’ suicides in Andhra, 2004. India Together, http:www.indiatogether.org/opinions/psainath/suiseries.htm.
12 P. Sainath, “Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History,” Counterpunch February 12, 2009, http:www.counterpunch.org/sainath02122009.html.
13 Noam Chomsky, “The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination,” address to the Left Forum, Pace University, New York, March 21, 2010. Posted May 31, 2010, http:www.democracynow.org/2010/5/31/noam_chomsky_the_center_cannot_hold.
14 Noam Chomsky, Interview, New York, April 13, 2010.
15 Norman Finkelstein, Interview, New York, March 9, 2010.
16 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 174.
17 Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter, “A Duty to Prevent,” Foreign Affairs January/February 2004, http:www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59540/lee-feinstein-and-anne-marie-slaughter/a-duty-to-prevent.
18 Michael Ignatieff, “Friends Disunited,” Guardian, March 24, 2003, http:www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2003/mar/24/iraq.world.
19 Fresh Air with Terry Gross, National Public Radio, March 18, 2003.
20 The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has an official YouTube channel of “important” Oscar speeches, but does not include Moore’s speech. That speech appears at http:www.tagg.org/rants/mmooreoscar.html.
21 Tony Judt, “Bush’s Useful Idiots,” London Review of Books 28:18 (September 21, 2006), 3-5.
22 Jeremy Scahill, interview, Washington, DC, April 28, 2010.
23 Josh Stieber, interview, Washington, DC, April 28, 2010.
24 Malalai Joya, interview, New York, October 28, 2009.
25 Quoted in Michelle Nichols, “Afghan opium feeding Europe, Russia, Iran addicts,” Reuters, October 21, 2009, http:www.reuters.com/article/idUSN20440001.
26 Matthew Hoh, Resignation letter to Ambassador Nancy J. Powell, September 10, 2009, http:www.docstoc.com/docs/13944018/Matthew-Hoh-Resignation-Letter.
27 Peter van Agtmael, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die (Portland, OR: Photolucida, 2009), 88.
28 Lori Grinker, Afterwar: Veterans from a World in Conflict (Milford, NY: de.MO, 2005), 58-59.
29 Ibid., 63.
30 Ibid., 96-107.
31 Ibid., 120-121.
32 Ibid., 124-125.
33 Peter van Agtmael, 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die, 64-65.
CHAPTER 3: DISMANTLING THE LIBERAL CLASS
1 Randolph Bourne, War and the Intellectuals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), 3.
2 “Capper of Kansas Now Backs Wilson,” New York Times, March 25, 1917.
3 D.S. Jordan to W. Kent, April 1, 1917, the Papers of William Kent, Yale University Library.
4 Randolph Bourne, The War and the Intellectuals (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 3-4.
5 See Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Pioneer: Eugene Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 136.
6 “Albert Edwards” [Arthur Bullard], “Under the White Terror,” Colliers, April 28, 1906.
7 Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Atlantic-Little Brown, 1980), 125.
8 Quoted in United States Committee on Public Information, National Service Handbook, Red, White and Blue Series, No. 2 (Washington, DC: 1917), title page.
9 George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1947), 157.
10 Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing, Secretary of State (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), 208.
11 “Radicals at Work for German Peace,” New York Times, June 24, 1917, 7.
12 Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 62.
13 John Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War (New York: Doubleday, 1962), 300.
14 Quoted in Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War, 301.
15 “Debs urges strike if nation fights,” New York Times, March 8, 1917, 3.
16 George Sylvester Viereck, Spreading the Germs of Hate (New York: Horace Liveright, 1930), 178-179.
17 Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War, 302.
18 Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Times of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 134.
19 Dos Passos, Mr. Wilson’s War, 300.
20 Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War, 182.
21 “Senators Tell What Bolshevism in America Means,” New York Times, June 15, 1919, 40.; U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Judiciary, Brewing and Liquor Licenses, 3:114, 123, 146-147.
22 Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1996), 280.
23 Sidney Pollard, The Idea of Progress: History and Society (London:
C. A. Watts, 1968), 9ff.