The Permanent Lie Our Deadliest
Threat
Columnist
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor
at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. He has
written 11 books
December 17,
2017
The most
ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free speech
through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google algorithms that
steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or anti-war sites. It
does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense of fiscal
responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares the way to
dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from the opening
of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the acceleration of
ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the destruction of public
education. It does not come from the squandering of federal dollars on a
bloated military as the country collapses or the use of the systems of domestic
security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous danger we face comes from the
marginalization and destruction of institutions, including the courts,
academia, legislative bodies, cultural organizations and the press, that once
ensured that civil discourse was rooted in reality and fact, helped us
distinguish lies from truth and facilitated justice.
Donald Trump
and today’s Republican Party represent the last stage in the emergence of
corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified by the permanent
lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and half-truths uttered
by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The
common political lie these politicians employed was not designed to cancel out
reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when he signed into law the
North American Free Trade Agreement, promised “NAFTA means jobs, American jobs
and good-paying American jobs.” George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq
because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed weapons of mass destruction. But
Clinton did not continue to pretend that NAFTA was beneficial to the working
class when reality proved otherwise. Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons
of mass destruction once none were found.
The permanent
lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in the face of
overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational. Those who speak in
the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars, traitors and purveyors of
“fake news.” They are banished from the public sphere once totalitarian elites
accrue sufficient power, a power now granted to them with the revoking of net
neutrality. The iron refusal by those who engage in the permanent
lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how transparent reality becomes, creates
a collective psychosis.
“The result
of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that
the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that
the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of
truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being
destroyed,” Hannah Arendt wrote in
“The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
The permanent
lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald Trump, who lies
about the size of his inauguration crowd despite photographic
evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is
“going to get killed” by a tax bill that actually will save him and his
heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he
has a report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not
increase the deficit—only there never was
a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures us, countering all factual
evidence, that “this is not a bill that is designed primarily to benefit the
wealthy and the large businesses.”
Two million
acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over
to the mining and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that
“public lands will once again be for public use.” When environmentalists
denounce the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism “a
false narrative.”
FCC Chairman
Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free speech on the
internet, says, “[T]hose who’ve said the internet as we know it is about to end
have been proven wrong. …We have a free internet going forward.” And at the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases such as “evidence-based”
and “science-based” are banned.
The permanent
lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters what is true. It
matters only what is “correct.” Federal courts are being stacked with imbecilic
and incompetent judges who serve the “correct” ideology of corporatism and the
rigid social mores of the Christian right. They hold reality, including science
and the rule of law, in contempt. They seek to banish those who live in a
reality-based world defined by intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian
rule always elevates the brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no
genuine political philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of
which are absurd and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power.
This is as true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum
of the Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach neoliberalism
and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the Christian right is
the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
“The venal
political figures need not even comprehend the social and political
consequences of their behavior,” psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo wrote in “The
Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and
Brainwashing.” “They are compelled not by ideological belief, no matter how
much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but by the
distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by their
advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an
overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own
pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real
goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve
some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into
going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion of
emotional identification with others, degradation of empathy—the mind has many defense
mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.”
When reality
is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is true one day often
becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded. Complexity, nuance, depth and
profundity are replaced with the simpleton’s belief in threats and force. This
is why the Trump administration disdains diplomacy and is dynamiting the State
Department. Totalitarianism, wrote novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is
at its core the desire for a simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces
reality, morality and ethics are abolished.
“Those who
can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,” Voltaire
warned.
The corporate
elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against people of color,
the poor and the working class, no longer play by any rules. Their lobbyists,
bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics, corrupt judges and
television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state defined by legalized
bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate elites write laws,
regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and plunder while imposing a
crippling debt peonage on the public, including college graduates burdened by
huge loans. They ram through austerity measures that dismantle state and
municipal services, often forcing them to be sold off to corporations, and
slash social programs, including public education and health care. They insist,
however, that when we have grievances we rely on the institutions they have
debased and corrupted. They ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed
political campaigns, petition elected representatives or appeal to the courts.
They seek to lure us into their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse
is pitted against gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed
to perpetuate injustice. It is a game we can never win.
“Thus all our
dignity consist in thought,” wrote Pascal. “It is on thought that we must
depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could never fill. Let
us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.”
We must pit power against power.
We must build parallel institutions and organizations that protect us from
corporate assault and resist corporate domination. We must sever ourselves as
much as possible from the vampire state. The more we can create self-contained
communities, with our own currencies and infrastructures, the more we can
starve and cripple the corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run
cooperatives, local systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and
independent artistic, cultural and political organizations. It means
obstructing in every way possible the corporate assault, including the blocking
of pipelines and fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of
civil disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it
means creating sanctuary cities.
All of this will have to be done the way it has always been done, by building
personal, face-to-face relationships. We may not ultimately save ourselves,
especially with the refusal by the elites to address the ravages of climate
change, but we can create pods of resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and
justice endure.
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