Chris Hedges, “American Sadism”
June 27, 2021 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm EDT
Chris Hedges returns to the Sanctuary for a virtual talk about the times in which we live.
Sadism now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in the United States. It is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years. It is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as Minneapolis. It is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. It is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites. It is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.
The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the middle ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted, sadistic pleasure.
1 opmerking:
Zoals een prachtige zomerdag vaak wordt afgesloten door zware onweersbuien, werd ik op deze weblog, na de prachtige foto van die mooie, gele pioen, weer geconfronteerd met dit stuk van Chris Hedges, die hier de harde feiten presenteert:
The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the middle ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self.
Even later schrijft hij:
No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
Dit gaat zeker niet over prachtige bloemen, maar over de werkelijkheid, helaas. En dan ook nog in het Engels, een taal die ik verafschuw. Mijn afkeer van de Engelse taal en letterkunde, wil ik voor de geïnteresseerden, later meer over vertellen.
Gegeven het feit, dat de heersende macht niet te vertrouwen is, lijkt het mij van belang dat je de taal van die heersende klasse kunt spreken, lezen, schrijven en begrijpen. Daar komt bij, dat in de meeste Nederlandse media niets zinnigs beschreven staat, enige uitzonderingen daargelaten. Daarom, beste schrijvers en lezers van deze weblog, trekt u zich niets aan van mijn afkeer van de Engelse taal en letterkunde en presenteert u gewoon wat u wil presenteren...
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