Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion

Chris Hedges’ 2008 book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, was not a book I planned on reading. It wasn’t in my ever-growing pile of “to-read” books but was something I found in a different sort of pile: a stack of discarded books someone had placed beside the recycling dumpster in my building’s garbage room. Naturally, I flipped through its pages and what I found were a number of striking passages its previous owner had highlighted in bright yellow: “America has become a façade. It has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions”; “At no period in American history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real”; and: “This endless, mindless diversion is a necessity in a society that prizes entertainment above substance.”

I was intrigued. And given how often one hears of the number of Americans described as “divorced from reality” (not to mention all the Nietzsche I’ve been reading), I knew this was something I had to read.

Hedges breaks his book into five chapters. While the first, “The Illusion of Literacy,” does touch on the disturbing percentage of both Americans and Canadians who are functionally illiterate, or who are literate but choose not to read, the real focus of this chapter is the variety of false narratives that inundate American culture as illustrated in the fantasy worlds of professional wrestling, celebrity culture, reality television, and the American entertainment complex as a whole. For Hedges, professional wrestling, with its unambiguous cast of “good guys” and “bad guys,” is popular among America’s working class and poor precisely because the fictional biographies of the wrestlers with their emotionally wrecked lives not only mirror those of the audience but the theatrical storyline, both in an out of the ring, also plays on the fears, xenophobia, and political distrust of those who fill the stands or watch on TV. In this world, “It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others.” It is, what Hedges calls, “the cult of victimhood”—a striking and insightful phrase that in the thirteen years since the book’s publication aptly captures our present cultural moment in which everyone seems to be a victim.

Celebrity worship, Hedges writes, similarly banishes reality as it appeals not only to our “yearning to see ourselves in those we worship” but also offers the false promise that anyone can think of him- or herself as a potential celebrity who possesses “unique if unacknowledged gifts.” For Hedges, the effect of all this is that it creates a “culture of narcissism,” and that “faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality.” It is a message that is reiterated in “popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation, and self-definition,” all of which argue that we are all unique, special, and entitled. Religious platitudes, such as “Jesus loves you,” the false notion that “you can do anything you set your mind to,” or the numerous workshops, seminars, and master classes that promise that “you too” can be a famous writer, actor, chef, or what-have-you all send the message that “we are all entitled to everything,” a message that becomes all the more entrenched in a culture that values individual rights and freedoms above all else. The effect of this, Hedges writes, is that reality is shunned—reality becomes the lie. “In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring.” The vast scope of the entertainment industry and the celebrity worship it produces, he argues, has robbed “us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children.” As a recent story on CBC Radio’s As It Happens illustrates, a new study found that what makes conspiracy theories so paradoxically convincing for so many people is directly related to how entertaining they are.

In the chapters that follow Hedges examines the role fantasy plays in other aspects of American life. “The Illusion of Love” is an extremely disturbing look at the porn industry and the utter dehumanization, objectification, and commodification of the women who work in that industry and the crippling effects it has on its male viewers.

In “The Illusion of Wisdom,” Hedges looks at how corporatism has infiltrated American universities, especially among the Ivy League. These schools, he argues, “do only a mediocre job of teaching students to question and think”; in fact, “they disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is, by nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent, and often subversive.” For Hedges, these universities are little more than vocational institutions that, instead of building minds, build careers, especially with their emphasis on STEM programs, business, and athletics. They have become a means by which one can create an impressive resume and establish important connections. As a result, these universities churn out “stunted men and women,” who are not capable of examining or questioning the system in which they operate but who in fact support it. In a passage that largely echoes Nietzsche, Hedges writes: “A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.”

Dovetailing on the role that corporatism plays in the American university system, “The Illusion of Happiness,” examines the pernicious effects that positive psychology has, particularly as it is used in “the corporate state,” and the illusion that “the only route to personal fulfillment and salvation” is through the corporation. Positive psychology, Hedges writes, charms by conditioning us to believe that all we need is a positive outlook and anything is possible. However, “like all the other illusions peddled in the culture, [it] encourages people to flee from reality when reality is frightening or depressing.” If we are not happy, the underlying message suggests, there must be something wrong with us; we are to blame; and, in so doing, positive psychology becomes very effective “in keeping people from questioning the structures around them that are responsible for their misery.” However, when it is employed in large corporations, particularly in corporate retreats, workshops, and meetings, its real purpose is to “manipulate people to do what you want”; for to question, criticize, or challenge is seen as “being negative” or “counterproductive”; it suggests one is not a team player. What positive psychology promotes instead is social harmony, and herein lies the danger. Hedges writes:

The promotion of collective harmony, under the guise of achieving happiness, is simply another carefully designed mechanism for conformity. Positive psychology is about banishing criticism and molding a group into a weak and malleable unit that will take orders.

All oppressive systems of power, Hedges observes, have used social harmony as their ostensible raison d’être but what lies underneath is in fact coercion; it is a control mechanism that suggests happiness can be found in conformity through which the seeds of totalitarianism are sown.

In the last chapter, “The Illusion of America,” Hedges describes the threat that America faces as a result of the many illusions it has created. America, he writes, is entirely founded on the illusion that it purports to celebrate freedom and democracy but in reality is a country that has been taken over by a small privileged group of corporate and political elites. It’s a country he describes as “inverted totalitarianism” in which the anonymity of the corporate state manipulates its “internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions.” (Doesn’t the recent news regarding Facebook’s deliberately divisive use of algorithms report just that?) Like great civilizations of the past, Hedges writes, America too is now in its decline, and its belief in illusions—its sheer disregard for reality—is not just fueling it but accelerating it. He writes:

The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it, and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip, and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying society.

Published in 2008, Hedges book is both damning in its examination of the role illusion plays in the American cultural and political landscape and prescient in anticipating the conditions that paved the way for a demagogue like Donald Trump—himself a peddler of illusions—to become president. Although social media was not as pervasive then as it is today, Hedges also accurately predicted that advantages in technology and science, rather than obliterating myth, have actually enhanced its power to deceive, as we clearly see today in in the proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories online. Even more far-seeing are the writers that Hedges turned to in his research, writers like John Ralston Saul and Daniel J. Boorstin, the latter in particular recognized the danger that lay in America’s addiction to entertainment in his 1961 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America (another book I’ve now added to my “to-read” pile). However, if one were look even further into the past for a Cassandra of our present crisis, one need only turn to Nietzsche. For the German philosopher, the various illusions that have taken over the West are the product of the death of the God and the “long shadow” this would cast on society. Although Nietzsche was vehemently opposed to Christianity, as a narrative it provided the rock upon which all truth and morality stood, even if that morality was psychologically pernicious and “anti-life” in its effects. But in the absence of that myth, truth and fiction have now become interchangeable and we now stand on the cusp of nihilism. As Nietzsche writes in The Will to Power, “‘Without the Christian faith,’ Pascal thought, ‘you, no less than nature and history, will become for yourselves un monstre et un chaos.’” Although Nietzsche often employs Pascal as a foil for his own philosophy, to Pascal’s point Nietzsche concedes: “This prophecy we have fulfilled, after the feeble-optimistic eighteenth century had prettified and rationalized man (WP §83).

As much as I enjoyed Hedges’ book, however, what all discussions that claim to speak from the position of reality fail to acknowledge is their presuppositions on the nature of reality and, therefore, truth. And this too is something that Nietzsche understood, for insofar as our culture claims to value truth, Nietzsche says that it is untruth that constitutes the necessary condition of human life and the preservation of the species (GS §107). Illusion, in other words, is life-sustaining. For Nietzsche, the very fabric of our being rests on illusion; and Christianity, with its metaphysics of punishment and reward, is only one example. Consider as well the countless lies we tell ourselves about ourselves, our inflated or undervalued egos, the “curated” image we project of ourselves on social media or on dating apps—indeed, are not the concepts of faith, hope, and optimism little more than lies to help us get out of bed in the morning? And is it possible to speak of “reality” and still be a regular churchgoer? As well as a journalist, Hedges is also a Presbyterian minister, yet the role religion plays in the “Empire of Illusion” is largely absent from his discussion. For Nietzsche, though—and this key—it is less important whether something is true than whether we believe it to be true (WP §507); for if we knew the truth—about ourselves, about metaphysical questions—it “would lead to nausea and suicide” (GS §107). Nietzsche claims that there are no truths, only “perspectives”; indeed, “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are” (“Truth and Lie in a Non-moral Sense”). Although this is an admittedly simplistic discussion of Nietzsche’s ideas of truth, the point here—and what Hedges’ book so powerfully illustrates—is that when the metaphysical “truths” that have held society together cease to be valid, and truth and fiction are up for grabs, our entire culture falls into decline.