Thursday, December 7, 2017

Henry Giroux: In a Culture of Fear


The dystopian side of ideology enshrines existing relations of power as a matter of common sense and endorses ignorance as a virtue. In this discourse, dissent appears obscene and compassion for others becomes an object of disparagement. In a culture of fear, ignorance sustains itself by looking everywhere for enemies while occupying the high ground of political purity and an empty moralism. I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know, it is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by the massive disimagination machines and its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it, but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift. This is a culture of social abandonment and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the ideology of ignorance while employing it to fill government positions and produce death-dealing policies. Of course, he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a feral capitalism that has been decades in the making. He is the theatrical postmodern self-absorbed Frankenstein monster that embodies and makes clear a history of savagery, greed, and predatory cruelty that has reached its endpoint--a poisonous form of American authoritarianism.


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