Powerful Quotes By Chris Hedges

With Chris Hedges, Powell's Books, Portland, Oregon

I have several excellent books by Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist and author Chris Hedges and have seen him speak multiple times over the years when he has come to Portland. Blessed are the truth-tellers whose courage, integrity, and wisdom inspire us to grow into our greater selves, something so needed in these times.  

I also need to acknowledge that the wider angle lens reflected in these quotes by Chris Hedges are indeed frightening and painful to look at, much less continue to explore and allow ourselves to absorb. Yet, it is exactly this shadow work ― this lifting of the veils of our illusions, ignorance, and indoctrination into false and harmful belief systems ― that is essential for our awakening. 

There can be no depth of collective and radical change without first doing our individual work of clearing away the obstacles which impair our capacity to be grounded in truth. And this takes a lot of courage. Deep courage. And this is where we need each other. The quote I heard when I first began my own healing process over 30 years ago also applies to us collectively as a people ― "We will only go as deep as the support we perceive is available to us." I have found this to be true. 

We also will only go as deep as we are open and able to grieve. So much of what is happening is so sad, tragic, and traumatizing to open our eyes and hearts to see. My eyes are welling with tears as I write this. Without this willingness and insight into the value of vulnerability, tenderness, empathy, compassion, and a boundless caring, we will shut out and shut down and stop our journeys into the deeper levels of what is happening within ourselves and each other and other species and the Earth.

Yet, this is exactly the path that is needed for humankind to move forward and have an actual shot at the profound and vital changes that are asked of us in these times. 

There was a time when I wished that I could just say that Republicans are bad and Democrats are good or some such simplistic statement, but this is no longer true for me. Today my commitment is to truth, wherever it may lead. May each of us embrace this commitment to truth, no matter what.

There is a huge task before us. Let's inspire one another to do our part one step at a time, to dig into the truth deeper and deeper, to be more and more brave-hearted, to cry and to celebrate together, and to remember kindness, courage, compassion, and love are also an integral part of this beautiful troubled world we share. Bless us all ― Molly

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The Most Daunting Existential Struggle Of Our Time

There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.

To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth ― intellectually and emotionally ― and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. As long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. It's better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we're up against. 

We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. 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.

A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.

We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society that is centered on the cult of the self ― an undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That has become a very effective way to divert our attention while the country is reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite and an anemic government that no longer is able to intercede on behalf of citizens but cravenly serves the interests of the oligarchy itself. 

We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.

Unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force that consumes greater and greater numbers of human lives until it finally consumes itself.

The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. 

Violence is a disease, a disease that corrupts all who use it regardless of the cause. 

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by mythmakers ― historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state ― all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

The violent subjugation of the Palestinians, Iraqis, and Afghans will only ensure that those who oppose us will increasingly speak to us in the language we speak to them — violence. 

The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.

War is addictive. Indeed, it is the most potent narcotic unleashed by mankind. 

War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death.

War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics. 

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history. 

In the beginning war looks and feels like love. But unlike love it gives nothing in return but an ever-deepening dependence, like all narcotics, on the road to self-destruction. It does not affirm but places upon us greater and greater demands. It destroys the outside world until it is hard to live outside war's grip. It takes a higher and higher dose to achieve any thrill. Finally, one ingests war only to remain numb. 

Most of those who are thrust into combat soon find it impossible to maintain the mythic perception of war. 

The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary. 

The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.

The failure to dissect the cause of war leaves us open for the next installment.

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. 

In war, we always deform ourselves, our essence. 

Jesus was a pacifist. 

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick. ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state.

It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it 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.

The media propagates a message that corporations want, and there’s a belittling and mocking of the poor and celebration of wealth. A kind of cutthroat, rapacious capitalism is celebrated on reality television shows where you betray and manipulate and push aside your competitors for fleeting fame and money. These are sick values, but they’re disseminated through corporate media in almost every program you watch. 

Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.

The words consent of the governed have become an empty phrase. Our textbooks on political science and economics are obsolete. Our nation has been hijacked by oligarchs, corporations, and a narrow, selfish, political, and economic elite, a small and privileged group that governs, and often steals, on behalf of moneyed interests. This elite, in the name of patriotism and democracy, in the name of all the values that were once part of the American system and defined the Protestant work ethic, has systematically destroyed our manufacturing sector, looted the treasury, corrupted our democracy, and trashed the financial system. During this plundering we remained passive, mesmerized by the enticing shadows on the wall, assured our tickets to success, prosperity, and happiness were waiting around the corner.  

The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.

There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege. 

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth. Take this away and a democracy dies. The fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of preemptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding.

When you have a liberal class that no longer functions, when those people who traditionally defend and care about a civil society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment ― this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party.

Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed. 

One needs solitude and quiet to think. The cacophony of modern culture is designed to make that impossible. 

It is better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.

We are the most illusioned society on the planet. We have to become adults. And it's hard; it's painful. I struggle with despair all the time. But I'm not going to let it win. It is incumbent upon all of us that at the same time we recognize how dark the future is, we also recognize the absolute imperative of resistance in every form possible.

The question is, how do you stop the power elite from doing as much damage to you as possible? That comes through movements. It's not our job to take power. You could argue that the most powerful political figure in April of 1968 was Martin Luther King. And we know Johnson was terrified of him. We have to accept that all of the true correctives to American democracy came through these movements that never achieved formal political power and yet frightened the political establishment enough to respond. 

Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.

If we don't hold fast to our moral principles, nobody's going to. We don't have to have a majority, but once ten, fifteen, twenty million people start voting left, we'll scare the piss out of the Democrats, and they'll have to respond. But they're not going to respond to us until that happens.

We are facing another economic meltdown. The ecosystem, on which the human species depends for life, is being destroyed at a rate that has not even been anticipated by climate scientists. We don't have a lot of time left. So either we get out and fight or we're finished.

Rebellion is not going to go away...What has been unleashed, I think, can't be stopped...The importance of continuing acts of resistance is that it keeps this narrative alive...We speak a fundamental truth about this system that terrifies them.

What kind of a world are we going to leave the next generation? I, at least, want my children to look back and say, "My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages. He was trying."

Battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom.