ARE WE INSANE? Is anxiety, and even depression, a rational response to what passes for reality these days? Chris Hedges seems to think so. Here’s how he frames the issue:
Welcome to the Asylum
When civilizations start to die, they go insane. . . Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. . .
According to The Urantia Book, one of the contributing reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire was “amusement madness.” “Bread and circuses,” if you will.
Hedges continues:
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism.
On the origin of fetishism, The Urantia Book notes its capitalistic roots:
A fetish was used to stand guard over the deposits of goods for silent barter. Such market places were secure against theft; nothing would be removed except by barter or purchase; with a fetish on guard the goods were always safe. The early traders were scrupulously honest within their own tribes but regarded it as alright to cheat distant strangers.
Don’t belong to the Insider’s Club? Then expect to be cheated of your hard earned wealth. But you already know, or more likely have experienced that, especially if any of your assets were being managed by Wall Street these last few years, an exclusive tribe if ever there was one.
Hedges concludes:
This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression— which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
As I wrote in Moral Insanity: Psychopaths and Sociopaths:
Sometimes I wish I believed in reincarnation. I mean, if all of history’s most prominent psychopaths had reincarnated at the same time, and through their manipulative talents came to occupy positions of power, there could hardly be a better explanation for the situation we find ourselves in today.
Red pill, blue pill— as always, the choice is ours.
[Image found here.]
