2.+THE+ILLUSION+OF+LITERACY+(EMPIRE+OF+ILLUSION)



Video Background on the author, [|Christopher Hedges]

APA Citation: Hedges, C. (2009). //Empire of illusion: the end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle//. New York, NY: Nation Books.

This chapter is from a larger critique of American society, but the point that Hedges wants to make is that, at a cultural level, many things are going wrong. In other chapters, Hedges surveys pornography, higher education, and popular psychology to make the point that increasingly Americans engae in "magical thinking" where spectacle and illusion are displacing rationality and analysis. He is highly influenced by mid-century thinkers and writers like Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Sheldon Wolin who detailed how the narratives societies tell about themsleves are "canaries in the coal mine" for decline and decay. In many ways, Hedges updates Postman's argument for the present day with more lurid examples, but he is also a parallel for Bettelheim's argument in //Uses of Enchantment//. Bettelheim advocated fairy tales for children because they are not moralizing and rigid fables that "blame the victim," nor are they escapist "myths" or "illusions" that serve as escapes from harsh reality. Fairy tales encourage individuals to face dilemmas and resolve them. Hedges argues that the rise of "spectacle" and "drama" are a cultural-level instances of escapism that is not healthy.

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Hedges begins with a narration of a WWW bout between Layfield and "The Heartbreak Kid." Most know that wrestling is "fake" and is an orchestrated spectacle, staged violence for the benefit of the audience/crowd. It is a clear example of illusion and entertainment. Wrestling has been around a while and this should be of a surprise to no one, but what is different is how the fake personae of the wrestlers become credentials for authority on real things, like investing and politics. Layfield in particular is invited as a guest onto TV programs to comment on economics and public affairs. Why would anyone think he is especially credible in this area? A key theme for Hedges is the content of the spectacles. He notes that the dramas staged by the wrestlers are projections, dark projections, of the audience's real struggles of their owns lives and the desire for carthartic "pay-back" for the injuries they suffer, real and imagined.
 * **pg. 4. "Layfield, like most wrestlers, has a long, complicated fictional backstory that includes a host of highly publicized intrigues, fights, betrayals, infidelities, abuse, and outrageous behavior . . . Tonight he has come in his newest incarnation as the 'self-made millionaire,' the capitalist, the CEO who walked away with a pot of gold while workers across the country lost their jobs, saw their savings and retirement funds evaporate, and fought off foreclosure. As often happens in a celebrity culture, the line between public and fictional personas blurs. Layfield actually claims to have made a fortune as a stock market investor and says he is married to the 'richest woman on Wall Street.' He is a regular panelist on Fox News Channel's //The Cost of Freedom// and previously appeared on CNBC . .. He also has written a best-selling book on financial planning called //Have More Money Now.// He hosts a weekend talk-radio program syndicated nationally by Talk Radio Network, in which he discusses politics."**

In this interview, the clip Hedges' references between Layfield and the HBK begins (with background) around 3:00 in this video. media type="youtube" key="CH0FL0m60Oo" height="345" width="420" align="center"

Hedges makes an interesting point that the "fake" aspect of wrestling is a feature, not a bug. Wrestling never claimed to be real; it is our own need to be fooled, to indulge in illusions, that make professional wrestling popular and profitable. I could easily compare the rise of professional wrestling with the decline of the "real" fights of professional boxing over the same period. People prefer the fake and artificial to the genuine and real. Here, Hedges notes the changes in wrestling's plot lines over time. In the past, the enemy was external and played to the audience's fear of "the other" and appealed to xenophobia (fear of foreigners) that pitted representatives of all Americans (the good guys) and against the American enemy of the moment (the bad guys). In recent years, the enemy has become an internal enemy focusing on class (rich-poor) differences and betrayal. It is a story about a nation that has lost its sense of identity and the ignores moral framing of their situation according to hedges. Hedges is especially concerned with the darkness of current narratives because they push three basic messages: 1) win at all costs 2) authorities are powerless or ill-intentioned; there is no protection from laws or justice, and 3) everyone is a victim and is therefore entitled to revenge. It will be interesting to compare this to Bettelheim's discussion of fairy tales, where he notes the function of these stories is to promote competence and autonomy (contra point # 3 above), to assure the child that ultimately justice prevails (contra point # 2 above) and that one must seek balance between competing and ambivalent goals (contra point # 1 above). How women are portayed is also degrading; the modal description is that women are unfaithful, immodest, and the cause of troubles among men. In short, women are objectified and only useful as objects of sexual desire. Full stop. This feeds themes of betrayal and victimhood and justify violence against women because "they deserve it." This is not only important for how men view and treat women, but also the self-image of women themselves, some who aspire to the negative role models being portrayed. Next, Hedges broadens the message outside of wrestling and addresses why we find dramas and illusions so attractive. The argument is part technological, part social. For the first time our illusions are so "real" that they can be truly confused with reality. Reality TV, which is all orchestrated, breaks the wall between the actor and audience. The social aspect is the desire for escapism: our illusions are more attractive than our realities therefore inform our understanding of the how the world works. I think Hedges makes an incredibly important and useful distinction here between "image" and "ideals". Images are artificial, they are the self, or mask, that we project out to the world. If the image does not serve our purposes, like a mask, we can discard it. It exists to promote and protect the self, but it is not an external reality. An ideal puts a claim on us. It is essentially our conscience, if we fail to live up to it, it is ourselves who chide ourselves. For example, if one lies effectively, one can have the image of being honest to others, but we have not lived up to the ideal of being honest. Many years ago, the sociologist David Riesman in his famous study //The Lonely Crowd//, discussed the difference between "inner-directed" individuals who march to the beat of their own drum, and "other-directed" individuals who constantly worry about how they perceived by others. Hedges further broadens his argument to discuss what he terms "celebrity culture." A celebrity can be thought of as a person famous for being famous. Hedges is not unique in this characterization of American culture. We have no aristocracy of land or blood, and instead we have a "celebrity" class that has a god or "idol" status in the public's eyes. The desire for connection or proximity to these individuals is a functional polytheism (different groups of people have different idols) in American society. Hedges is a former war correspondent who covered the conflict in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the First Gulf War, and won a pulitizer as part of group of reporters who covered Al-Qaeda around the world for the //New York Times// in 2001. He, naturally, raises the example of the soldiers who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, made famous by this photograph. and how that photograph became an illusion divorced from their reality. This story was dramatized by Clint Eastwood in the movie //[|Flags of Our Fathers]// Hedges would probably argue that the mental sufferings (depression and suicide) of many soldiers returning from Aghanistan and Iraq parallels the experience of the flag-raisers, driven by the divide between the illusion of war and its reality. Hedges notes that the obsession with appearance and the desire to become celebrities or at least behave like celebrities has become pervasive in American society. Our masks are more important than our true faces and this helps us avoid dealing with real problems. This message is repeated in advertising, but is also a major theme in the Reality TV and self-help genre. Once again, I think that this can be fruitfully compared to Bettelheim's message. Fairy tales are about the "consolation" that comes from believing that one will transcend one's current position and limitations, while Hedges claims that the message in modern media reinforces our inferiority. Hedges is particularly concerned with the message that condemns realism as negativity to be avoided. We cannot solve our collective (or individual) problems if we prefer lies to truth, especially if that truth does not fit the self-image we prefer. This emerges in the educational realm as always being "positive" about students, whether or not they perform to expectations. Most of the rationale for this approach is that children have fragile egos that will be crushed by criticism; this is an empirical claim and we shoud consider whether or not it is true. Are children helped by feedback that is positive, but does not reflect the reality of their progress?
 * **pg. 5. "The bouts are stylized rituals. They are public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy . . . the most potent story tonight . . . is one of financial ruin, desperation, and enslavement of a frightened and abused working class to a heartless, tyrannical, corporate employer . . . the crowd, mostly young, working-class males, knows by heart the long list of vendettas and betrayals being carried into the ring. The matches are always acts of retribution for a host of elaborate and fictional wrongs. The narratives of emotional wreckage reflected in the wrestlers' stage biographies mirror the emotional wreckage of the fans."**
 * **pg. 5-6. "The success of professional wrestling, like most of the entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling us that these stories are real. Rather, it succeeds because we ask to be fooled. We happily pay for the chance to suspend reality."**
 * **pg. 6-7. "Clashes in the professional wrestling ring from the 1950s to the 1980s hinged on a different narrative. The battle against the evil of communism and crude, racial stereotypes stoked the crowd. The bouts . . . appealed to nationalism and a dislike and distrust of all who were racially, ethically, or religiously different . . . In wrestling, villains were nearly always foreigners. They were people who wanted to destroy 'our way of life.' They hated America. They spoke in strange accents and had swarthy skin. But that hatred, once directed outward, has turned inward . . . The story line in professional wrestling evolved to fit the new era. It began to focus on the petty, cruel, psychological dramas and family dysfunction that come with social breakdown. The enemy became figures like Layfield, those who had everything and lorded it over those who did not. The anger unleashed by the crowd became the anger of people who, like the Heartbreak Kid, felt used, shamed, and trapped. It became the anger of class warfare . . . It represents a society that has less and less national cohesion, a society that has broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes. The stables cheat, lie, steal one another's women, and ignore all rules in the desperate scramble to win. Winning is all that matters. Morality is irrelevant."**
 * **pg. 10-11. "Identities and morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores, rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and permanent values, as in the culture at large, has evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood . . . 'All the elements are there: sibling rivalry, disputed parentage, child neglect and abuse, domestic violence, family revenge.' Those who were once born with the virus of inherent evil, the Russian communist or the Iranian, now become evil for a reason. It is not their fault. They are victims. Self-pity is the driving motive in life. They were abused as children or in prison or by friends or lovers or spouses or employers. The new mantra says we all have a right to seek emotional gratification if we have been abused, even if it harms others. I am bad, the narratives say, because I was neglected and poorly treated. I was forced to be bad. It is not my fault. Pity me. If you do not pity me, screw you. I pity myself. It is the undiluted narcissism of a society in precipitous decline. The referee, the only authority figure in the bouts, is easily distracted and unable to administer justice. As soon as the referee turns his back . . The referee, preoccupied, never notices. The failure to enforce rules, which usually hurts the wrestler who needs the rules the most, is vital to the story line. It reflects, in the eyes of the fans, the greed, manipulation, and abused wreaked by the powerful and the rich. The world . . . is always stacked against the little guy. Cheating becomes a way to even the score. The system of justice . . . is always rigged. It reflects . . .the tainted justice system outside the ring. It promotes the morality of cheat or die."**
 * **pg. 12-3. "Women, although they enter the ring to fight other women wrestlers, are almost always cast as temptresses. They steal each other's boyfriends. They are often prizes to be won by competing wrestlers. These vixens, supposedly in relationships with one wrestler, are often caught on surveillance videos flirting with rival wrestlers. This provokes matches between the jealous boyfriend and the new love interest. The plotlines around the women, or 'divas,' are lurid, bordering on soft porn . . . The divas in the ring are there to fuel sexual fantasy. They have no intrinsic worth beyond being objects of sexual desire. It is all about their bodies."**
 * **pg. 15. "We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology . . . [Historian and Former Librarian of Congress] Daniel Boorstin writes that in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. Americans . . . increasingly live in a 'world where fantasy is more real than reality.' He warns, 'We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so 'realistic' that they can live in them. We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience.'"**
 * **pg. 15. "' . . .an image is something //we// have a claim on. It must serve our purposes. Images are means. If a corporation's image of itself or a man's image of himself is not useful, it is discarded. Another may fit better. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving towards it, we assume the matter is with us, and not with the ideal.'"**
 * **pg. 17. "We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society our gods are celebrities. Religious belief and practice are commonly transferred to the adoration of celebrities. Our culture builds temples to celebrities the way Romans did for divine emperors, ancestors, and household gods. We are a de facto polytheistic society. We engage in the same kind of primitive belief as older polytheistic cultures. In celebrity culture, the object is to get as close as possible to celebrity."**
 * **pg. 21. "The veterans saw their wartime experience transformed into an illusion. It became part of the mythic narrative of heroism and patriotic glory sold to the public by the Pentagon's public relations machine and Hollywood. The reality of war could not compete against the power of the illusion. The truth did not feed the fantasy of war as a ticket to glory, honor, and manhood. The truth did not promote collective self-exaltation. The illusion of war peddled in //[|The Sands of Iwo Jima]//, like hundreds of other Hollywood war films, worked because it was what the public wanted to believe about themselves. It was what the government and the military wanted to promote. It worked because it had the power to simulate experience for most viewers who were never at Iwo Jima or in a war. But as Hayes and the others knew, this illusion was a lie."**
 * **pg. 23, 26. "We pay variety of lifestyle advisers -- Gabler calls them 'essentially drama coaches' -- to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial empire . . . telling women how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and fashion consultants all, in essence promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we assured with how we look and how we present ourselves to others . . . The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness . . . Troubled marriages, abusive relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem problems--all will vanish along with the excess fat off their thighs. They will be new. They will be flawless. They will be celebrities."**
 * **pg. 26. "Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows such as //The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super Sweet 16,// and //The Real Housewives of . . .// The American oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced, perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw $200,000 parties and have $1 million dollar weddings. This life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. The working classes, compromising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are shut out of television's gated community. They have become largely invisible . . .Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded."**
 * **pg. 26-7. "We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved, and protected . . . it is a . . . culture of narcissism. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity . . .Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality . . . are shunned and condemned for their pessimism."**

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The implication of the message Hedges describes in contemporary culture is individualistic and narcissistic. Other people only matter insofar as they fit within our own plans for fame, power, wealth, and self-aggrandizement. If not, they can be discarded. They exist for our entertainment, if we are not amused, then be gone with them. Hedges observation about the relative desirability of the //Real World// vs. Harvard (of which Hedges elsewhere has nothing but criticism) is telling not because Harvard should be desirable, but the relative value we put on education vs. entertainment in our culture. Similar points have been made that more people vote in American Idol competitions than national elections. Hedges quotes philosopher [|Hannah Arendt] that when "classics" seek to preserve themselves by becoming "entertaining" they lose their moral and intellectual value. Think about how often "classic" works of literature have been popularized, modernized, or translated into "modern" English or have been dramatized for public consumption. Hedges sees this as a sign of decay, others might see it as broadening the dissemination of great works. In many ways, K-12 English classes have moved away from "canonical" books for more modern or contemporary reading in the interest of making it more relevant or engaging for students. Hedges would criticize this policy, others support it. Should this criticism be taken seriously? Hedges claims that we have vulgarized ("dumbed down") our culture and therefore have robbed ourselves of the ability to think analytically, handle complex situations, or separate constructed illusions from reality, to our own peril. In the past, this would have been criticized, i.e., boys who don't like school get turned into donkeys, now it is seen as a virtue. The consequences. Take a moment and reflect on how large a failure these figures imply for our educational system. Another staggering reminder of how much digital media has replace print-media in our time. And why it matters. This is basically the same argument that Postman is making in //Amusing Ourselves to Death.// Publics who rely on images, slogans, and bumper-stickers are more malleable clay in the hands of opportunistic leaders, paving the path away from democracy and towards authoritarianism. In essence, we may be traveling down the path to a Huxleyian world envisioned in his novel, //Brave New World.//
 * **pg. 29. "Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity culture. They are objects, like consumer products. They have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live on fabulous sets. Those who fail to meet the ideal are belittled and mocked. Friends and allies are to be used and betrayed during the climb to fame, power, and wealth. And when they are no longer useful, they are to be discarded . . . Life, Bradbury understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the most compelling form of entertainment."**
 * **pg. 39. "More than twice as many young people apply to MTV's //Real World// show than to Harvard . . ."**
 * **pg. 43-44. "The popularization of culture often ends in its total degradation. The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: 'The result of this is not disintegration but decay, and those who promote it are not the Tin Pan Alley composers but a special kind of intellectual, often well read and well informed, whose sole function is to organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects in order to persuade the masses that //Hamlet// can be as entertaining as //My Fair Lady//, and perhaps as educational as well. There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.'"**
 * **pg. 44. "We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys--a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity."**
 * **pg.44. "Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate--a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high-school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of the families in the United States did not buy or read a book."**
 * **pg.44. "Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, ones that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication. A television is turned on for six hours and forty-seven minutes a day in the average household. The average American daily watches more than four hours of television. That amounts to twenty-eight hours a week, or two months of uninterrupted television watching a year. That same person will have spent nine years in front of a television by the time he or she is sixty-five."**
 * **pg. 45. ". . . a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read . . . Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded."**

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The decline in the sophistication of public addresses, as illustrated by the grade-level vocabulary of presidential debates over time illustrates the decline in the public's langauge use and the danger of prioritizing accessibility to the lowest common denominator instead of raising the level and sophistication of discourse. It should be noted that similar trends have been documented in the reading literature and textbooks for K-12 students as well. The image of an eternal present, i.e., //Groundhog Day//, is a frequently cited metaphor. The great contribution of writing and literacy is the ability to include the past in the present. The terms "prehistoric" and "preliterate" and basically synonymous. Science depends on evidence and data from the present to influence present decisions. In addition, as Bettelheim notes, the inability to see the future is the condition of permanent infancy and a source of depression, i.e., the belief that tomorrow is just a repetition of today without any growth or development. Print media prompts analysis because it freezes thought in time and allows it to be examined. However, when we judge truth by its emotional appeal and consistency (something becomes true when all believe it to be true), we are prone to error and cannot distinguish artifice from reality. Illusion comes to dominate reality because it is more attractive, not boring or complicated. This creates an illusion "echo chamber" or the "shadows on the wall" discussed in Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
 * **pg. 45-6. "The culture of illusion thrives by robbing us of the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth. It reduces us to the level and dependency of children. It impoverishes language. The //Princeton Review// analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates of 2000, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debate of 1960, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. It reviewed these transcripts using a standard vocabulary test that indicates the minimum educational standard needed for a reader to grasp the text. IN the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln spoke at the educational level of an eleventh grader (11.2), and Douglas addressed the crowd using a vocabulary suitable (12.0) for a high-school graduate. In the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the candidates spoke in a language accessible to tenth graders. In the 1992 debates, Clinton spoke at a seventh-grade level (7.6), while Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.8), as did Perot (6.3). During the 2000 debates, Bush spoke at a sixth-grade level (6.7) and Gore at a high seventh-grade level (7.6)."**
 * **pg. 47. "Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports. The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present . . . Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification.**
 * **pg. 48. "The most essential skill in political theater and a consumer culture is artifice. Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative. The reality of the narrative is irrelevant. It can be completely at odds with the facts. The consistency and emotional appeal of the story are paramount. Those who are best at deception succeed."**
 * **pg. 49. "An image-based culture communicates through narratives, pictures, and pseudo-drama. Scandalous affairs, hurricanes, untimely deaths, train wrecks--these events play well on computer screens and television. International diplomacy, labor union negotiations, and convoluted bailout packages do not yield exciting personal narratives or stimulating images . . .Acting, politics, and sports have become, as they were in Nero's reign, interchangeable. 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. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by cliches, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be . . . In this world, all that matters is the consistency of our belief systems. The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth."**

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Hedges uses the concepts of "pseudo-events" and "stereotypes" and notes the differences. Pseudo-events are more dangerous in his view because a stereotype must have a kernel of truth, overgeneralized and decontextualized as it may be, but at least it is something that can be refuted by appeal to facts and empirics. The problem of pseudo-events is that it cannot be evaluated this way and it ultimately displaces genuine truth with an artificial reality. They cannot be judged true or false as a stereotypes could be. Hence, awareness is not a salve with pseudo-events. Knowing that you are being deceived is no protection against deception. The ultimate danger of pseudo-events is that they destabilize truth by creating a nearly perfect replica of it and individuals lose the ability to tell the difference between the clone and the genuine article. Michael Pollan has made this point regarding the food we eat. Most of the "food" we consume is not natural, nor are many of the tastes we experience. If we tasted most things in their natural form, we would probably prefer the doctored item over the original. Hedges concern is that this will undermine critical and analytical thinking and the ability to have autonomous and independent thought: one of the central stated goals of education.
 * **pg. 50. "When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant. Our national discourse is dominated by manufactured events, from celebrity gossip to staged showcasings of politicians to elaborate entertainment and athletic spectacles. All are sold to us through the detailed personal narratives of those we watch. 'The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses,' Boorstin wrote. 'The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images--however planned, contrived, or distorted--more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself."**
 * **pg. 51. "A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion. Random facts or obscure bits of data and trivia are used either to bolster illusion and give it credibility, or discarded if they interfere with the message. The worse reality becomes--the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment sky-rocket--the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship,, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill is the ability to entertain, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe. This is the real danger of pseudo-events and why pseudo-events are far more pernicious than stereotypes. They do not explain reality, as stereotypes attempt to do, but replace reality. Pseudo-events redefine reality by the parameters set by their creators. These creators, who make massive profits selling illusions, have a vested interest in maintaining the power structures they control."**
 * **pg. 52. "Pseudo-events, which create their own semblance of reality, serve in the wider culture the same role creationism serve for the Christian Right. Pseudo-events destabilize truth. They are convincing enough and appear real enough to manufacture their own facts . . . The use of pseudo-events to persuade rather than overtly brainwash renders millions of us unable to see or question the structure and systems that are impoverishing us and in some cases destroying our lives. The flight into illusion sweeps away the core values of the open society. It corrodes the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to grasp historical facts, to advocate for change, and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways, and structures of being that are morally and socially acceptable. A populace deprived of the ability to separate lies from truth, that has become hostage to the fictional semblance of reality put forth by pseudo-events, is no longer capable of sustaining a free society."**

A longer lecture address and Q&A by Christopher Hedges about the book this chapter is taken from. media type="youtube" key="_EpeF1fcji0" height="402" width="506" align="center"