Some excerpts from the online chat with Chris Hedges 7/21/10

Peter from Ontario:
"Hi Chris, thanks for your inspiration. Could you outline concretely how we might go about turning things around?"

Chris Hedges:
"We have to stop believing that we can effect change through established political or social organizations or electoral politics, and I think that still remains a huge hurdle for us people who in the end, through accommodation of fear and very clever advertising, are herded like sheep into a dysfunctional system, which is how so many people who should have known better voted for Obama. The environmental crisis that we're about to face will be even more catastrophic than the economic one, and we have to, on a personal level, reconsider how we relate to the society at large and to the ecosystem. We have both personal and social decisions to make. At this point most people are not willing to make those choices or take those steps."

Reader question from Terry:
"If you could put a single book on the topic of global warming (or ecology in general) into the hands of everyone on the planet with the knowledge that everyone would read it cover to cover, what title would you pick?"

Chris Hedges:
"Either any of the books by Lovelock or the new book by Clive Hamilton 'Requiem for a Species'."

Comment From Jason:
"I listened to your chat with Derrick Jensen and I guess my question is the question he asked, what do we do, the average person that is? Join Greenpeace, run for political office, start a farm in the country and live completely off the grid, hide in the woods and weather the storm? I feel like nothing anybody says or does, no form of action, can stop the machine we call civilization from destroying humanity and world along with it."

Chris Hedges:
"Well the coup d'etat is over, and they won. We lost. And now we have to learn to cope with it. It is very clear that the engines of corporatism and globalization are going to kill the ecosystem, no matter how many dead zones are created in the Gulf of Mexico or protests organized. We are going to have to make some very serious decisions about acts that dispute a system that in theological terms is a system of death and exploitation. And yet even then, it's probably too late. If you read closely the science on global warming-  even if we stop emissions, global warming will accelerate because of what has already been emitted. I think we have to begin to prepare for collapse and if you want to survive, that's going to mean access to a local food source.
"So, in the end I'm with Camus, I don't think we're going to fool ourselves into thinking we can make a change. It's all hijacked, the political system, financial system. . . hijacked military complex, it's hijacked, even all of our social and educational systems. I've taught at places like Princeton and they all function like corporations. We've allowed these corporations to snuff out all voices of sanity and decency. . .  and  we listen to this garbage and  we watch it. And I include Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow-  as bad as the right wing, they are all playing the same wing, nobody is addressing the institutional methods that are strangling us. I don't care if its from the left or right, it all acts as diversion to keep us in a state of self delusion."

Comment From Alias:
"What does the fact that Bolivian peasants were able to roll-back the government's plan to privatize the water supply while we here can only sit back and ask people like yourself and Chomsky 'What can I do?' say about us?"

Chris Hedges:
"Well as a culture, we've been rendered captive to electronic hallucinations that have dis-empowered us. One of the most pernicious elements of the electronic age is that it destroys the cohesion of real communities. People retreat into virtual communities, you can walk down the street where I live in Princeton at night and see that sort of glow of monitors that keep people inside their homes. . .  and in a future civilization people will be living in cells called hives that essentially sever them from their neighbors."

Question from Richard Nixon:
"Chris in your recent article you wrote 'Why continue to obey the laws and dictates of our executioners?'  Can you expand on this a little. I took this as laws made need to be broken to get decent climate change reform."

Chris Hedges:
"Well it's very clear that the people who control the power systems have no interest in power change reforms because it would mean their extinction. So those of us who care about effecting change have to find mechanisms outside of the political structure, which Henry Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience where he analyzed an individual's relation to the state and the moral questions of whether human beings should obey laws when they are immoral- or, in this case, self destructive. And I think that the questions that Thoreau asks are ones that we have to ask and I think we have to follow in Thoreau's footsteps where he writes about what he calls the machine. Thoreau writes about how many people around him are opposed to slavery and the war, but rather than expressing their opinions they sit around and do nothing about it. He said they hesitate, regret, sometimes petition, but nothing that actually has an effect."

Comment From Peter from Ontario:
"I'm a bit cynical about the idea of uprooting the powerful institutions that have created this mess. I realize this is throwing you a softball, but don't you think anyone that tries to rebel will be squashed like a bug? I mean, I look around at my family and neighbors, and see people that have been indoctrinated by the same message, 'focus on yourself right now and don't worry about anything that will happen later on'. Whenever I share your column with family and friends, they always give the same response - quit trying to wreck the good times for the rest of us and get a real job."

Chris Hedges:
"Well America has produced a country of people who've never had to grow up. They live in this illusion that reality is not an impediment to what they desire . . .  they can have everything they want, they just have to dig deep within themselves,  grasp that they are truly exceptional or believe that Jesus that can produce miracles. Its a form of magical thinking that is fed to us from the media to the corporations, from Oprah to Hollywood to Corporatism to the Christian right, and it has created a society where we are captivated by illusion, an illusion about who we are and where we're going and that's a very common characteristic among dying civilizations that lack the emotional fortitude to grasp that their world is are crumbling around them, so they retreat into the magical. If you read Cicero, Joseph Roth,  or Freud, they saw very clearly, both the disintegration and the capacity of people around them to accept it. The danger is when you remain in a state of illusion, you essentially perpetuate an infantilism that leaves you unprepared- physiologically, intellectually and emotionally- for collapse, and when collapse comes, you react like children, you search for a savior, a demagogue, someone who promises vengeance, moral renewal and fantastic visions of a new glory.
"Its an old old story and we are not immune to the cycles of human history. The Greeks did not believe in a linear time, they believed that societies had a period of growth, maturation and decay and I think the Greeks are right. So when your family doesn't want to hear, they are retreating into the far more comforting arena of illusions that are provided for them by corporate entities that seek to keep us ignorant and dis-empowered and stop us from fighting back.
"And will they crush us like bugs? Probably. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't resist. Resistance is a moral imperative. The problem with the left is that it was seduced by the practical and that is what killed it as a moral force. We have a commitment to non-historical values, justice, liberty, protection of life, love, which are of course deemed by the world to be impractical; but which keep alive that possibility of another way of being and another form of community. At this point I think we have to look at the middle ages and the monastic communities that kept alive learning, humanities, and life in a time of darkness so that these great contributions of human history are not lost. And that becomes a battle worth fighting because as we enter an age of barbarism, the snuffing out of these great forces of humanism will be tragic for the human race.  I think we have to focus much of our energy on trying to protect these non-historical forces, these commitments to [moral] values, and that's going to entail rebellion and perhaps even great personal risk. But I think it is worth doing, not because we can create a structure that can disarm corporatism, but because we can at least protect those virtues that permit people to live in ways that they are not slaves."

 From the online chat with Chris Hedges  July 21, 2010 hosted at TruthDig.com

Here is a July 12  audio discussion at TruthDig with Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen, on what can be done about this situation: