Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy. Those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to entertain and reassure them. And these demagogues, as they have throughout history, lead the crowd, blinded and amused, towards despotism.
In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges travels to the ringside of professional wrestling bouts at Madison Square Garden, to Las Vegas to write about the pornographic film industry, and to academic conferences held by positive psychologists - who claim to be able to engineer happiness - to chronicle our terrifying flight as a culture into a state of illusion. Hedges exposes the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, and moral collapse around us. He attacks the absurd idea that we can always draw on inner resources and strengths to have everything we desire.
Reality, we are assured, is never an impediment to human wishes. It can always be overcome. The future will always be glorious. And held out to keep us amused are spectacles and celebrities who have become idealized versions of ourselves and who, we are assured, we can all one day become.
The cultural embrace of illusion, and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it, have accompanied a growing system of casino capitalism, with its complicated and unregulated deals of turning debt into magical assets, to create fictional wealth for us, and vast wealth for our elite. Corporations, behind the smoke screen, have ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed our manufacturing base and impoverished our working class. The free market became our god and government was taken hostage by corporations, the same corporations that entice us daily with illusions through the mass media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow of The Nation Institute.