The
Struggle Against Dystopia
by Henry
A. Giroux
(Part I)
The shadow
of Orwell’s nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society with its
all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression now works its way
through American politics like a lethal virus. Orwell’s dystopian
apparition of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of
surveillance and repression has come to fruition, reshaping the
American body politic in the guise of a poorly orchestrated Reality
TV show. As Orwell rightly predicted, one of the more significant
characteristics of an authoritarian society is its willingness to
distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. But
Orwell was only partly right. Today, rather than just agressively
instill a sense of fear, dread and isolation, contemporary
totalitarian commitment also wins over large number of individuals
through appeals to our most debased instincts projected on to hapless
others. Our lurid fascination with others’ humiliation and pain is
often disguised even to ourselves as entertainment and humor, if
perhaps admittedly a little perverse. Under the new authoritarianism
fear mixes with the endless production of neoliberal commonsense and
a deadening coma-inducing form of celebrity culture. Huxley’s Soma
now joins hands with Orwell’s surveillance state.
State
terrorism works best when it masks the effects of its power while
aggressively producing neoliberal commonsense through diverse
cultural apparatuses in order to normalize the values and conditions
that legitimate its reign of terror. For instance, Umberto Eco argues
that one element of authoritarianism is the rise of an Orwellian
version of newspeak, or what he labels as the language of “eternal
fascism,” whose purpose is to produce “an impoverished
vocabulary, and an elementary syntax [whose consequence is] to limit
the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” Dwight
Macdonald, writing in the aftermath of World War II and the horrors
of the Nazi Holocaust, argues that as more and more people are
excluded from the experience of political agency and exhibit “less
and less control over the policies” of their governments, ethics is
reduced to the status of mere platitudes and politics becomes banal.
What has become clear to many Americans is that the electoral system
is bankrupt. As the political process becomes more privatized,
outsourced, and overrun with money from corporations and
billionaires, a wounded republic is on its death bed, gasping for
life. In addition, as the state becomes more tightly controlled,
organized, and rationalized by the financial elite, politics and
morality are deprived of any substance and relevance, thus making it
difficult for people to either care about the obligations of critical
citizenship or to participate in the broader landscape of politics
and power. Far easier to wax ironic or cynical.
For Orwell,
the state was organized through traditional forms of authoritarian
political power. What Orwell could not have imagined was the
reconfiguration of the state under a form of corporate sovereignty in
which corporations, the financial elite, and the ultra-rich
completely controlled the state and its modes of governance.
Hyper-capitalism was no longer merely protected by the state, it has
become the state. As is well known, the fossil fuel companies,
megabanks, and defense industries such as Boeing, General dynamics
Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin now control the major seats of
political power and the commanding institutions necessary to insure
that the deeply anti-democratic state rule in the interests of the
few while exploiting and repressing the many. This was recently made
clear by a Princeton University scientific study that analyzed
policies passed by the U.S. government from 1981 to 2002 and
discovered that vast majority of such policies had nothing to do with
the needs and voiced interests of the American people. As the authors
pointed out, “the preferences of the average American appear to
have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant
impact upon public policy.” Put bluntly, the study made clear that
the opinions of the public per se simply do not count. The study
concluded that rather than being a democracy the United States had
become an oligarchy where power is effectively wielded by “the
rich, the well connected and the politically powerful, as well as
particularly well placed individuals in institutions like banking and
finance or the military.”
As a result
of this mode of governance, individual and social agency are in
crisis and are disappearing in a society in which 99 percent of the
public, especially young people and minorities of class and color are
considered disposable. At a time when politics is nation-based and
power is global, the rulers of the Orwellian state no longer care
about the social contract and make no compromises in their ruthless
pursuits of power and profits. The social contract, especially in the
United States, is on life support as social provisions are cut,
pensions are decimated, and the certainty of a once secure job
disappears. The new free-floating global elite are unrestrained by
the old rules of politics and not only refuse to make any political
concessions, they also no longer believe in long-term social
investments and are more than willing to condemn those populations
now considered disposable to a savage form of casino capitalism.
Isolation,
privatization, and the cold logic of a mad version of neoliberal
rationality have created new social formations and a social order in
which it becomes difficult to form communal bonds, deep connections,
a sense of intimacy, and long term commitments. In the manner of
Huxley’s cautionary forewarning, people now participate willingly
in their own oppression. Neoliberalism has created a society of
ruling brutes for whom pain and suffering are now viewed as
entertainment, warfare a permanent state of existence, and militarism
as the most powerful force shaping masculinity. Politics has taken an
exit from ethics and thus the issue of social costs is divorced from
any form of intervention in the world. This is the ideological script
of political zombies who, as Alain Badiou points out, now control a
lifeless version of democracy. Atomization, emotional
self-management, and the ideology of self-interests are the curse of
both neoliberal societies and democracy itself. Terror now takes the
form of the atomization of individual agency and the politics of a
moral coma. Poverty, joblessness, low wage work, and the threat of
state sanctioned violence produce among many Americans the ongoing
fear of a life of perpetual misery and an ongoing struggle simply to
survive. Collective paralysis now governs American society,
reinforced by a fixed hedonism. Risk taking is individualized through
a shameless appeal to resilience. Insecurity coupled with a climate
of fear and surveillance dampens dissent and promotes a kind of
ethical tranquilization fed daily by the mobilization of endless
moral panics, whether they reference immigrants allegedly storming
American borders or foreign terrorists blowing up shopping centers.
Such conditions more often than not produce withdrawal, insecurity,
paranoia, and cynicism rather than rebellion among the American
populace.
Americans
now live under a form of casino capitalism that revels in deception,
kills the radical imagination, depoliticizes the public, and
promulgates what might be called an all-embracing punishing state.
Idealism and hope for a better future has been replaced by a
repressive disciplining machine and a surveillance state that turns
every space into a war zone, criminalizes social problems, and
legitimates state violence as the most important practice for
addressing important social issues. The carceral state and the
surveillance state now work together to trump security over freedom
and justice while solidifying the rule of the financial elite and the
reigning financial services such as banks, investment houses, and
hedge funds, all of which profit from the expanding reach of the
punishing state. Americans now live in what Robert Jay Lifton once
described as a “death-saturated age” as political authority and
power have been transformed into a savage form of corporate
governance and rule. The United States has moved from a market
economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the public good
and social contract are viewed with disdain and aggressively
eliminated.
The basic
elements of casino capitalism and its death wish for democracy are
now well known: government should only exists to protect the ruling
elite; self-interest is the only organizing principle of agency, risk
is privatize; consumption is the only obligation of citizenship;
sovereignty is market-driven; deregulation, privatization, and
commodification are legitimate elements of the corporate state;
market ideology is the template for governing all of social life,
exchange values are the only values that matter, and the yardstick of
profit is the only viable measure of the good life and advanced
society. With the return of the new Gilded Age, not only are
democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and
formative cultures that make such values and protections central to
democratic life are being eviscerated. At the heart of neoliberalism
in its diverse forms is the common thread of breeding corporate and
political monsters, widespread violence, the decimation of political
life, and the withdrawal into private.
We are
witnessing the emergence of new forms of repression that echo the
warnings of Aldous Huxley and reach deeply into the individual and
collective psyches of the populace. Extending Huxley’s analysis, I
want to argue that under regimes of neoliberalism, material violence
is matched by symbolic violence through the proliferation of what I
call disimagination machines. Borrowing from Georges Didi-Huberman’s
use of the term, “disimagination machine,” I extend its meaning
to refer to images, along with institutions, discourses, and other
modes of representation that undermine the capacity of individuals to
bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering,
agency, ethics, and collective resistance. The “disimagination
machine” is both a set of cultural apparatuses extending from
schools and mainstream media to an idiotic celebrity culture and
advertising apparatus that functions primarily to undermine the
ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable,
and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue. Put simply, to become
critically informed citizens of the world.
(Part II)
(Part II)
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Well, this is a case in which
reality exceed imagination. I bet that Rod Serling, the creator of
the famous series “The Twilight Zone” couldn’t imagine such
a scenario. And neither George Orwell could probably ever imagine,
that one day, people would have the devices which describe in his
famous book “1984” inside their houses, but they would press
the button on their own will, due to their brain addiction,
without actually anyone to enforce them to do it. That through the
propaganda and the psychological terror, people would elect
governments-servants of the systemic establishment through false
democratic processes, leading themselves to deeper poverty and
enslavement. That people would even reproduce the propaganda,
although they would stop believe to the mouthpieces speaking
through the devices.
Generations of pragmatists grow
with cliches like "this is the best society we can have",
or, "humans are what they are and will never change".
Thus, ethic, in many cases, ends to be a kind of luxury and
replaced by a crude economic pragmatism and an extreme cynicism.
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