America Is in Need of a Moral Bailout

clipped from www.truthdig.com In decaying societies, politics become theater The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse. unless we grasp the “societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms” we will be cursed with a more ruthless form of corporate power, one that does away with artifice and the seduction of a consumer society and instead wields power through naked repression.

Moral nihilism. The author of this commentary, Chris Hedges, has been able to put into words the sentiment I have felt about this nation for a very long time.

Our educational system has gone to hell in favor of supplementing corporations and the military, instead of producing thinkers addressing the larger moral questions of meaning and purpose.

We give ourselves too easily to the influence of reality television, mass media, and cultural assumptions.

Our capacity to be affected by human rights issues has been relegated to the occasional financial gift because it makes us feel better, if we bother to give at all.

We turn a blind eye to American corporations involvement with environmental and wildlife destruction as long as we get the latest new product we think we must have.

We subjugate our dignity to the never-ending thirst for more money, things, and power.

Where has our value system gone? What has it been replaced with?

Moral nihilism.