Chris Hedges

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Author, activist, teacher and dissident Chris Hedges spoke at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY on June 27, 2021. In this talk Chris speaks about sadism, which he says:

-Now defines nearly every cultural, social and political experience in the United States.
-Is expressed in the greed of an oligarchic elite that has seen its wealth increase during the pandemic by $1.1 trillion while the country has suffered the sharpest rise in its poverty rate in more than 50 years.
-Is expressed in extra-judicial killings by police in cities such as Minneapolis.
-Is expressed in our complicity in Israel’s wholesale killing of unarmed Palestinians, the humanitarian crisis engendered by the war in Yemen and our reigns of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
-Is expressed in the torture in our prisons and black sites.
-Is expressed in the separation of children from their undocumented parents, where they are held as if they were dogs in a kennel.

Chris Hedges goes on to say that...

The historian Johan Huizinga, writing about the twilight of the Middle Ages, argued that as things fall apart sadism is embraced as a way to cope with the hostility of an indifferent universe. No longer bound to a common purpose, a ruptured society retreats into the cult of the self. It celebrates, as do corporations on Wall Street or mass culture through reality television shows, the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt. Get what you can, as fast as you can, before someone else gets it. This is the state of nature, the “war of all against all,” Thomas Hobbes saw as the consequence of social collapse, a world in which life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And this sadism, as Friedrich Nietzsche understood, fuels a perverted, sadistic pleasure.the cultural and social forces that have given rise to extremism in the United States.

Meghan Marohn moderates a Q&A following the talk.

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Cameras – Eleanor Goldsmith, Jill Malouf, Elizabeth Press, Claire Hutchinson
Audio – Troy Pohl
Director – Branda Miller

Production – Steve Pierce
Post production – Alexandra Shablovsky