Resistance is futile

If that’s all you’ve got, that is.

I used to be inspired by Chris Hedges’ writings, now I’m just bored.  No, make that, frustrated.

Maybe it’s that I find it difficult to take seriously the man who tells us all about what atheists “believe” and yet gets it all so completely wrong.  In this one essay, Hedges makes me question his ability to separate fact from his own biases, thereby calling into question everything else he has written. As they would say in a court of law, ”Goes to credibility, Your Honor.”

Or maybe I can only read so many articles about how corrupt the system is, and how there is no hope for humankind outside of a complete and utter up-ending of the entire system, before I begin to tune out.  Saying it’s hopeless is not going to motivate me.

A friend sent me Zero Point of Systemic Collapse, written by Hedges in March 2010, via email yesterday. In it Hedges, once again, tells us the system that is broken beyond repair. We are headed for economic collapse. But don’t bother trying to fix it. Given the current state of affairs, it is impossible. Or so sayeth Hedges.

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.

[. . .]

Too many resistance movements continue to buy into the facade of electoral politics, parliaments, constitutions, bills of rights, lobbying and the appearance of a rational economy.The levers of power have become so contaminated that the needs and voices of citizens have become irrelevant.

We’re not going to change it, he moans. His answer? Run away and figure out how to ride it out. This is where Hedges loses me.

If we build self-contained structures, ones that do as little harm as possible to the environment, we can weather the coming collapse. This task will be accomplished through the existence of small, physical enclaves that have access to sustainable agriculture, are able to sever themselves as much as possible from commercial culture and can be largely self-sufficient. These communities will have to build walls against electronic propaganda and fear that will be pumped out over the airwaves. Canada will probably be a more hospitable place to do this than the United States, given America’s strong undercurrent of violence. But in any country, those who survive will need isolated areas of land as well as distance from urban areas, which will see the food deserts in the inner cities, as well as savage violence, leach out across the urban landscape as produce and goods become prohibitively expensive and state repression becomes harsher and harsher.

In other words, Hedges advocates abandoning the very people who are most likely to need us. Death and destruction will be all around, but we must protect ourselves. And not for just a little while. A long time. Lifetimes. Wow.

And why are we do do this? So we can “resist.”  Not that that will do much good either, according to Hedges, at least not any time soon.

We must continue to resist, but do so now with the discomforting realization that significant change will probably never occur in our lifetime. This makes resistance harder. It shifts resistance from the tangible and the immediate to the amorphous and the indeterminate. But to give up acts of resistance is spiritual and intellectual death. It is to surrender to the dehumanizing ideology of totalitarian capitalism. Acts of resistance keep alive another narrative, sustain our integrity and empower others, who we may never meet, to stand up and carry the flame we pass to them. No act of resistance is useless, whether it is refusing to pay taxes, fighting for a Tobin tax, working to shift the neoclassical economics paradigm, revoking a corporate charter, holding global internet votes or using Twitter to catalyze a chain reaction of refusal against the neoliberal order. But we will have to resist and then find the faith that resistance is worthwhile, for we will not immediately alter the awful configuration of power. And in this long, long war a community to sustain us, emotionally and materially, will be the key to a life of defiance.

That’s it? Okay Chris, you go first. Start your self-sustaining, off the grid, agricultural community. Build your walls against the “electronic progaganda and fear.” Except, how is that global internet vote thing going to happen? Or Twitter?  (And don’t even get me started on how fingers-in-your-ears-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you that sounds.) You see, I am so confused by this one paragraph that I can’t move past it. To give up resistance is to surrender to the ideology. Really?  All-or-nothing, black or white, you’re either with us or against us? Is that what he’s saying?  Do we have to have the community in a physical place? Why? By stepping out  and refusing to participate, aren’t we leaving the rest of unsuspecting humanity to perish? 

No matter to Hedges, it appears. At least we’ll “sustain our integrity.”

Talk about destroying the village in order to save it.

What is the end game? Resistance for resistance itself? Alas, it appears that is precisely what Hedges means. In his latest article, Power and the Tiny Acts of Rebellion, Hedges concludes by writing:

I do not know if we can win this battle. I suspect we cannot. But I do know that if we stop resisting, if we stop rebelling, something fundamental will die within us. As the corporate vise tightens, as the vast corporate system begins to break down with fossil fuel decline, extreme climate change and the expansion of global poverty, even mundane and ordinary acts to assert our common humanity and justice will be condemned as subversive.

It is time to think of resistance in a new way, something that is no longer carried out to reform a system but as an end in itself.  African-Americans understood this during the long night of slavery. German opposition leaders understood it under the Nazis. Dissidents in the former Soviet Union knew this during the nightmare of communism. Resistance in these closed systems was local and often solitary. It was done with the understanding that evil must always be defied. The tiny acts of rebellion—day after day, month after month, year after year and decade after decade—exposed to everyone who witnessed them the heartlessness, cruelty and inhumanity of the oppressor. They were acts of truth and beauty. We must take to the street. We must jam as many wrenches into the corporate system as we can. We must not make it easy for them. But we also must no longer live in self-delusion. This is a battle that will outlive us. And if we fight, even with this tragic vision, we will lead lives worth living and keep alive another way of being.

And then what? 

Gawd. On the surface it sounds so fucking good, but, then my mind drifts back to what he wrote in Zero Point:

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking.

Isn’t this exactly what Hedges is doing here?  Dreaming of small bands of integrity-filled visionaries that will one day create a Brave New World? Or something like that. Hedges calls people like me cowards.

Those who begin these acts are always few in number and dismissed by those who hide their cowardice behind their cynicism.

Cynical? No.  I just can’t buy into Hedges’ bleak vision of the future.  Goodness knows there are days when I just want to pack it all in. Why bother, I think. It all just feels so hopeless. Maybe we are past the point of no return … 

And yet,  I’m not ready to walk away. Not. Just. Yet.

More to come.

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