WESTERN PHILOSOPHY: “Independent Thought” / Socrates ☮
Reply
Category Archives: Anti-Authoritarianism
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: “Democracy in America is a Useful Fiction” / truthdig / Chris Hedges / 01.24.2010 ☮
Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.
The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as ifthey are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.
Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.
NEOCONSERVATISM: “Hillary Embraces War Criminal John Negroponte-Liberals FREAK OUT! and Liberal Elites Rip Hillary Over Embrace of Warmongers” / Jimmy Dore ☮
NEOCONSERVATISM: “Anti-War Dems Shut Down at DNC While Warmonger Leon Panetta Chuckles” / Jimmy Dore ☮
CENSORSHIP: “California Delegates Replaced with Actors/White Noise Machine for Hillary Clinton’s DNC speech” ☮
POLITICAL RESISTANCE: “The 1 Percent’s Useful Idiots” / Chris Hedges 07.26.2016 ☮
PHILADELPHIA—The parade of useful idiots, the bankrupt liberal class that long ago sold its soul to corporate power, is now led by Sen. Bernie Sanders. His final capitulation, symbolized by his pathetic motion to suspend the roll call, giving Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination by acclamation, is an abject betrayal of millions of his supporters and his call for a political revolution.
No doubt the Democrats will continue to let Sanders be a member of the Democratic Caucus. No doubt the Democrats will continue to agree not to run a serious candidate against him in Vermont. No doubt Sanders will be given an ample platform and media opportunities to shill for Clinton and the corporate machine. No doubt he will remain a member of the political establishment.
Sanders squandered his most important historical moment. He had a chance, one chance, to take the energy, anger and momentum, walk out the doors of the Wells Fargo Center and into the streets to help build a third-party movement. His call to his delegates to face “reality” and support Clinton was an insulting repudiation of the reality his supporters, mostly young men and young women, had overcome by lifting him from an obscure candidate polling at 12 percent into a serious contender for the nomination. Sanders not only sold out his base, he mocked it. This was a spiritual wound, not a political one. For this he must ask forgiveness.
Whatever resistance happens will happen without him. Whatever political revolution happens will happen without him. Whatever hope we have for a sustainable future will happen without him. Sanders, who once lifted up the yearnings of millions, has become an impediment to change. He took his 30 pieces of silver and joined with a bankrupt liberal establishment on behalf of a candidate who is a tool of Wall Street, a proponent of endless war and an enemy of the working class.
Sanders, like all of the self-identified liberals who are whoring themselves out for the Democrats, will use fear as the primary reason to remain enslaved by the neoliberal assault. And, in return, the corporate state will allow him and the other useful idiots among the 1 percent to have their careers and construct pathetic monuments to themselves.
ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM: “Would We Have Drugged Up Einstein? How Anti-Authoritarianism is Deemed a Mental Health Problem” / Bruce E. Levine ☮
We are increasingly marketing drugs that essentially “cure” anti-authoritarians.
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by 1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians; and 2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.
POLITICAL RESISTANCE: “Resisting What is to Come – The Struggle” / Chris Hedges ☮
REVOLUTION: “Chris Hedges: On Revolution in America ” / Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ☮
POLITICAL COMMENTARY: “Janeane Garofalo Sits Down with Lee Camp, and Lawsuit May Prove Election Fraud” / RT America / Redacted Tonight ☮
Lee Camp interviews the comedy legend and all around amazing person, Janeane Garofalo. They get right into it about the manipulation of the corporate mainstream media. In fact, back in 2003 during the build up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the “Fox and Friends” show on the Fox news network had her as a guest and ambushed her about her objection to the war. She had four people screaming at her. And she shut them all down with poise, grace and legit information.
Always Question Authority 