Chris Hedges "American Sadism" LIVE

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I don't always listen to Chris Hedges, but when I do I listen to Chris Hedges.

I'm about a half hour in (2 hrs) and he's already hit on a lot of thing that people generally don't talk about with respect to specific lines of pathology opened up by distorted uses of power. Right now he's actually talking about the issue of people being worked to death at the time of the industrial revolution (or places where that may indeed be still happening today such as third world mining operations), and the idea of just how sharply we look at something like murder as a crime but if you work thousands of people to death no specific act killed them so it's somehow seen as okay (probably much less merciful in many cases than a bullet or even bayonet).

Getting back to that whole 'Wetiko', 'Moloch', 'ubiquitous psychopathology', yeah... he's doing a good job of unpacking it.

Also yes - in talking about 'American Sadism' he's skipping around and hitting Belgian, English, etc. sadism as well but the reason it's specifically the US in his view right now is our being in late empire state - and he covers different historians talking about what late empire looks like in various places.

Steven Hassan is also good about mind control groups: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpw7sTgMzj4

He's painting a bleak picture which, unfortunately, is pretty much spot on.

When he was talking about the FDR administration and the grassroots movements that led to social reforms, I asked myself if it's possible today. I'm not so sure. The system, and the propaganda we're fed from childhood to the grave, may have anesthetized the masses so thoroughly that they cannot see the truth in front of them.

The only thing I can think of - if they start losing power the world destabilizes, if other people stabilize the world their power tends to restabilize. The trick would be seeing if that relationship could be decoupled, ie. K-shape it in a different direction, some other team. I think GameB at least has a little bit of that mindset but it's still more a philosophy than anything organized people are doing (Authentic Revolution maybe being one of the examples where it's actually in practice).