Chris Hedges: Flee Society’s Dazzling and Deadly Fantasies [Video]

 The American people’s collective inability to overcome commercial illusion and confront the grim realities of the economic and environmental crises means they will remain slaves to fiction and its apocalyptic outcomes, Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges told Paul Jay on The Real News Network’s new show, “Reality Asserts Itself.”

“Of course it’s bleak,” Hedges said in response to Jay’s remark that Hedges is often called gloomy.

[pullquote] Rebelling against the scummy mainstream media and its lies and distortions is essential to remedy a profoundly sick society and obtain our liberation. But far too many Americans still sit on the fence doing nothing, not even working up a healthy sense of anger at the current situation. [/pullquote]

“I’m sorry. The climate science reports are bleak. I’m not making it up. This kind of mania for hope is really a kind of sickness because it prevents us from seeing how dire and catastrophic the situation is if we don’t radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and the ecosystem. And so of course people don’t want to hear it. You know, they want to become entranced or mesmerized with the trivia that dominates the airwaves and the sagas of soap operas. And, you know, we are fed this mantra that is really fiction. And the mantra goes that we can have everything we want, that reality is never an impediment to what we desire. And that’s given to us by Oprah, and it’s given to us by Hollywood … and it’s a lie. It’s not true. And I think we can’t even use the word hope until we confront reality and begin to resist against the real.”

Hedges’ conversation with Jay below is part three in a seven-part series. See parts one and two here and here.

—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

TheRealNews: