Tag Archives: Sacrifice

Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The banquet of consequences for the Fed, the elites and their armies of parasitic flunkies and factotums is being laid out, and there won’t be much choice in the seating.

Words can be debased just like currencies. Take the word sacrifice. The value of the original has been debased by trite, weepy overuse to the point of cliche. Like other manifestations of derealization and denormalization, this debasement is invisible, profound and ultimately devastating.

Consider the overworked slogan of implied shared sacrifice: we’re all in this together. Pardon my cynicism, but doesn’t this sound like what the first class passengers in the lifeboats shouted to the doomed steerage passengers on the sinking Titanic?

Here is the ice-cold reality of America in 2020: Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me. This isn’t a new trend, of course. Any measurable sacrifices shared by all the socio-economic classes ended with World War II in 1945, and since then it’s been one long slide to Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me.

We’ve seen this slide to decay and collapse many times in history. The elites who once gained social status and political power by making real sacrifices on behalf of the nation / empire become entirely self-serving, accumulating ever greater wealth and power by transferring all the sacrifices and risks onto the lower classes.

Peter Turchin, author of War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, describes how civic virtue is gradually replaced by personal greed and self-interest.

This excerpt perfectly captures the current zeitgeist:

“Virtus included the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to act in ways that promoted good, and especially the common good. Unlike Greeks, Romans did not stress individual prowess, as exhibited by Homeric heroes or Olympic champions. The ideal of hero was one whose courage, wisdom, and self-sacrifice saved his country in time of peril.

Unlike the selfish elites of the later periods, the aristocracy of the early Republic did not spare its blood or treasure in the service of the common interest. When 50,000 Romans, a staggering one fifth of Rome’s total manpower, perished in the battle of Cannae, as mentioned previously, the senate lost almost one third of its membership. This suggests that the senatorial aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen….

The wealthy classes were also the first to volunteer extra taxes when they were needed… A graduated scale was used in which the senators paid the most, followed by the knights, and then other citizens. In addition, officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay, saving the state 20 percent of the legion’s payroll….

The richest 1 percent of the Romans during the early Republic was only 10 to 20 times as wealthy as an average Roman citizen.”

Now compare that to the situation in Late Antiquity when

“An average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no ‘middle class’ comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor.”

Compare this to the America of World War II and the America of today. Wealthy, politically influential families such as the Kennedys could only retain their influence if their sons served in positions of combat leadership, and Joe Kennedy was killed in the European theater after volunteering for a highly risky air mission. John F. Kennedy very nearly lost his life in the South Pacific.

And how do our era’s crop of presidents and presidential contenders fare by comparison? The idea that flesh and blood should ever be at risk in defense of the nation /empire–perish the thought.

As Turchin sagely observed, it’s not just the limitless greed and avoidance of sacrifice of the elite that generates destabilizing inequality–it’s the eradication of the middle class as all the risks and sacrifices were shifted from the self-serving top to the middle and lower classes.

As I’ve often noted, risk cannot be made to disappear, it can only be transferred to others. In the grand scheme of things, the inherent risks of globalization and financialization have all been transferred to the middle and working classes (however you define them). The elite class enjoys the near-infinite support of the Federal Reserve and it’s ability to print near-infinite sums of currency to bail out the greediest, most self-serving scum of parasites and speculators.

Meanwhile, all the sacrifices required to support this unfair, corrupt, predatory system have been transferred to the middle and working classes via sleight of hand. The sacrifices weren’t transparent and up front; they were cloaked in the decline of job security, in ever-higher costs, in the decline of social mobility and the erosion of the purchasing power of wages.

The elites’ economist flunkies and factotums claimed that bailing out the freeloaders, parasites and speculators would benefit “the little people” because the grand trade-off delivered by the Federal Reserve (as correspondent R.J. pointed out to me) was: no more financial panics, which caused much misery in the working class due to business failures causing layoffs and unemployment.

But globalization, financialization and the rise of cartel-state monopolies have eviscerated the middle and working classes far more effectively and permanently than any brief financial panic, while greatly enriching the elite class–a rise in wealth that is backstopped by the Federal Reserve: profits are the elites to keep while their losses are socialized, i.e. transferred to the lower classes.

Job security, the purchasing power of wages and social mobility–nothing vital to the middle or working classes is backstopped by the Fed; the Fed’s one and only job is backstopping the wealth of our parasitic, predatory elite.

Sacrifice for Thee But None For Me. The banquet of consequences for the Fed, the elites and their armies of parasitic flunkies and factotums is being laid out, and there won’t be much choice in the seating.

The Cost of Resistance

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(Museum of the Revolution, León, Nicaragua)

By Chris Hedges

Source: TruthDig

Resistance entails suffering. It requires self-sacrifice. It accepts that we may be destroyed. It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness. It is about the pursuit of freedom. Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner freedom that comes with defiance, and perhaps this is the only freedom, and true happiness, we will ever know. To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life. It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as the theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.

Most of those who resist—Sitting Bull, Emma Goldman, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.—are defeated, at least in the cold calculation of the powerful. The final, and perhaps most important quality of resistance, as Cone writes, is that it “inverts the world’s value system.” Hope rises up out of defeat. Those who resist stand, regardless of the cost, with the crucified. This is their magnificence and their power.

The seductive inducements to conformity—money, fame, prizes, generous grants, huge book contracts, hefty lecture fees, important academic and political positions and a public platform—are scorned by those who resist. The rebel does not define success the way the elites define success. Those who resist refuse to kneel before the idols of mass culture and the power elites. They are not trying to get rich. They do not want to be part of the inner circle of the powerful. They accept that when you stand with the oppressed you get treated like the oppressed.

The inversion of the world’s value system makes freedom possible. Those who resist are free not because they have attained many things or high positions, but because they have so few needs. They sever the shackles used to keep most people enslaved. And this is why the elites fear them. The elites can crush them physically, but they cannot buy them off.

The power elites attempt to discredit those who resist. They force them to struggle to make an income. They push them to the margins of society. They write them out of the official narrative. They deny them the symbols of status. They use the compliant liberal class to paint them as unreasonable and utopian.

Resistance is not, fundamentally, political. It is cultural. It is about finding meaning and expression in the transcendent and the incongruities of life. Music, poetry, theater and art sustain resistance by giving expression to the nobility of rebellion against the overwhelming forces, what the ancient Greeks called fortuna, which can never ultimately be overcome. Art celebrates the freedom and dignity of those who defy malignant evil. Victory is not inevitable, or at least not victory as defined by the powerful. Yet in every act of rebellion we are free. It was the raw honesty of the blues, spirituals and work chants that made it possible for African-Americans to endure.

Power is a poison. It does not matter who wields it. The rebel, for this reason, is an eternal heretic. He or she will never fit into any system. The rebel stands with the powerless. There will always be powerless people. There will always be injustice. The rebel will always be an outsider.

Resistance requires eternal vigilance. The moment the powerful are no longer frightened, the moment the glare of the people is diverted and movements let down their guard, the moment the ruling elites are able to use propaganda and censorship to hide their aims, the gains made by resisters roll backward. We have been steadily stripped of everything that organized working men and women—who rose up in defiance and were purged, demonized and killed by the capitalist elites—achieved with the New Deal. The victories of African-Americans, who paid with their bodies and blood in making possible the Great Society and ending legal segregation, also have been reversed.

The corporate state makes no pretense of addressing social inequality or white supremacy. It practices only the politics of vengeance. It uses coercion, fear, violence, police terror and mass incarceration as social control. Our cells of resistance have to be rebuilt from scratch.

The corporate state, however, is in trouble. It has no credibility. All the promises of the “free market,” globalization and trickle-down economics have been exposed as a lie, an empty ideology used to satiate greed. The elites have no counterargument to their anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critics. The attempt to blame the electoral insurgencies in the United States’ two ruling political parties on Russian interference, rather than massive social inequality—the worst in the industrialized world—is a desperate ploy. The courtiers in the corporate press are working feverishly, day and night, to distract us from reality. The moment the elites are forced to acknowledge social inequality as the root of our discontent is the moment they are forced to acknowledge their role in orchestrating this inequality. This terrifies them.

The U.S. government, subservient to corporate power, has become a burlesque. The last vestiges of the rule of law are evaporating. The kleptocrats are pillaging and looting like barbarian hordes. Programs instituted to protect the common good—public education, welfare and environmental regulations—are being dismantled. The bloated military, sucking the marrow out of the nation, is unassailable. Poverty is a nightmare for half the population. Poor people of color are gunned down with impunity in the streets. Our prison system, the world’s largest, is filled with the destitute. And presiding over the chaos and the dysfunction is a political P.T. Barnum, a president who, while we are being fleeced, offers up one bizarre distraction after another, much like Barnum’s Feejee mermaid—the head and torso of a monkey sewed to the back half of a fish.

There is no shortage of artists, intellectuals and writers, from Martin Buber and George Orwell to James Baldwin, who warned us that this dystopian era was fast approaching. But in our Disneyfied world of intoxicating and endless images, cult of the self and willful illiteracy, we did not listen. We will pay for our negligence.

Søren Kierkegaard argued that it was the separation of intellect from emotion, from empathy, that doomed Western civilization. The “soul” has no role in a technocratic society. The communal has been shattered. The concept of the common good has been obliterated. Greed is celebrated. The individual is a god. The celluloid image is reality. The artistic and intellectual forces that make transcendence and the communal possible are belittled or ignored. The basest lusts are celebrated as forms of identity and self-expression. Progress is defined exclusively by technological and material advancement. This creates a collective despair and anxiety that feeds and is fed by glitter, noise and false promises of consumer-culture idols. The despair grows ever-worse, but we never acknowledge our existential dread. As Kierkegaard understood, “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.”

Those who resist are relentlessly self-critical. They ask the hard questions that mass culture, which promises an unachievable eternal youth, fame and financial success, deflects us from asking. What does it mean to be born? What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die? How do we live a life of meaning? What is justice? What is truth? What is beauty? What does our past say about our present? How do we defy radical evil?

We are in the grip of what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death”—the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. Those who are ruled by rational abstractions and an aloof intellectualism, Kierkegaard argued, are as depraved as those who succumb to hedonism, cravings for power, violence and predatory sexuality. We achieve salvation when we accept the impediments of the body and the soul, the limitations of being human, yet despite these limitations seek to do good. This burning honesty, which means we always exist on the cusp of despair, leaves us, in Kierkegaard’s words, in “fear and trembling.” We struggle not to be brutes while acknowledging we can never be angels. We must act and then ask for forgiveness. We must be able to see our own face in the face of the oppressor.

The theologian Paul Tillich did not use the word “sin” to mean an act of immorality. He, like Kierkegaard, defined sin as estrangement. For Tillich, it was our deepest existential dilemma. Sin was our separation from the forces that give us ultimate meaning and purpose in life. This separation fosters the alienation, anxiety, meaninglessness and despair that are preyed upon by mass culture. As long as we fold ourselves inward, embrace a perverted hyper-individualism that is defined by selfishness and narcissism, we will never overcome this estrangement. We will be separated from ourselves, from others and from the sacred.

Resistance is not only about battling the forces of darkness. It is about becoming a whole and complete human being. It is about overcoming estrangement. It is about the capacity to love. It is about honoring the sacred. It is about dignity. It is about sacrifice. It is about courage. It is about being free. Resistance is the pinnacle of human existence.