Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.
Puppet Theater of the Absurd – by Mr. Fish.
The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots.
The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.
Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.
In Hitler and the Germans, the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people.
The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness.
Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact.
These idiots, who promise to recapture lost glory and power, do not create. They only destroy. They accelerate the collapse.
Limited in intellectual ability, lacking any moral compass, grossly incompetent and filled with rage at established elites who they see as having slighted and rejected them, they remake the world into a playground for grifters, con artists and megalomaniacs.
They make war on universities, banish scientific research, peddle quack theories about vaccines as a pretext to expand mass surveillance and data sharing, strip legal residents of their rights and empower armies of goons, which is what the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has become, to spread fear and ensure passivity.
Reality, whether the climate crisis or the immiseration of the working class, does not impinge on their fantasies. The worse it gets, the more idiotic they become.
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Hannah Arendt blames a society that willingly embraces radical evil on this collective “thoughtlessness.” Desperate to escape from the stagnation, where they and their children are trapped, hopeless and in despair, a betrayed population is conditioned to exploit everyone around them in a desperate scramble to advance.
People are objects to be used, mirroring the cruelty inflicted by the ruling class.
‘Celebrating the Degenerate’
A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized.
Those who exhibit them are condemned as stupid; “a man [or woman] who behaves in this way,” Voegelin notes, “will be socially boycotted.”
But the social, cultural and moral norms in a diseased society are inverted. The attributes that sustain an open society — a concern for the common good, honesty, trust and self-sacrifice — are ridiculed.
They are detrimental to existence in a diseased society.
When a society, as Plato notes, abandons the common good, it always unleashes amoral lusts — violence, greed and sexual exploitation — and fosters magical thinking, the focus of my book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
The only thing these dying regimes do well is spectacle. These bread and circuses acts — like Trump’s $40 million Army parade to be held on his birthday on June 14 — keep a distressed population entertained.
The Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes, the land where everything is possible, is peddled to mask the cruelty of economic stagnation and social inequality.
The population is conditioned by mass culture, dominated by sexual commodification, banal and mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, to blame itself for failure.
Trump congratulating Kevin Holland after his victory during the mixed-martial arts UFC 316 in Newark, N.J., on Saturday. (White House /Daniel Torok)
Søren Kierkegaard in The Present Age warns that the modern state seeks to eradicate conscience and shape and manipulate individuals into a pliable and indoctrinated “public.” This public is not real. It is, as Kierkegaard writes, a “monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage.”
In short, we became part of a herd, “unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.” Those who question the public, those who denounce the corruption of the ruling class, are dismissed as dreamers, freaks or traitors. But only they, according to the Greek definition of the polis, can be considered citizens.
Thomas Paine writes that a despotic government is a fungus that grows out of a corrupt civil society. This is what happened to past societies. It is what happened to us.
It is tempting to personalize the decay, as if ridding ourselves of Trump will return us to sanity and sobriety. But the rot and corruption has ruined all of our democratic institutions, which function in form, not in content.
The consent of the governed is a cruel joke. Congress is a club on the take from billionaires and corporations. The courts are appendages of corporations and the rich. The press is an echo chamber of the elites, some of whom do not like Trump, but none of whom advocate the social and political reforms that could save us from despotism.
It is about how we dress up despotism, not despotism itself.
Collective Retreat From Reality
The historian Ramsay MacMullen, in Corruption and the Decline of Rome, writes that what destroyed the Roman Empire was “the diverting of governmental force, its misdirection.”
Power became about enriching private interests. This misdirection renders government powerless, at least as an institution that can address the needs and protect the rights of the citizenry.
The U.S. government, in this sense, is powerless. It is a tool of corporations, banks, the war industry and oligarchs. It cannibalizes itself to funnel wealth upwards.
Singaporean Minister of Defense Chan Chun Sing hosting U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, May 30, 2025. (DoD / Alexander Kubitza)
“[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness,” Edward Gibbon writes.
“Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”
The Roman emperor Commodus, like Trump, was entranced with his own vanity. He commissioned statues of himself as Hercules and had little interest in governance. He fancied himself a star of the arena, staging gladiatorial contests where he was crowned the victor and killing lions with a bow and arrow.
The empire — he renamed Rome the Colonia Commodiana (Colony of Commodus) — was a vehicle to satiate his bottomless narcissism and lust for wealth. He sold public offices the way Trump sells pardons and favors to those who invest in his cryptocurrencies or donate to his inauguration committee or presidential library.
Trump’s meme coin tops $10-billion market cap as he takes office https://t.co/JCsOqt9trQ
— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) January 21, 2025
Finally, the emperor’s advisors arranged to have him strangled to death in his bath by a professional wrestler after he announced that he would assume the consulship dressed as a gladiator. But his assassination did nothing to halt the decline. Commodus was replaced by the reformer Pertinax who was assassinated three months later.
The Praetorian Guards auctioned off the office of emperor. The next emperor, Didius Julianus, lasted 66 days. There would be five emperors in A.D. 193, the year after the assassination of Commodus.
Like the late Roman Empire, our republic is dead.
Our constitutional rights — due process, habeas corpus, privacy, freedom from exploitation, fair elections and dissent — have been taken from us by judicial and legislative fiat. These rights exist only in name.
The vast disconnect between the purported values of our faux democracy and reality means our political discourse, the words we use to describe ourselves and our political system, are absurd.
Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, 1920. (Christian Mantey, Kulturagent/ Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
Walter Benjamin wrote in 1940 amid the rise of European fascism and looming world war:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Our decay, our illiteracy and collective retreat from reality, was long in the making. The steady erosion of our rights, especially our rights as voters, the transformation of the organs of state into tools of exploitation, the immiseration of the working poor and middle class, the lies that saturate our airwaves, the degrading of public education, the endless and futile wars, the staggering public debt, the collapse of our physical infrastructure, mirror the last days of all empires.
Trump the pyromaniac entertains us as we go down.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
This article is from Scheerpost.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers
Other scholars posit reasons for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Economist and futurist Michael Hudson considers that the indebtedness of the population which meant debt-slavery, sapped the Empire of popular strength. Rome was a creditor-class nation and to this day we suffer from the Roman law that “all debts must be paid”, while true law states that “debts that can’t be paid won’t be paid”.
Britain’s Sir Albert Howard, “the father of modern composting” posited that Rome’s slave system of agriculture eventually depleted soil health and thus weakened the grain that all Romans depended on for vitality. Our modern world recreates Rome’s slave agriculture with fossil fuel driven agribusiness.
Thanks to CN and Chris Hedges for this excellent consideration:
Without intellect or morality, the tyrant seeks glory and power to reward his corrupt supporters. He waves his flag, thumps his scriptures, and invents pretexts for wars, surveillance, denial of rights, and internal military actions.
The tyrant dominates society by rewarding supporters among the manipulative, deceitful and violent, and eliminates conscience with commercial entertainment and violence. Those with moral concerns are ridiculed or branded disloyal.
All branches of our former democracy are indeed now corrupt, remaining only as charades and symbols.
Congress, the courts, and mass media are a corruptocracy of billionaires and corporations who prevent all reform.
Our constitutional rights are no more than formalities ignored by corrupt judges, legislators, and secret agencies.
Grim but accurate in many ways. We can only cross our fingers and hope that in time it is proven to be wrong because hope is all we have.
I linked that Walter Benjamin essay and gave that precise quote in a comment to a recent article here on CN not that long ago! Would like to say it was one of yours, but honestly cannot remember; tempting however unlikely to wonder if that influenced its inclusion here at all. Either way, it’s a wonderful essay I’m glad to see referenced for others, but I’m surprised you didn’t link it here, so here it is for anyone curious the source of that quote:
hXXps://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
It is on philosophy of history, and he articulates beautifully what I have always felt most conceptions of history (by historians and everyone else) lack, which is trying to understand history in its own terms, as those in history knew it; and to see the perspective of the victims and not only the conquerors.
I have learned so much and of so much wonderful literature from your writing, and your citations and references in your books. Thanks for another wonderful piece, Chris Hedges. Your sense of humanity and morality, combined with your conviction and clarity, are always an inspiration to me in our dark times, and you really have a way with words that is always such a joy to read.
The vast majority of the 99% blindly support capitalism. None of them can escape responsibility for the consequences. For the power wielded by the rulers of world capitalism is a reflection of the political ignorance of our class everywhere. Some dictators are homegrown and elected. They include the likes of King & Queen Ortega, Turkey’s ever power-hungry president Erdo?an, Rodrigo Kill ’em All Duterte of the Philippines and his replacement Marcos Jnr. Other odious examples include Hitler, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front, Meloni, Orbán and, of course, Trump.
Former Democrat Debs was clear: ‘I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands’ (1908).
If the 99% understood the true nature of capitalism, they would shun it and lead a socialist revolution. But too many years of propaganda and miseducation have concealed capitalism’s face, replacing it with the false but shiny beauty of freedom and prosperity.
Siden04 This may be the most positive rendering of Americans plight I’ve read here for sometime. I give you a cheer, Hear, Hear!
I detect a worrisome tone in many of these comments. My intention is not to point fingers or present myself as being negative.
We cannot allow ourselves to be swept under and away by giving up. As a country we need to stand up and resist what we all know is bullshit behavior by a witless dictator.
True the world is changing, we must at the very least resist this deadly tide and cast off those who wish us to be their servants.
Debs was correct as he was clear about the correct course.
I will remind everyone here of a man and country in very dire straights. Leck Walisa of Poland – Quotes, “I’m Lazy. But it was lazy people who invented the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things. – You cannot change the facts with your lies, allegations and counterfeits – freedom must be gained step by step slowly. Freedom may be the soul of humanity but ofter you have to struggle to prove it.
I will remind everyone here Leck and his Polish country men, many grand fathers found themselves in a situation not so much unlike ours.
Nov 7, 2022 – The thing that lies at the base of positive change is, the way I see it, is service to a fellow human being .
I have recently wrote , “Everyone must be constantly aware of their surroundings, the dog of war have been released.” As negative as the comment seems the intention is that by the individuals constant vigilance we can protect each other from tyranny
No one wins the fight is they give up before the struggle ever starts.
The Soviet Union’s so-called dynasty didn’t exactly “crumble.” Since its founding it was targeted by world capitalism for destruction, total, terrible and merciless destruction. See Gaza and the West Bank for a current demonstration of what the West has always been capable of and has not infrequently actually resorted to.
On 22 June 1941, a capitalist power bloc, the Axis, sent a force numbering an astounding 3.8 million against the U.S.S.R. The objective was clear: the extermination and enslavement of the Slavic population, the total extermination of the Soviet Jewish population, and the total destruction and dismemberment of the entire Soviet Union — terrible and merciless.
Post World War II, the Soviets were rewarded for having destroyed the Nazi Wehrmacht and bringing an end the Third Reich with a new war against it. And so it went. No cost was too great, no sacrifice too extreme, human life and suffering, as usual, mattered not at all. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republica had to go.
And finally, after being subjected by world capitalism to over 70 years of unspeakable violence, sabotage, subversion and suffering, it finally “crumbled.” And where are we now and how might the Soviet Union’s continued presence have prevented some of the catastrophes the U.S, has inflicted on the world since the fall of the U.S.S.R on 31 December 1989? Oh my. No one can say. Or should say, no one dares to say.
Yes. Capitalism can never get enough.
For what it may be worth (or not) I remember Eric Voegelin’s statement: “It is the task of a politician to bamboozle his people into doing, for all sorts of reasons, things which should be done for the right reasons. That is the art of a statesman.”
I do believe we have been headed in this direction from the time the first Europeans set foot on this continent. Plunder and pillage through extreme violence was the norm back then and it still is. Only our technology has become more sophisticated. Our baser human traits have always been at the root of US policy.
We may have managed to tame it in the domestic arena, but how we deal with resistance from targeted nations has been consistent. Now the domestic situation mirrors the foreign one. Colonialism was never abandoned. Quite the opposite.
I agree with Hedge’s take on our collapsing empire and the inevitable rise of idiots like Trump and his minions. We need to dump capitalism if we are to survive on this planet. No one knows what exactly will replace it. We have to take the first step to begin to find out.
Could it be called…for short…KAKISTOCRACY? But it is much more than this…
Brilliant and disturbing – as always. These observations/judgements/conclusions should be front page headlines in any and all major news outlets. Sadly, few have the historical knowledge or the extraordinary daring of Chris Hedges. But now – today and yesterday and tomorrow – aware of the terrible bleakness, how does one move forward in a meaningful direction and encourage the many gestures of resistance? There are voices everywhere in the US sounding the alarm. We need to hear more and more of them and nourish hope rather than total despair.
It shouldn’t take extraordinary daring to be a journalist in a country blessed with a First Amendment. It should be the norm, rather than the exception.
“A society convulsed by disorder and chaos, as Voegelin points out, celebrates the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent. In an open, democratic society, these attributes are despised and criminalized”.
The first test case I thought of was the USA. Big problem there: the USA has always celebrated “the morally degenerate, those who are cunning, manipulative, deceitful and violent”. Actually from before 1776, but especially since the early 19th century.
And yet it is supposed to be “an open, democratic society” – we are always being told that it is in fact the most open, democratic society in the world, and thus the ideal model for all others.
“And yet it is supposed to be “an open, democratic society” – we are always being told that it is in fact the most open, democratic society in the world, and thus the ideal model for all others.”
You mean like the IDF is supposed to be the “most moral army” in the world.
There couldn’t be a lamer interpretation of this Klee work than Benjamin’s. He describes the angel’s face as turned towards the past. The angel’s face isn’t turned at all — just his left eye is turned, toward his left — and if he is facing the past this is pure conjecture. Then Benjamin describes the past as catastrophic, and throwing up refuse, that Klee didn’t draw. Then he describes a strorm blowing from Paradise, which he places in the past. But Klee’s angel experiences no strong frontal wind — see the hair, the wide open eyes, and the face shows no strain of exertion associated with thwarted arm/wing movement. The angel is not airborn, being propelled backward where Benjamin identifies future — see how Klee has drawn the angel’s right leg stepping forward. Then Benjamin sees more yet debris that Klee didn’t draw. Benjamin engages in all this pictorial misreading just to be able to fob off his slogan: “This storm is what we call progress.”
Another brilliant piece by Chris Hedges
I couldn’t agree more.