When the soulless wage war it is part of a perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. The more they fail, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.
President Donald Trump overseeing “Operation Epic Fury,” the U.S. attack on Iran, at Mar-a-Lago, Palm Beach, Florida, March 1. (White House /Daniel Torok)
The most profound realities of human existence are often the ones that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.
But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?
Philosophers and theologians, including Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Arthur Schopenhauer, have all grappled with the concept of a soul, with Schopenhauer preferring to define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.
While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. I saw the soulless in war. Those so calcified inside they kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.
The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.
Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.
I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — mean nothing to those without souls.
This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.
Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruelest deeds and bitterest defeats, the patina of goodness, success and morality.
Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.
“The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed.”
The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice.
Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls.
Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.
The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.
Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.
Thucydides understood. Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Woodruff went so far as to define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals, Woodruff writes, is the only thing that can bind us together.
It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or what in religious terms, we call grace.
“If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs,” Woodruff writes. “Pray instead that all may be reverent.”
The Emperor Has No Soul – Mr. Fish.
Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments.
He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in honor of himself, an arch that will be bigger than the Arch of Triumph erected by North Korean dictator Kim II Sung in Pyongyang.
He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, political and artistic figures deemed by Trump to be politically correct, along with, of course, himself.
His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.
These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless.
Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.
The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier, the more encrusted in gold leaf, the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else, to herd us with offerings to the feet of Moloch.
When the soulless wage war it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more they are convinced everyone has betrayed them, the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.
Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.
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.”
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This article is from the Chris Hedges via Scheer Post.
The views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Extremes of capitalism and imperialism, like in the US, can erode the human soul as well as human reason. Human reason is transformed into capitalist-imperialist technological rationality. Levels and types of such erosion are variable in the populations under capitalism and imperialism, as well as their types and levels. Soul and reason have mass psychological, politico-economic, cultural, biological, and epigenetic dimensions. Biologically and epigenetically these can be and are regulated and activated to differential levels, which can be and are inherited by the progenies. Hence, these processes become intergenerational. Psychological environment of families also plays a role in that. Hence, it is very likely that the soul and reason of Donald Trump have been severely eroded and transformed. These are extremely complex matters, which I analyzed in my 2015 article with the following link. Fazal Rahman, Ph.D. Retired geneticist, currently theoretical interdisciplinary researcher and writer. hxxps://imperialismandthethirdworld.wordpress.com/…
The same soul question could be asked of Biden, Obama, the Bush’s, and our other presidents of the last 60 years. Do the authors of the Project For A New American Century have souls? Do the victims of America’s militarism suffer and agonize any less when the evil inflicted on them originates from more “civil” American leaders?
Spot on Jimm.
The empty barrel analogy .
A soul filled ?, casket, headed over Viagra falls .
“ It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honor and protect — including the natural world —“
It troubling that the natural world is included as a sort of after thought when the natural world is the only source of ordering principles capable of ‘correcting’ the trajectory of present human changes; ideologies and beliefs generated mostly or fully by human thought have always been fundamentally instrumental functioning in immediate contexts — destined to wander, willy-nilly, from one surface absurdity to the next.
In Hedges’ world view and in his efforts to give these topics relevance in the experience and language habits of the greatest number of people, I can see the usefulness of this exercise, but it continues, in my view, to miss the point that there is no escaping the creation of the ‘soulless’ and worse, making opportunities for ‘soullessness’ to be the operating principle of political and economic processes; that this is the outcome of the unavoidable structures of huge populations, vast accumulations of material excess and a depth of technological powers that function well beyond the comprehension of even the people who create them.
“Pray for Rosemary’s Baby.” He has his father’s eyes.” This chillingly ironic line confirms the baby’s demonic parentage. After Rosemary cries, “What have you done to its eyes?” Roman’s calm, almost proud, response reveals that the baby’s father is not Guy, but Satan. It’s a moment of dark, understated humor that underscores the complete and horrifying triumph of the coven, “God is dead! Satan lives!” Roman Castevet.
Context: “Spoken during the final scene” [Rosemary’s Baby] “in the Castevets’ NYC apartment, after the baby’s true nature has been revealed to Rosemary. It is a celebratory chant by Roman and the coven, signifying that their dark prophecy has been fulfilled.
This quote, “God is dead,” is the coven’s triumphant declaration of victory. It references a famous 1966 TIME magazine cover that asked, “Is God Dead?” A question that reflected the era’s anxieties about the decline of traditional religion. In the film, Roman provides a terrifying answer, heralding the dawn of a new, satanic age with the birth of the Antichrist.”
… “Donald Trump is the greatest friend Israel has ever had in the White House.” Benyamin Netanyahu [before the full Knesset] “You will be recorded in the history of our people,” Netanyahu said in Hebrew. “You have already been recorded in the history of humanity.”
No doubt, Trump-Vance, Inc./Israel, like the 1968 American psychological horror film, written & directed by Roman Polanski, rock that “satanic culture w/sinister intentions,” universally, for plant, animal & human life. No One Is Safe!
……. “ The Emperor Has No Soul” – Mr. Fish.
“Soul is closely connected to fate, and the turns of fate almost always go counter to the expectations and often to the desires of the ego.” ~Thomas Moore, #Jung
I know it might seem dangerous to argue ‘Souls’ with someone who’s studied Theology, but I disagree with the premise of this piece. I do not feel that having an Evil Soul is the same as having No Soul.
To me, a souless person acts like a machine. No feelings at all about what they are doing. There was an old movie called “American Psycho” that comes to mind. The person who acts in society, but does not feel. That machine-like sort of person is whom I would describe as Soul-less.
Donald Trump is not a person with No Soul. Donald Trump is a person with an Evil Soul.
Speaking of the epitome of THE soulless ghoul now in Americas Presidential residence; from somewhere out in the ‘blogosphere’ (Don’t precisely recall the specific article):
POST 5/11/20
So, Joe Lockhart, in your opening preamble your intention is to clear the mainstream media of any culpability. In 1998 the corporate shill, Bill, paid no heed to more than 100 hundred newspapers’ opinions, whereas Nixon meekly succumbed?
Neither Richard Nixon, nor Bill Clinton was a totally narcissistic, debased, degenerate being; Clinton perhaps less so than Nixon. Nixon, perhaps, contained more of a conservative embodiment of ethical character, with a remnant of morality coursing through his veins.
Nixon was not actually impeached, yet his conscience was such that he in fact took it upon himself to resign and spare the nation any more of his paranoid infirmities. In the earlier years of his presidency, he did do the country much good. (Fact check for yourselves)
[Current confirmation of aforementioned paragraph using AI: “Richard Nixon was not formally impeached by the House of Representatives. While the House Judiciary Committee adopted three articles of impeachment (obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress) in July 1974, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, before the full House could vote on them.”]
Clinton, on the other hand, was a double dealer of the first order, who actually sold-out the country to the highest bidder, and in his impeachment hearing, tried to lie his way through, until he was formally impeached. And with his one forerunner president, who too was impeached, there was no price to pay. This one fact alone (that he resigned) is enough to somewhat burnish Nixon’s record in office. He did have a remnant of personal conscience.
Neither of them ever, during his presidential term, inadvertently alluded in any statement, to his own delusions of grandeur; evincing a personal pathology of character, when on January 23rd 2016 Trump made the assertive claim, even before he was inaugurated into the office of President of the (entire) United States, about my “my people… where I could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot someone and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay”.
What an ominous early warning that was, yet tragically, none of the majority of the American voters paid enough heed to giving the statement its deserved credence. (Statement date verified 03/31/26 online by this commenter.)
After three-plus years of Trumps active behaviors and policy nightmares (in the first term) ………….. and here we are today, “so help US dog”!
There will always be sick people like Trump in our midst. What is more concerning is the number of people with a functioning conscience who are willing to put it aside to hitch a ride on his star. When immorality becomes the norm we are in deep trouble.
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
*
To run for President of the United States, a candidate must be a natural-born citizen, at least 35 years old, and have been a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years. These requirements are outlined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution.
Given the unprecedented dangerous state in which Americans and people around the Earth find themselves in due to criminal decisions made by leaders displaying character traits destructive to efforts at improving the health, well-being and happiness of their fellow human beings in this world, Americans might strongly suggest to members of the United States Congress that they add two requirements, via Constitutional Amendment, to those already defined in the United States Constitution:
1): The candidate must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, his/her possession of a soul, as soul is commonly understood, and, 2): The candidate must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, his/her possession of the capacity to love … as love is commonly understood.
Endless war must end.
Peace.
Thank You Mr. Hedges.
What an outstanding and disturbing commentary on the mindset of despotic individuals such as those currently running amok upon our planet.
May sane minds regain control.
Didn’t Trump also say something like ” I can shoot anyone on 5th Aveneue and not lose a vote”?
I am wondering what kind of nation has the US become considering the utterances of officials notably the president who takes delight in saying he would seize the oil of this and that country and still the people just look at the things as if all is well.
Are we serious about our lives being together controlled by warmongers?
Soulless, heartless and full of blustering bloviation.
None of his predecessors were much better.
No but people may live many lifetimes in personal forms of hell on earth or other states of their creating. Purgatory is just a bardo state no one is stuck in before rising again as in springtime as resurrection with karmic conditioning from the cave of bardo..
An alternative position would be that he has a soul, a dead one at that. He also has a conscience, and a free will. He can be known by his fruits, which Mr. Hedges enumerates well. Trump is an evil person, and he has plenty of company. His willfull actions are the antithesis of the Beatitudes.
This reminds me of the book “In the Absence of the Sacred” by Gerry Mander. It refers to the sacredness of our natural world and indigenous reverence for it. He was definitely on to something. Trump is the unfortunately logical outcome of our colonialist culture’s indifference to the sacred. The only thing our leaders hold sacred is profit at any cost. It is literally killing us. You don’t have to be religious to hold our world as sacred. The question before us at this late stage of empire is how do we free ourselves from these soulless virtually insane leaders before they are able to their worst?
I don’t know what he is missing, but he certainly had a souless upbringing and was taught the values or lack by his parents who were racist too and awful people without compassion for others. His older brother, Fred, Jr. had compassion, unlike many in his family and it chewed him up inside and he became a drunk and a maintenance worker for his father’s properties, or so I read somewhere. I am sure I would have liked him more than his relatives. His father took the apartment complexes he gave him to manage after Fred wanted to fix the leaky windows against the New York City cold.