Americans will attack anyone who warns them

A trope I have noticed with Americans ever since the Internet began is they don’t trust you when you tell them the truth. They inevitably assert that it’s a nasty trick to take something away from them — whether it’s as petty as their trust, or as large as their fortune. It seems they don’t trust the processes of normal conversation and shy away from them. But then, they are convinced by the next sales gimmick or the next religious prophet or shyster. They will pay these people a fortune, just because of the way they talk, which presses all their buttons.

 I would say America (and to a large degree much of the West) has become a narcissistic culture, incapable of giving credence to reality but willing to keep paying out to maintain the illusion that that they are more superior and discerning than others. They’re completely addicted to that feeling, which is why reality hits them as a let down, a descent from that constant state of feeling high.

 Even the critics of this decline inside the USA keep advocating a return to religiosity as a way out of their narcissistic disorder, but religiosity of the American sort is a large part of the problem, as an outsider like me can see.


The Folly of Empire

The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than the original,” Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his book “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.” “We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories in the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Hedges is a Christian, so he also blames a retreat into the sexual, but the fact is that Americans retreat into religion more than anything else.   They are also highly suspicious of criticisms, language or ideas they haven't heard before.   Therefore they hear only the latest calls to do something more crazy.  There's no warning them.

More that is obviously true from the outside and happening also, but to a lesser degree, throughout the West:

Culture and literacy, in the final stage of decline, are replaced with noisy diversions and empty clichés. The Roman statesman Cicero inveighed against their ancient equivalent—the arena. Cicero, for his honesty, was hunted down and murdered and his hands and head were cut off. His severed head and his right hand, which had written the Philippics, were nailed onto the speaker’s platform in the Forum. The roaring crowds, while the Roman elite spat on the head, were gleefully told he would never speak or write again. In the modern age this toxic, mindless cacophony, our own version of spectacle and gladiator fights, of bread and circus, is pumped into the airwaves in 24-hour cycles. Political life has fused into celebrity worship. Education is primarily vocational. Intellectuals are cast out and despised. Artists cannot make a living. Few people read books. Thought has been banished, especially at universities and colleges, where timid pedants and careerists churn out academic drivel. “Although tyranny, because it needs no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.” And ours have been destroyed.