That's a sentence from Chris Hedges book, "Empire of Illusion - The End of LITERACY and the TRIUMPH of Spectacle." I had some problems reading the first 2 chapters of the book, The Illusion of Literacy and The Illusion of Love.
The first chapter is a review of large parts of contemporary American society, professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, and reality TV. My problem was the he gave too much detail in describing these things, for instance the first 14 pages are dedicated to describing professional wrestling, its various back stories and actors. But, the descriptions are devastating. I can't remember if Hedges compares this to the bread and circuses at the fall of the Roman Empire, but I definitely came away with the feeling that that's where the US is right now.
The second chapter covers the current state of pornography in the US. All I can say is the description is graphic and disgusting. I had no idea.
"The sole basis for authority is wealth," is a sentence from the third chapter (The Illusion of Wisdom). This chapter discusses the elite educational system in the US. The prep schools, the ivy league universities, their students, and the general tenor of the education. Hedges thinks the US is currently in the state it's in because of the absolute decadence of this elite education and the largely hereditary system of admissions. The people who come out of these schools are largely technocrats with no idea how to think critically or independently; and since, these are the leaders our country, we will not work our way out the mess we are currently in.
I haven't read the final 2 chapters of the book, The Illusion of Happiness and The Illusion of America. I am looking forward to reading them.
A couple of paragraphs from the third chapter:
John D Rockefeller III, an alumnus, was our graduation speaker the year I finished prep school at Loomis-Chaffey. The wealthy and powerful families in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles are molded by these institutions into a tribe. School, family, and entitlement effectively combine. The elites vacation together, ski at the same Swiss resorts, and know the names of the same restaurants in New York and Paris. They lunch at the same clubs and golf on the same greens. And by the time they finish an elite college, they have been conditioned to become part of the inner circle. They speak an intimidating language of privilege, complete with references to minutiae and traditions only the elite understand. They have obtained a confidence those on the outside often struggle to duplicate. And the elite, while they may not say so in public, disdain those who lack their polish and connections. Once they finish their schooling they have the means to barricade themselves in exclusive communities, places like Short Hills, New Jersey, or Greenwich, Connecticut. They know few outside their elite circles. They may have contact with a mechanic in their garage, or their doorman, or a nanny, or gardener or contractor, but these are stilted, insincere relationships between the powerful and the relatively powerless. The elite rarely confront genuine differences of opinion. They are not asked to examine the roles they play in society and the inequities of the structure that sustains them. They are cultural philistines. The sole basis for authority is wealth. And within these self-satisfied cocoons they think of themselves as caring, good people, which they often are, but only to other members of the elite or, at times, the few service workers who support their lifestyles. The gross social injustices that condemn most African-Americans to urban poverty and the working class to a subsistence level of existence, the imperial bullying that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, do not touch them. They engage in small, largely meaningless forays of charity, organized by their clubs or social groups, to give their lives a thin patina of goodness. They can live their entire lives in state of total self-delusion and perpetual childhood. "It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-world beyond, and a pseudo-world within themselves as well," wrote C. Wright Mills.
...
Our elites - the ones in Congress, the ones on Wall Street, and the ones being produced at prestigious universities and business schools - do not have the capacity to fix our financial mess. Indeed, they will make it worse. They have no concept, thanks to the educations they have received, of how to replace a failed system with a new one. They are petty, timid, and uncreative bureaucrats superbly trained to carry out systems management. They see only piecemeal solutions that will satisfy the corporate structure. Their entire focus is numbers, profits, and personal advancement. They lack a moral and intellectual core. They are as able to deny gravely ill people medical coverage to increase company profits as they are to use taxpayer dollars to peddle costly weapons systems to blood-soaked dictatorships. The human consequences never figure into their balance sheets. The democratic system, they believe, is a secondary product of the free market - which they slavishly serve.
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