Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle »

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He is the author of the best-selling War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. He currently writes for numerous publications, including Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and Mother Jones. A columnist for Truthdig, he lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

In this New York Times bestseller, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges has written a shattering meditation on American obsession with celebrity and the epidemic of illiteracy that threatens our cultural integrity. Reporting on such phenomena as professional wrestling, the pornographic film industry, and unchecked casino capitalism, Hedges exposes the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, and moral collapse around us. Empire of Illusion shows us how illiteracy and the embrace of fantasy have impoverished our working class, allowed for the continuance of destructive public policy, and ushered in cultural bankruptcy.

The Barnes & Noble Review

In this short, grim, fiercely argued book, journalist Chris Hedges explains that we are doomed. He catalogues in essay-length chapters four examples of what he calls modern America's "moral nihilism": its fawning celebrity culture, sadistic pornography industry, insipidly vocational universities, and pervasive corporate influence. Hedges concludes with a wake-up call for a society that, he says, "has become the greatest illusion in a culture of illusions":

In an age of images and entertainment, in an age of instant emotional gratification, we neither seek nor want honesty or reality. Reality is complicated. Reality is boring. We are incapable or unwilling to handle its confusion. We ask to be indulged and comforted by clichés, stereotypes, and inspirational messages that tell us we can be whoever we seek to be, that we live in the greatest country on earth, that we are endowed with superior moral and physical qualities, and that our future will always be glorious and prosperous.

As a leftist, Hedges would never resuscitate Robert Bork's phrase "slouching towards Gomorrah," but that is the general idea. Totalitarianism, Hedges argues, not only looms for a society distracted from its civic obligations by shallow entertainments and corporate inducements; it becomes inevitable. We are Weimar Germany, and you can practically hear the goose-stepping down at the plaza.

I The Illusion of Literacy 1

II The Illusion of Love 55

III The Illusion of Wisdom 89

IV The Illusion of Happiness 115

V The Illusion of America 141

Notes 195

Acknowledgments 205

Bibliography 209

Index 217