Chris Hedge’s Essay — “Pathology of the Rich White Family” — Will Reward with a Defensible Slant on Truth — but You Will Need a Strong Stomach and an Open Mind to Get through It

© 2015 Peter Free

 

18 May 2015

 

 

Can a couple of hard shots to our snoozing perspectives be a good thing?

 

Journalist (and former seminarian) Chris Hedges’ undiplomatic directness strengthens his apparent clarity of purpose and challenges those averse to his thinking:

 

 

Starting at age 10 as a scholarship student at an elite New England boarding school, I was forced to make a study of the pathology of rich white families.

 

Years later, by choice, I moved to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood when I was a seminary student. I lived across the street from one of the poorest housing projects in the city, and I ran a small church in the inner city for nearly three years. I already had a deep distaste for rich white families, and that increased greatly after I saw what they did to the disenfranchised.

 

Rich white people, I concluded after my childhood and Roxbury experiences, are sociopaths.

 

Michael Kraus, Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner [see here], social scientists at the University of California, did research that led them to conclude that the poor have more empathy than the rich.

 

The poor, they argued, do not have the ability to dominate their environments. They must build relationships with others to survive. This requires that they be able to read the emotions of those around them and respond. It demands that they look after each other. And this makes them more empathetic.

 

The rich, who can control their environments, do not need to bother with the concerns or emotions of others. They are in charge. What they want gets done. And the longer they live at the center of their own universe, the more callous, insensitive and cruel they become.

 

The rich white family has an unrivaled aptitude for crime. Members of rich white families run corporations into the ground (think Lehman Brothers), defraud stockholders and investors, sell toxic mortgages as gold-plated investments to pension funds, communities and schools, and then loot the U.S. Treasury when the whole thing implodes. They steal hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street through fraud and theft, pay little or no taxes, almost never go to jail, write laws and regulations that legalize their crimes and then are asked to become trustees at elite universities and sit on corporate boards. They set up foundations and are admired as philanthropists. And if they get into legal trouble, they have high-priced lawyers and connections among the political elites to get them out.

 

© 2015 Chris Hedges, The Pathology of the Rich White Family, TruthDig (17 May 2015) (extracts)

 

 

It is difficult to argue persuasively with Hedges’ thesis, when cognizant of the sum of societal evidence

 

My personal experience, on average, also bears him out.

 

 

Sociopaths?

 

I suspect that anyone who substitutes the purely personal for the diluting and larger interests of the community tends to go off in sociopathic directions. That, after all, is what the definition of sociopath broadly means, even though we do not usually think of it quite that way.

 

Evolutionarily, we tend to look out for ourselves and for those who carry our genes at the expense of everyone else. It is not surprising — especially in these times of arguably far too many people on the planet — that this evolutionary tendency might demonstrate noticeably anti-community characteristics. Especially so when some of us have the dominating financial means to thrust the rest aside.

 

 

The moral? — I quote Hedges as motivation to think more deeply than we do about Society’s chosen and byproduct purposes

 

Today in the United States, there is a notable absence of clear thinking about anything that has to do with social foundations. We have reduced ourselves to shouting vacuous clichés and fighting over equally silly trigger phrases.

 

In this Tempest of Triviality, we are unable to link facts, phenomena and causation — much less pose potentially workable alternatives to where we have been and where we are drifting.

 

Chris Hedges is angry because his perspective is spiritual and social. Where we are is neither.