Inverted totalitarianism
Chris Hedges: Well, Sheldon Wolin, the great political philosopher who taught at Berkeley and later Princeton, now 86, has written his sort of magnum opus called, “Democracy Incorporated.” And he argues that we live in a system that he calls inverted totalitarianism. The classical totalitarianism, in classical totalitarianism, like fascism or communism, economics is always subordinate to politics. But in inverted totalitarianism, politics is subordinate to economics. And with a rise of the consumer society, with the commodification of everything, including human beings and natural resources, you have built into it a form, an inevitable form of self annihilation. Because nothing has intrinsic value when society is no longer recognized as sacred. You exhaust everything for their, for its ability to make money. No matter how much human misery you create, no matter how much you go, how far you go to destroy the ecosystem that is sustaining the human species. And that with the rise of celebrity culture, of consumer culture, and on federate capitalism, you get what Benjamin Demott has called, I think quite correctly, junk politics.
From: Interview with Chris Hedges by Hartman