By Chris Hedges
Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges discussed “the psychology of the super rich: their sense of entitlement, the dehumanization of workers, and mistaken belief that their wealth will insulate them from the coming storms” with The Real News Network’s senior editor, Paul Jay.
Of the conditions that shape the thinking and values of the rich, Hedges said:
“The rich are different, because when you have that much money, then human beings become disposable. Even friends and family become disposable and are replaced. And when the rich take absolute power, then the citizens become disposable, which is in essence what’s happened. There is a very callous indifference.”I mean, these people — and C. Wright Mills wrote about this in ‘The Power Elite’ — they’re utterly cut off. I mean, the only people they ever meet who are members of the working class are people who work for them — their gardeners or their chauffeurs. They live in self-encased bubbles. They have no real contact with reality. I mean, they don’t even fly on commercial airlines. And yet they have absolute power.
“Now, that becomes very dangerous politically because they’re so out of touch and they are able to retreat into their enclaves in the same way that you saw in France under Louis XVI, people retreating to Versailles, or the end of the Chinese dynasty when everybody went to the Forbidden City.”
Read a full transcript of the exchange here .
ABOUT CHRIS HEDGES
Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.
Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges’ original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009, and granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay “One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.”
