Chris Hedges is one of the most thought provoking critics writing today. His weekly column on truthdig is one that I rarely miss.

Here’s some thoughts on the culture of self, from Hedges’ book “The Empire of Illusion”:

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and welth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”

“Words of synthesis summarizing a synthesis of affects: that is the miracle of the ‘psychological label.’ In effect this is the only language in which the objects speak to us, the only one it has invented. Yet, this basic lexicon, which covers walls and haunts consciousnesses, is strictly asyntactic: diverse brands follow one another, are juxtaposed and substituted for one another without an articulation or transition. It is an erratic lexicon where one brand devours the other, each living for its own endless repetition. This is undoubtedly the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. It is a language of signals. And the ‘loyalty’ to a brand name is nothing more than the conditioned reflex of a controlled affect.”

—Jean Baudrillard (1968)

“Bauldrillard effectively shows that a semiological analysis reveals that consumer objects constitute a system of signs that differentiate the population. This system of signs cannot become intelligible if each sign is related to each object, but only through the play of difference between the signs…he indicates how consumer objects are like hysterical symptoms; they are best understood not as a response to a specific need or problem but as a network of floating signifiers that are inexhaustible in their ability to incite desire…Bauldrillard goes on to argue that the reproduction of the mode of production has become dependent upon the expansion of consumption, on the reproduction of the act of consumption, thus inaugurating a new epoch in the history of capitalism.”