Comments on: Chris Hedges at Starr King

By: financial literacy month

financial literacy month — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:40:00 +0000

Monetary literacy is such an important skill to show the youth. It is a shame that they don’t teach it in schools.

By: Rick

Rick — Mon, 25 May 2009 13:42:58 +0000

Dave–beautiful commentary. I have seen this absolutist-purist aversion to power before (mostly among my New Age friends!), and it has always scared, worried and depressed me. I’m just surprised to hear that Chris Hedges thinks this way.

I’ve always seen Chris as wonderfully exemplifying what Tikkun does best: combining cultural-spiritual with political concerns. But the one thing that I think many ‘religions’ or ‘spiritualities’ get really wrong is that absolutist aversion to political power, exactly for the reasons you mention. Many religious people sometimes have this sense that moral goodness can be found only in ‘the individual’ and that the processes of human institutional life are an *inevitable* corruption of the foundational goodness of which only the human heart is capable.

But social institutions can hold, elaborate, articulate, manifest (and even magnify!) the goodness in the human heart in a beautiful way! They — and the power they wield — can even temper the raging best in the human heart. That’s what politics is all about.

By: Dave Belden

Dave Belden — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:45:16 +0000

John, these are great points and I agree that all kinds of things go wrong with institutions. We need a sort of sociological taxonomy of things typically go wrong with religious and social change movements, so that we who start them or join them are alerted to the pitfalls, and are trained in ways to counteract them.

I love the story about how some aircraft accidents were analyzed as resulting from pilot error, and from the overly deferential behavior of copilots, who saw the error but did not speak up enough, and so lost their lives; and this led to specific training for copilots in how to stand up to authority and, in a real sense, speak truth to power.

We just need equivalent analysis and training in all aspects of running organizations: it’s a huge task, but much of it has been developed and is part of our culture already. It’s just that we have a long way to go. It’s the awareness of the failings of institutions that enables us to make corrections in them.

By: john suter

john suter — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:55:07 +0000

I tend to agree with Chris Hedges about institutions, which are really only organizations made by humans. It makes one feel insignificant to think that an institution might possibly outlive its founders and then become something entirely different. I think too that those people who have a vision to start a movement or an institution are the only ones who really feel the vision. Those that follow are less pure, if you will, and many will leave the institution or the movement if they do not receive enough salary. Those who surround the leader are often there because it is a place of power and they are the ones that chase away the children (“suffer the children to come unto me”). They are children too and don’t have the faith or understanding of the leader in that group. Much of it is driven by our fear and need to feel as though we can control what happens to us. The drive for control, however, makes many people simply drag their feet. They feel that is the only mode available to exert themselves.

By: Alana Y. Price

Alana Y. Price — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:43:34 +0000

What a futuristic picture of Chris Hedges — it looks like he’s being beamed down from a starship! I think you are right to be wary of discourses that identify moral purity as the goal. Discourses of purity lead too easily to situations in which people declare themselves the gatekeepers and paragons of goodness, thereby shielding themselves from calls to accountability. I’m much more excited about the idea of approaching institutions and individuals with the expectation that they will always be imperfect, they will never be truly moral. If we presume imperfection, we are more likely to open ourselves and our institutions to constructive scrutiny and redirection from each other and the community at large.