Finding Freedom in Handcuffs

By Chris Hedges

Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, an activist, an author and a member of a
reporting team that won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize, wrote this article after he was
released from custody following his arrest last Thursday. He and about 15 other
participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement were detained as they protested
outside the global headquarters of Goldman Sachs in lower Manhattan.

Faces appeared to me moments before the New York City police arrested us
Thursday in front of Goldman Sachs. They were not the faces of the smug Goldman
Sachs employees, who peered at us through the revolving glass doors and lobby
windows, a pathetic collection of middle-aged fraternity and sorority members.
They were not the faces of the blue-uniformed police with their dangling cords
of white and black plastic handcuffs, or the thuggish Goldman Sachs security
personnel, whose buzz cuts and dead eyes reminded me of the East German secret
police, the Stasi. They were not the faces of the demonstrators around me, the
ones with massive student debts and no jobs, the ones whose broken dreams weigh
them down like a cross, the ones whose anger and betrayal triggered the street
demonstrations and occupations for justice. They were not the faces of the
onlookers—the construction workers, who seemed cheered by the march on Goldman
Sachs, or the suited businessmen who did not. They were faraway faces. They were
the faces of children dying. They were tiny, confused, bewildered faces I had
seen in the southern Sudan, Gaza and the slums of Brazzaville, Nairobi, Cairo
and Delhi and the wars I covered. They were faces with large, glassy eyes, above
bloated bellies. They were the small faces of children convulsed by the ravages
of starvation and disease.

I carry these faces. They do not leave me. I look at my own children and
cannot forget them, these other children who never had a chance. War brings with
it a host of horrors, including famine, but the worst is always the human
detritus that war and famine leave behind, the small, frail bodies whose tangled
limbs and vacant eyes condemn us all. The wealthy and the powerful, the ones
behind the glass at Goldman Sachs, laughed and snapped pictures of us as if we
were a brief and odd lunchtime diversion from commodities trading, from hoarding
and profit, from this collective sickness of money worship, as if we were
creatures in a cage, which in fact we soon were.

A glass tower filled with people carefully selected for the polish and
self-assurance that come with having been formed in institutions of privilege,
whose primary attributes are a lack of consciousness, a penchant for deception
and an incapacity for empathy or remorse. The curious onlookers behind the
windows and we, arms locked in a circle on the concrete outside, did not speak
the same language. Profit. Globalization. War. National security. These are the
words they use to justify the snuffing out of tiny lives, acts of radical evil.
Goldman Sachs’ commodities index is the most heavily traded in the world. Those
who trade it have, by buying up and hoarding commodities futures, doubled and
tripled the costs of wheat, rice and corn. Hundreds of millions of poor across
the globe are going hungry to feed this mania for profit. The technical jargon,
learned in business schools and on trading floors, effectively masks the reality
of what is happening—murder. These are words designed to make systems operate,
even systems of death, with a cold neutrality. Peace, love and all sane
affirmative speech in temples like Goldman Sachs are, as W.H. Auden understood, “soiled,
profaned, debased to a horrid mechanical screech.”

We seemed to have lost, at least until the advent of the Occupy Wall Street
movement, not only all personal responsibility but all capacity for personal
judgment. Corporate culture absolves all of responsibility. This is part of its
appeal. It relieves all from moral choice. There is an unequivocal acceptance of
ruling principles such as unregulated capitalism and globalization as a kind of
natural law. The steady march of corporate capitalism requires a passive
acceptance of new laws and demolished regulations, of bailouts in the trillions
of dollars and the systematic looting of public funds, of lies and deceit. The
corporate culture, epitomized by Goldman Sachs, has seeped into our classrooms,
our newsrooms, our entertainment systems and our consciousness. This corporate
culture has stripped us of the right to express ourselves outside of the
narrowly accepted confines of the established political order. It has turned us
into compliant consumers. We are forced to surrender our voice. These corporate
machines, like fraternities and sororities, also haze new recruits in company
rituals, force them to adopt an unrelenting cheerfulness, a childish optimism
and obsequiousness to authority. These corporate rituals, bolstered by retreats
and training seminars, by grueling days that sometimes end with initiates curled
up under their desks to sleep, ensure that only the most morally supine remain.
The strong and independent are weeded out early so only the unquestioning
advance upward. Corporate culture serves a faceless system. It is, as Hannah Arendt writes, “the
rule of nobody and for this very reason perhaps the least human and most cruel
form of rulership.”

Our political class, and its courtiers on the airwaves, insists that if we
refuse to comply, if we step outside of the Democratic Party, if we rebel, we
will make things worse. This game of accepting the lesser evil enables the
steady erosion of justice and corporate plundering. It enables corporations to
harvest the nation and finally the global economy, reconfiguring the world into
neofeudalism, one of masters and serfs. This game goes on until there is hardly
any action carried out by the power elite that is not a crime. It goes on until
corporate predators, who long ago decided the nation and the planet were not
worth salvaging, seize the last drops of wealth. It goes on until moral acts,
such as calling for those inside the corporate headquarters of Goldman Sachs to
be tried, see you jailed, and the crimes of financial fraud and perjury are
upheld as lawful and rewarded by the courts, the U.S. Treasury and the Congress.
And all this is done so a handful of rapacious, immoral plutocrats like Lloyd
Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs who sucks down about $250,000 a day and who
lied to the U.S. Congress as well as his investors and the public, can use their
dirty money to retreat into their own Forbidden City or Versailles while their
underlings, basking in the arrogance of power, snap amusing photos of the rabble
outside their gates being hauled away by the police and company goons.

It is vital that the occupation movements direct attention away from their
encampments and tent cities, beset with the usual problems of hastily formed
open societies where no one is turned away. Attention must be directed through
street protests, civil disobedience and occupations toward the institutions that
are carrying out the assaults against the 99 percent. Banks, insurance
companies, courts where families are being foreclosed from their homes, city
offices that put these homes up for auction, schools, libraries and firehouses
that are being closed, and corporations such as General Electric that funnel
taxpayer dollars into useless weapons systems and do not pay taxes, as well as
propaganda outlets such as the New York Post and its evil twin, Fox News, which
have unleashed a vicious propaganda war against us, all need to be targeted,
shut down and occupied. Goldman Sachs is the poster child of all that is wrong
with global capitalism, but there are many other companies whose degradation and
destruction of human life are no less egregious.

It is always the respectable classes, the polished Ivy League graduates, the
prep school boys and girls who grew up in Greenwich, Conn., or Short Hills,
N.J., who are the most susceptible to evil. To be intelligent, as many are at
least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable
citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,”
including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in
the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to
systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable
to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on
others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as
the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal
of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one
set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system
work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and
rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek
something else—a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If
justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search
they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong
than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally
defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It
refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life,
indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only
morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say “this is
wrong,” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.”

“The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never
given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them
back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving
in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing ourselves, so as
not to be swept away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple
temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it
has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep
over the whole world.”

There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up
around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign
correspondent. I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were
not and did not. The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug
mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They
are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to
fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors
of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last breaths had marked
my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call
for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps
across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me
in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me
choose sides. As the metal handcuffs were fastened around my wrists I thought of
them, as I often think of them, and I said to myself: “Free at last. Free at
last. Thank God almighty, I am free at last.”