For anyone frustrated with the long preamble, Hedges comes on at 16 minutes.

Love Chris Hedges an American that isn't constantly wittering and twittering psuedo happiness - a true realist

I wish the audio quality matched the video quality :)

You have a choice - you can be a rebel or remain a slave.

I cry for this country and what it’s done to it’s earlier inhabitants. I cry for Mother Earth and what we’ve done.

Reading the comments on Chris Hedges videos discloses such a vortex of conflicting opinions, I have to say. Reading the Truthdig comments on Hedges' weekly columns there tends to make me actually wonder if some secret organization is paying people to degrade the tone of discussion in that section. I find him to be one of the most inspiring speakers, though, and I'm not alone.

"The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice." Emma Goldman

What's really depressing is that this is from 2013. Shit's gotten waaaaaayyy worse since then. We are witnessing the collapse of the most advanced civilization ever, in real-time, on twitter, facebook & Co. It will take thousands of years to rebuild anything close to our current societal level of complexity with almost all our easily accessible dense sources of energy depleted.

15:30 of preamble babble before the man steps up

one of the most brilliant speeches i have ever heard. his notion of "sublime madness" is a call for life, made by people crippled by the system. listen, absorb, subscribe to the words and vision of this visionary who sings the only song of liberation left ..

Psuedo, fascist, Christian, right. My god, did Chris Hedges ever hit "the nail" squarely on the head! "Along came a spider ....."

Hedges begins at 15:15

0:00:01 Trevor Harrison, Director of Parkland Institute -- Intro 0:04:20 Dr. Leslie Cormack, Dean of Arts, University of Alberta 0:09:30 Trevor Harrison, Director of Parkland Institute 0:15:48 Chris Hedges -- Speech 1:11:00 Chris Hedges -- Q&A

speech starts at 16:30 , the beginning is all fluff.

Dear Mr. Hedges. I have long understood Economics better than I have literature. Thank you. so many English professors have attempted to explain "Moby Dick" to me, I get it now, thanks. I never saw it in these terms before.

Seven years later, listen starting @ 1:37. At i:42, he perfectly describes our current situation.

The elephant in the room that nobody is addressing is the 800 TRILLION in outstanding derivatives. Global GDP is around 70 trillion per year. This means either the Fed or money center banks or both, are leveraged to the tune of 10 years of global GDP. This can only end one way - very, very badly.

Steven Pinker's cultists should watch this.

Like the way Chris describes our present social system and how in our economic system everything becomes a commodity ie human beings and the natural world exploited to the point of exhaustion or destruction

“I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.”

Chris Hedges 15:58 "I love titles like that..."

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

And now the wheels of heaven stop You feel the devil's riding crop Get ready for the future It is murder -Leonard Cohen

That was one of the most important speeches I have ever heard 🙏🏻

16:00 start of conference

Thank you for uploading and sharing.

Christopher explains in a previous lecture the flaw of a pessimistic/optimistic dichotomy. I see this in how we constantly count our eggs before they hatch. where a disconnect exists between current problems today and purported technologies that are supposed to fix those problems in some vaguely outlined future. These speculations are fueled by billionaires that decide where we, as a species, choose to invest the capital of our society. The problem is, as we have seen in the Theranos debacle, they are easily swayed by a black turtleneck and can't be bothered to go ask any medical technologist or pathologist the physical limitations at play in our technologies.

why oh why are all these aulas utterly plagued bv such inept sound system incompetence. how hard can it be to delegate resposability to to make these bloody things work

He predicted the January 6, 2021 riot at 1:42:15

I love Chris but it was hard to listen to with such poor audio

hedges has simply combined the ideas of JOSEPH TAINTER & JOHN MICHAEL GREER;if you like this,check them out

When people en masse absorb what this guy is talking about: Goodbye Blue Monday.

Love Chris

Hedges Rocks

Is there better audio that can be edited into this video?

"The American people are mine now. They can't leave our elite ideologies: entertainment, fast food and America is the greatest countryon planet." Ahab.

People need to go back to living on small farms and selling or trading locally, protecting the family and their communities. If we cut a tree, plant 3, if we eat a fruit, plant it's seeds, take some, but leave some for others. Our way of life is not lived within the laws of the planet.

Technology! Solving today's problems, by creating Tomorrow's!

15:55 Chris Hedges

01:38:00 occupy leaders still being hounded by authorities?

The talk doesn't start until 15:45

16:00 SPEECH START

A Prophet. He speaks to my, our condition.

He dimed this. 10 flawless unique yet very familiar a decent man with a brain. How few r left

Progress isn't a myth, but a process with biological limits. That it can end in some kind of condition that is satisfactory to all, and that goes on forever, or at least for geological time-scales, is the myth. Every educated person knows that. So the question isn't just how much is possible, and how sustainable is some degree of it, but how much of it is satisfactory and to whom? Even with the best possible government and culture underlying it, there comes a point at which people, quite sensibly, slack off and enjoy what they've got, because they don't want more. This happens whether or not they attain awareness of their own mortality and that of the human species. In preference to whom Hedges quotes, I like Aristophanes' "At last one gets enough of sunsets, cabbages, and love." Anyone born with the wit to make sense of the world in all its biological complexity, civilizations included, sees what Aristophanes did as a child when looking at adults, but especially at their own parents. That most people aren't born with enough wit to see that is what makes the human species, as a whole, self-destructive as Ahab and others who, dissatisfied with themselves, turn destructive to others and themselves when their circumstances are more fortunate than others'. That's what tyranny is all about, in the defining sense. The tyrant achieves or is born to wealth and power, but is still the same miserable bastard or bitch he or she always was or would have been in any case. Montaigne put it this way, "On the highest throne in the world, we're still sitting on our own rump." This should not be cause for misanthropy, but for skepticism of the motives of anyone who from a place of comfort, further afflicts the already uncomfortable with their conduct, under the claim that it's for the sake of progress, or their own good, or some combination thereof, or with the excuse that achievement is increased by adding hindrances to the already existing ones. Not everyone is a sadomasochist, but unfortunately for the rest of us, most people essentially are: Luxury isn't what sates them, but ruin is, especially the spectacle of someone else's ruin. That is what makes tragedy in theater and music so enjoyable to most people, and comedy in theater and music the mainstay of people who are more benign than most. Lyric, joyful music in particular, or poetry celebrative in tone, is what happens when the best of both worlds meet, when the comically inclined, capable of happiness, are happy in the comfortable circumstances that agree with them. Hedges is evidently aware of all of that, but is only foolishly consistent in the inconsistency with which he deploys his terms, and in some of his observations of the ruling class. Most of them are trolls, but aren't most people of any class also predominantly trollish? Like everything else, it comes in degrees, and isn't particularly selective according to the class you're born into. This does not invalidate his critique or his predictions of global catastrophe, but it does make them overly pessimistic when it comes to time scales and degree of damage to the biosphere. He gives civilization only decades, and the human species, scraping by like a paltry few rats amid the ruins left behind by self-slaughtered billions, perhaps a further century or two, as the greenhouse effect runs away past the point of no return to equilibrium, which ends all life on Earth. My own view is that we have at least a century or two more of civilization, then collapse and extinction of the human species over the course of a couple of millennia, as the climate swings to conditions inhospitable to us, but not far enough to go past the tipping-point fatal to all life. A million years hence the world will be pretty much as it was a million years ago, though so much reduced in biodiversity, especially of big and complex organisms, that sentience will more than likely never evolve on it again. The planet will be alive but unconscious, and the tiny portion of all our artifacts that have not escaped obliteration will remain undiscovered by any creature capable of interpreting them. On the whole I agree with Hedges, and appreciate his intellectual rigor, honesty, and humane decency, but differ with him only in emphasis because, dread as I do what is to come that is beyond my power to alter, I've been more fortunate than he has, and am more worn out from what I've enjoyed than what I've endured, and wish only for a little more time and quiet to reflect on both as darkness gathers, in the process of slowing its fall.

a modern day Boethius only the fall of Rome wasn't as bad as our fall is going to be.

Around 40:00 starts talking about how to revolt, before it mostly talks about how we are marching towards our own self destruction (which most of us already know)

Two speeches stretched out in to one overly long. However, who else speaks the truth so clearly.

The Hedges talk begins here 16:02 anything prior to that is drivel.

go chris

1. The reverb in the echo chamber is just too much for us w/ even mild attentional or intellectual disabilities. 2. The momentous content is overwhelmed by a) the momentous failure to edit it both for excessive length (without the loss of a single meaningful point, eg, redundancy being the surplus waste resulting from failure to finish the task) and b) failure to structure the content to the ordinary rhythm & cadence humans evolved with before the introduction & primacy of the written word, ie, during our thousands of years under oral traditions. The man is brilliant. I have listened to this twice. I follow the narratives & the concepts as he goes, but find in the end when it’s over that I don’t carry away as much as I would want. This is a 1st draft w/ -0- edits. I cannot go to an editing process because, when I finished it, it would be a speech about half as long as his that might include - - a discussion of what was lost of “prehistoric” humans’ benefits from living orally in small groups in the “state of nature”, unhindered by the tyranny of “Civilization and its Discontents” - the tyranny of being governed by the writings of dead men in the service of a small group of live ones; - that history is just a succession of stories largely based on the arbitrary conditions in place as each story plays out, eg, had the US not committed mercantile aggression against the feudal Japanese empire in 1854, Japan would not have rapidly industrialized, militarized, and, by 1905 obliterated the Russian Navy, defeated the Russian empire, triggered the 1905 Russian revolution, and so thoroughly weakened them that they were unable to deter Germany from starting WWI. So, no US empire, no rudely-awakened Japan, no disabling of the Russian empire, no WWI, no Russian revolutions 1905-1917, no war USSR, no Holodomar, a phase-out begun of the 4-5 empires w/ global reach, a peaceful European balance of power as industrialization spread to the Urals, and in Asia, much less likelihood of the 60-yr continental terror wrought by Japan, and everywhere, no nuclear weapons… (The previous fantasy was brought to you by the “NOT US empire” that courtesy of US Gen. Curtis LeMay in WWII introduced napalm and civilian bombing campaigns that killed a million or so civilians in Europe & Japan, an innovation so successful that civilian bombing campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos & Thailand killed several million more civilians by the mid-70s. (A British MI-6 analyst stationed in Korea observed that in the whole of N. Korea, when LeMay was finished, there was not a single building or structure of any significant size left standing. He was so horrified that he defected to the Soviet Union.)

Amen ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

So what is the solution to our problems?

why are the humanitarian intellectuals not leading the world..I mean, truly leading the world? why are not the Chomskys and Hedges' not in the White House or even leading the business world? I suppose they are simply outnumbered by status quo leaders and commoners. How do we get these people up front and center stage, not in academia and in public libraries but in the political and economic roles where true change can be made? let us ponder this, let us critically think up a strategy to get these guys into the right roles...the roles that rightfully belong to them!

The sound guy needed to adjust the gain/fader and eq

We are Hamlet. All we can do is condemn those who have already murdered us with poison.

Rigorous debate in canadian universities is now an arid environment.

Oy, the audio.

Ive been down so long lord, down so long, dont worry mee. 1:01:01

Most of the world is ASLEEP.

54:31 uhhh, ok I was with you until now But the apparent contradiction of "the Christian right is bonkers lul" mentioned at the beginning and the positive reading of black Christian expierience was the early warning sign

Thank you Chris Hedges, and everyone who made this possible.

Please excuse my typo below. I meant "addiction".

Do not worry we are the CSIS bldg because it is the only one they did not bother to bug.

Chris @ 15:52

I sure like Chris Hedges, but the audio on this was intolerable and I was unable to listen to it.

One reason to regret the mass extinction of sea life is that many new medicines, such as pain killers, come from animals in the sea such as sea snakes and snails. They could yield painkillers without addition. But that won't happen if we allow the ruin of our seas.

a realist with a penchant for Utopia

Skip the intros, guys. 16 minutes is way overdoing it.

Better to suffer wrong than to do wrong

16:00

I'm glad I didn't have to pay for this speech. I want to know more about the subject not a reading of the book Moby Dick if I want that I'll read the book myself.

wow!!!!!!1

15:55 Heges starts speaking

Truth is the only genuine 'authority'.. spaceandmotion

Starts at 15:50 (!!!)

We have to choose either will rebellion or slaves to

lousy audio...

A great presentation but awful audio.

Skip to 16:00 for Hedges

Being 70, learning, understanding, observation, re-examination and experience 247 365. Deindustrialisation or the technological evolution of meta- industrialisation in this 21st century that really began in the 1940's and has its roots in ww2. Shifting across continents in the pursuit of hegemonic dominance enforced by the perpetual phenomena that is at the core of all goals in life at all levels, defined as 'conflicts of interests', a perpetually unbalanced human condition. Natural......a global collective of innocently ignorant individuals ..... What can one do about it? Answers will differ I suspect, but doesn't that mean .....hmm. Love always

The introduction is useful. Introduces mustn’t be near the 🎤

I tire of all the congratulations and thank you preliminaries on and on -

15:57

if you can set aside your bias, you've done good work. If you can't you've done nothing.

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Why is Hedges one of 3 humans left who vehemently deny that Ralph Nader cost the Dems the presidency?

▶ The Myth of Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies - Chris Hedges: ukposts.info/have/v-deo/f5-lh4SubalnqHk.html ~Pub Dec 13, 2013 via Parkland Institute GOTO 15:50 ++++ ▶ Connect @Peta_de_Aztlan ++++

I am one of those persons BIG TIME

What power does America think it has?

15:37 for content

i love the lady at 1:27:30

Hedges comes on at 21 minutes, after the time-traveller from 1978.

A fish rots from the head down.

We don't get Chris 'til the 16:00m mark ...

He cares.

Radicals need a moment of crisis

Wow. Stunningly prescient considering what’s been going on since this talk- in the US, in Canada, the world. His answer to the last question predicted T**** and todays Republican Party.

7 yrs old just found it today. Chomskys so old. Hedges is less yet is better because he knows he's not noam. Hedges reminds me of william shirer reincarnated. I count hedges snowden chomsky has hero's true americans. Not baseball uncle sam gi joe. Or sergeant shoots. The hoardes if guided this way would be helpful n as likely as a handshakes on the eastern front of the second germany vs the world things. The courage n moral of those folks r needed now and there is nothing of those achieved left. Nothing.

Bring back the Wobblies