“There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can’t read a simple sentence” (Hedges 44). In the excerpt from Empire of Illusion, author Chris Hedges emphasizes on the mechanisms used to make an illiterate America suffer. Political leaders only need a facade of honesty and sincerity, and “most off all they need a story, a personal narrative” (Hedges 48). This is one of the many cunning mechanisms propagated by television—a political leader’s ostensive story. Moreover, we are in a totalitarian system that compounds the personal narrative and pseudo-events on television artfully, such as reporting the political theater solely based on how well it beguiled our emotions. As a result, the lack of reading has been traded off for pseudo-events that have dramatized “productions orchestrated by publicists, political machines, [and] …show more content…
The deceitfulness of personal narratives and pseudo-events causes us to suffer, producing an egregiously illiterate culture with the inability to critically analyze and distinguish truth from fiction; and the only way to cure this epidemic is by reading more—utilizing technology as a benefactor and not a catalyst to their hidden agendas. First, Hedges cites how personal narratives and pseudo-events keep us indefinitely subservient to a hidden totalitarian system that desires only to uphold its power and authority. For example, personal narratives make us suffer because we neither seek nor want reality or honesty (Hedges 49). We suffer by becoming ignorant and distracted to the illusion of political theaters manufactured for the sole purpose of preserving the totalitarian system’s