Hedges Summary In Chris Hedges “Empire of Illusion”, he suggests that society no longer values the truth and prefer fantasy to reality. Hedges believes America is converting to a totalitarian system, a system of complete subservience due to illiteracy and begins with propaganda movements. People no longer ask questions or seek out what is true, but rather live in a state of an uncomplicated fantasy with emotions and performance as a basis of “truth”. Illiteracy flourishes in North America with fifty-million people able to read at just a fourth or fifth grade level. One-third of North Americans are illiterate or barely literate, most of whom have not picked up a book since graduating high school. The thinking of most Americans must be “why read when one can watch TV”. According to …show more content…
One can then assume Americans gather much of their information from TV. The information is presented in “...familiar, comforting clichés and exciting images” (45) while viewers are lured in by celebrities that give a “...false sense of intimacy...”(45). It is the celebrities, news anchors, and politicians that bombard their audience with images, emotion, and speak in a language suitable for children. Mass media has become full of predictability, repetition, and bias. Instead of watching for content and truthfulness, viewers seek out the shows that have awesome images, arouse emotion, give a false sense of security, and take them far away from reality. Americans have placed celebrities on the highest pedestal because they enjoy the pseudo-dramas they present. Politicians have found that if they acted more like their celebrity counterparts, they gain votes. Hedges remarked that the grade level of vocabulary used by politicians have dropped from a high school graduate in Abraham Lincoln’s election to a meager sixth and seventh grade level. Politicians were meant to be voted by the people based on the politician’s honesty and