Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below
with Chris Hedges
Originally on RT America on Jul 28, 2018
The Chris Hedges YouTube Channel on Jul 6, 2022
Photographer and filmmaker, Lauren Greenfield, discusses the cult of self and its destructive qualities shown in her new film – Generation Wealth – with journalist Chris Hedges.
Generation Wealth – Official Trailer
Amazon Studios on Apr 4, 2018
For the past 25 years acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield (The Queen of Versailles, Thin, kids+money, #likeagirl) has traveled the world, documenting with ethnographic precision and an artist’s sensitivity a vast range of cultural movements and moments. Yet, after so much seeking and searching, she realized that much of her work pointed at one uniting phenomenon: wealth culture. With her new film, Generation Wealth, she puts the pieces of her life’s work together for in an incendiary investigation into the pathologies that have created the richest society the world has ever seen. Spanning consumerism, beauty, gender, body commodification, aging and more, Greenfield has created a comprehensive cautionary tale about a culture heading straight for the cliff’s edge. Generation Wealth, simultaneously a deeply personal journey, rigorous historical essay, and raucously entertaining expose, bears witness to the global boom-bust economy, the corrupted American Dream and the human costs of capitalism, narcissism and greed.
From the archives:
It Starts with the Lie that We’re Free by Shawn S. Grandstaff
Something Seems To Be Missing by Shawn S. Grandstaff
The Rich Are Only Rich If We Let Them Be by Dariel Garner
Chris Hedges and Richard Wolff: The Coming Collapse of the American Economic System
Inequality, Social Dysfunction and Misery by Graham Peebles
Revolt Against The Shallow Deadliness Of Our Corn Syrup Nation
Chris Hedges: The Power of Propaganda
Dandelion Salad 
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Golden words! Top of my to see list.
The perversion of desire and the fetish of contrived need, are the most insidious poisons in any sane society. Life is the opportunity to seek truth, and find it through the expression of the integrity one’s spirit.
Anything short of that, in my estimation, is a corrupting and corrupt fantasy. Disease indeed. Addiction is invariably a symptom of absence, a substitute for authenticity, & ‘existential’ meaning.
Economics as a necessary function like breathing, has been skyjacked by blatant imposture, escamotage ~ the iron lung of oppressive substitution; and politics….systematically polluted by greed ~ infested with the warped hallucinations of runaway self-aggrandizement.
Public voyeurism is certainly a degrading societal tendency, but viewing an intelligent film like this is the very antithesis of compulsive behaviour. Any form of voluntary participation in a genuine cultural experience is a commendable act. True art enlightens.
Conditioned vulgarity however, is altogether something else. Bravo, Lauren Greenfield!
Thanks, David. Great comment.
I agree, profit is a notion that has utterly lost its ethical meaning of just, legitimate gain (…ie ‘ecological’ or sustainable, yield.) It is more or less now a synonym for indiscriminate ‘plunder.’
Plunder, indeed.
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A great interview on the disease that is destroying this society and several others, but one important point seems to get left out, namely that the desire for ever more consumer commodities derives directly from the compulsion of every capitalist to increase profits in order to remain competitive. Thus an addiction to profit and hence capital tends to come to possess virtually every capitalist. Indeed it is a kind of “occupational hazard” of being in business under capitalism, even if it is usually not experienced as such. Since the most successful capitalists, the monopolist oligarchs, constitute the ruling class in this country, and “the ruling ideas [in any society] are the ideas of the ruling class,” as Marx succinctly put it, how could the capitalists’ drive for ever more production, profit, and capital not also saturate the non-capitalist in the society, who, among other things, are mostly daily indoctrinated into the culture of “ever more” through being subjected to constant “speed up” and pressure to produce ever more at their workplaces?
Great point, William, thanks for commenting.
My first comment was a response to William, Lo. Great post.
Glad you liked it, David.