The Trivial and the Banal

An excerpt from the third chapter of I Don't Believe in Atheists by Chris Hedges.

James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, spoke of the "old triumvirate of tyrants in the human soul, the libido sciendi, the libido sentiendi, and the libido dominandi" [The lust of the mind, the lust of the flesh and the lust for power]. Adams, who worked with the anti-Nazi church leader Dietrich Bonhoeffer in 1935 and 1936 in Germany, warned us that these lusts are universal and intractable. They lurk beneath the surface of the most refined cultures and civilizations. "We may call these tendencies by any name we wish," he said, "but we do not escape their destructive influence by a conspiracy of silence concerning them."

The belief that science or religion can eradicate these lusts leads to the worship of human potential and human power. These lusts are woven into our genetic map. We can ameliorate them, but they are always with us; we will never ultimately defeat them. The attempt to deny the lusts within us empowers this triumvirate. They surface, unexamined and unheeded, to commit evil in the name of good. We are not saved by reason. We are not saved by religion. We are saved by turning away from projects that tempt us to become God, and by accepting our own contamination and the limitations of being human.

The belief in moral advancement implicitly calls on us to ignore the common good and place our faith in the empowerment of the state. It teaches that everything should be dedicated to private gain. The corporate state – the engine, we are assured, of our great moral progress - instructs us on how to view the world. Corporatism is about placing our faith in unchecked corporate advancement, as well as in the neutral disciplines of science and technology. The effect on the individual in the emergent corporate state is a kind of numbing acceptance of our political, economic and social disempowerment. We give over our rights as citizens because we are taught to believe these forces will lead us to utopia. There is, as John Ralston Saul wrote, a passivity and conformity "in those areas which matter and nonconformism in those which don't." We view the status quo as an unadulterated good. We are assured it is leading us to a wonderful and glorious future. We do not question. We are left to seek our individuality and our identity in the trivial and the banal.