Guest column by Chris Hedges
The most profound realities of human existence are often those that can never be measured or quantified. Wisdom. Beauty. Truth. Compassion. Courage. Love. Loneliness. Grief. The struggle to face our own mortality. A life of meaning.
But perhaps the greatest conundrum is the concept of a soul. Do we have a soul? Do societies have souls? And, most basically, what is a soul?
Philosophers and theologians have all grappled with the concept of a soul. Some define the mystical force within us as will. Sigmund Freud used the Greek word psyche. But most have accepted, whatever the definition, some version of a soul’s existence.
While the concept of the soul is opaque, soullessness is not. Soullessness means something inside of us is dead. Basic human feelings and connections are shut down. Those without souls lack empathy. Soullessness is often seen in war, where leaders, so calcified inside, kill without any demonstrable feeling or remorse.
The soulless exist in a state of insatiable self-worship. The idol they have erected to themselves must be constantly fed. It demands a never-ending stream of victims. It demands abject obedience and subservience, publicly on display at Trump cabinet meetings.
Psychologists, I expect, would define the soulless as psychopathic.
I write this not to get into an esoteric debate about the soul, but to warn what happens when those without souls seize power. I want to write about what is lost and the consequences of that loss. I want to caution you that death, our death — as individuals and as a collective — means nothing to those without souls.
This makes the soulless very, very dangerous.
Those who lack souls have no concept of their own limitations. They feed off a bottomless and self-delusional optimism, giving to their cruellest deeds and bitterest defeats, the lustre of goodness, success and morality.
Those without souls — as Paul Woodruff writes in his small masterpiece Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue — do not have the capacity for reverence, awe, respect and shame. They believe they are gods.
The soulless cannot respond rationally to reality. They live in self-constructed echo chambers. They hear only their own voice.
Civic, familial, legal and religious rituals and ceremonies that transport those with souls into the realm of the sacred, into a space where we acknowledge our shared humanity, forcing us, at least for a moment, to humble ourselves, are meaningless to those without souls.
Those without souls cannot see because they cannot feel.
The soulless, enslaved by narcissism, greed, a lust for power and hedonism, cannot make moral choices. Moral choices for them do not exist. Truth and falsehoods are identical. Life is transactional. Is it good for me? Does it make me feel omnipotent? Does it give me pleasure? This stunted existence banishes them from the moral universe.
Human beings, including children, are commodities to the soulless, objects to exploit for pleasure or profit or both. We saw this soullessness displayed in the Epstein Files. And it was not only Epstein. Huge sections of our ruling class, including billionaires, Wall Street financiers, university presidents, philanthropists, celebrities, Republicans, Democrats and media personalities, consider us worthless.
Reverence is not a religious virtue but a moral virtue. Some define it as a political virtue. Reverence for shared ideals is the only thing that can bind us together.
It is the only attribute that ensures mutual trust. Reverence allows us to remember what it means to be human. It reminds us that there are forces we cannot control, forces that we will never understand, forces of life that we did not create and must honour and protect — including the natural world — and forces that allow us moments of transcendence, or, in religious terms, what we call grace.
If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs; pray instead that all may be reverent.
Trump’s celebration of himself is made manifest in his stunted vocabulary of superlatives and his rebranding of national monuments.
He tears down the East Wing to construct his gaudy and oversized $400 million ballroom. He proposes a 250-foot-tall memorial arch, adorned with gilded statues and eagles, in his honour.
He is planning a “National Garden of American Heroes” that will include life-size statues of celebrities, sports figures, and political and artistic figures deemed politically correct by Trump, along with, of course, himself.
His face adorns the sides of federal buildings on huge, well-lit banners. He changed the name of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts.
He added his name to the headquarters of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has announced a new fleet of U.S. naval vessels called Trump-class battleships.
These are monuments not only to Trump, but to a perverted ethic, to the insatiable self-worship that defines the inner void of the soulless.
Monuments, houses of worship and national shrines dedicated to justice, self-sacrifice and equality, which demand from us humility and introspection, which require the capacity for reverence, mystify the soulless.
The soulless have no sense of aesthetics. They have no sense of balance, symmetry and proportion. The bigger, the gaudier the better. They seek to shut out everything and everyone else.
When the soulless wage war, it is part of this perverted drive to build a monument to themselves. When war goes badly, as it is going in Iran, the soulless, unable to read reality, demand greater levels of violence and destruction. The more they fail, the more convinced they are that everyone has betrayed them, and the more they descend into a tyrannical rage.
Trump, potentially facing a humiliating debacle in Iran, will lash out like a wounded beast. It does not matter how many suffer and die. It does not matter what weapons, including nuclear weapons, must be employed. He must triumph, or at least appear to triumph.
“Fathers and teachers, I ponder, ‘What is hell?’” Father Zossima asks in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
This is the plight of the soulless. They seek, in their misery, to make their hell our own.
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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