Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

From a bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a scathing polemic against the spectacle-obsessed culture that has taken over American life.

“A trenchantly argued critique of the near-destruction of the American Dream by unfettered capitalism.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

An instant bestseller, Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion is one of the most striking and unsettling explorations of illusion and fantasy in contemporary American culture.

Traveling to the ringside of professional wrestling bouts at Madison Square Garden, to a pornography convention in Las Vegas, and to academic conferences held by positive psychologists—who claim to be able to engineer happiness—Hedges chronicles the encroachment of artifice and propaganda in all corners of American life. He exposes the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, environmental, political, and moral collapse around us.

A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies, Hedges argues, and we are dying now.