Naomi Wolf on American Complacency | Big Think

Naomi Wolf on American Complacency

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Naomi Wolf diagnoses Americans with ‘depression.’

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Naomi Wolf:

Naomi Wolf is an author and essayist whose works have appeared in The New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Glamour, Ms., Esquire, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. She also speaks widely to groups across the country.

Her first book, The Beauty Myth, was an international bestseller. She followed it with Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change The 21st Century; Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood; Misconceptions, critique of pregnancy and birth in America; The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot; and Give me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

Wolf is also co-founder of the Board of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization devoted to training young women in ethical leadership for the 21st century. She is a graduate of Yale University and completed her graduate work at New College, Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Wolf: I guess I would use a word like passive or kind of hopeless and depressed. I mean, I see it much more like, it’s a psychological problem. I mean, the people I’ve met are depressed, you know. It’s not that they’re personally depressed. They are depressed about their relationship to power in this country. They feel, you know, all the hallmarks of depression, they feel hopeless, they feel like there’s no point in making effort, it will never get better and that guarantees inaction, you’re quite right. Well, we got to be this way partly to our fault and partly it’s their fault. I discovered when I researched “Give Me Liberty” that we really been subjected, not just the last eight years of this systemic shredding of the Constitution, but really the 30 years of a quite sustained propaganda effort from vested interests who are very well served by citizens giving up on the process to kind of brainwash us into believing that our scope for action as citizen is this big, like, all we are expected to do is vote, maybe send an e-mail to our representative, rather than maintaining and understanding among us that it’s our job to lead the country. And there are many ways this has been done. I mean, one way is this messaging that began with the Reagan years that this system is broken and there’s so much messaging that the system is broken and almost no messaging about how to engage with this system to fix it that understandably people walk away from their sit at the table. I mean, I hear from many, many young people, there’s no point, you know, there’s no point, it’s rigged, it doesn’t matter. I hope people who have read “Give Me Liberty” understand how much every single voter and active citizen matters, but it serves the powers to be for us to say, well, you know, I’m not going to participate. It serves them. Because they maintain control over the decision making process in the outcome.