AMERICA has been lying to itself, according to author Chris Hedges.

   A corporate-created commodity culture, he says, has created an “empire of illusion” that left the nation living a fantasy, living as children without the emotional depth to understand the problems it faces.

   ”The illusion,” he says, “is that we can continue to build massive deficits to sustain and expand our empire, as well as borrow to maintain previous levels of consumption. That’s over, but we haven’t faced it.”

   Mr. Hedges, a Princeton resident and author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, will be speaking at the Solebury School Dec. 4 as part of its Creative Thinkers series and will moderate a discussion with Ralph Nader at Labyrinth Books in Princeton Dec. 5.

   Mr. Hedges, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for coverage of terrorism in The New York Times and now writes a weekly column for Truthdig.com, spoke with TIMEOFF by phone about his new book.

   MacCleans, the Canadian newsweekly, calls Empire of Illusion a “Remarkable, bracing and highly moral... lament for his nation.”

   The book bemoans a national descent into celebrity culture and spectacle — represented by the worlds of professional wrestling and pornography — and an abandonment of the written word that has left far too many of us susceptible to the fantasies created for us by corporations. The fantasies, he says, affect every aspect of our political life — including our campaigns for political office.

   ”Campaigns are built around personal narratives and are not about issues,” he says. “We are skillfully made to feel and then to confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.”

   And the political press is part of the process of illusion-building, he says, reducing the coverage of campaigns “to the coverage of the stagecraft.

   ”The question is, ‘How successful are candidates at selling themselves to the public,’” he says. “And pundits will criticize candidates who are not successful, who are not able to construct an artifice.

   ”That’s symptomatic of a culture that has severed itself from print and relies on images and confuses propaganda with ideology,” Mr. Hedges continues.

   That has left our cultural and intellectual growth stunted.

   ”Everybody communicates in the idiom of popular culture using the vocabulary of a sixth-grader,” he says. “The medium of television makes it impossible to communicate on a higher level.”

   Corporate forces control debate, define the parameters of the argument and “establish illusions that are conducive toward profit.” He points to the healthcare debate as an example.

   ”Any real debate about health care would acknowledge that the for-profit healthcare industry is the problem and must be destroyed,” he says. “The industry’s influence constrains the debate.”

   The same goes for the fall 2008 bank bailout, which was imposed on an angry public because the powerful financial firms wanted it and the Washington elite viewed propping up the financial industry as “good for the economy.” The “accepted wisdom,” Mr. Hedges says, is that the financial sector drives the economy and that bailing out financial firms “will allow us to borrow our way back to a bubble economy.”

   The United States “no longer exists in a state of capitalism,” he says. “We exist in a state of corporate socialism. But (the financial elite) is so inept, they are destroying the socialism that is trying to save them. We have a bankrupt elite, a criminal class that runs Wall Street.”

   It is part of a larger illusion, Mr. Hedges says, one that allows us to think “we can continue to build massive deficits to sustain and expand our empire, as well as borrowing to maintain previous levels of consumption.

   ”That’s over, but we haven’t faced it,” he says.

   And that’s the danger, that we “believe reality is never an impediment to what we want, but as the gap opens up between that illusion and the reality of what is happening to us, we are not prepared intellectually, psychologically or emotionally to deal with it.”

   The bailout money may have prevented the economy from failing completely, Mr. Hedges says, but “we have just postponed collapse and, when we have to face it, we’ll be bankrupt and we won’t be able to respond.

   ”When these illusions are not shattered and you make decisions based on the illusions you commit collective suicide as a society, which is what we are doing,” he continues.

   We are facing what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, author of Politics and Vision and a professor emeritus at Princeton University, called “inverted totalitarianism,” Mr. Hedges says. In a February column for truthdig.com, Mr. Hedges described the concept as “find(ing) its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state.”

   Profit controls everything, he says.

   ”In inverted totalitarianism, economics always trumps politics,” Mr. Hedges says. “And it brings with it different forms of ruthlessness. If we don’t rest the centers of power back from corporate hands, they will continue to cannibalize the country.”

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  Chris Hedges will speak during the Creative Thinkers Series at the Solebury School John D. Brown Athletic Center, 6832 Phillips Mill Road, New Hope, Pa., Dec. 4, 7 p.m. 215-862-5261; www.solebury.org. He also will appear with Ralph Nader to talk about Mr. Nader’s new book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton, Dec. 5, 3 p.m. 609-497-1600; www.labyrinthbooks.com