Joe Jukic: Frank, you ever read Chris Hedges on the cult of the self? He nails it—how our whole culture’s been hijacked by this narcissistic religion of “me.” Superficial charm, grandiosity, constant need for stimulation, zero empathy. He says it’s pure psychopathy dressed up as self-actualization, and it’s rotting the foundations of everything: rule of law, real community, even the possibility of justice.
Frank Sumera: Yeah, I’ve read him. Hedges is right about the symptoms. The endless selfies, the personal brands, the influencers who treat every human interaction like content. The corporate state sells you the idea that your highest duty is to yourself—your feelings, your image, your “journey.” Meanwhile the actual structures of power stay untouched. But Joe, Hedges stops one layer too shallow.
Joe: How so? The man spent years reporting from war zones. He’s seen the emptiness up close.
Frank: He has. And he names the idolatry correctly—worship of the self is just another golden calf. But the deeper sickness isn’t only the people performing for the camera. It’s that the camera itself has become the moral measure. People start believing that if no one records it, it doesn’t count. Virtue becomes performance. Outrage becomes currency. Empathy becomes a brand asset.
That’s why I keep saying the same thing: what matters is how you treat people when the camera is off.
When there’s no audience, no likes, no documentary crew, no chance of going viral. When the person across from you has nothing to offer your personal brand. That’s the real test. The janitor. The quiet neighbor. The relative who embarrasses you. The stranger who can’t do anything for you. How you speak to them, how you listen, whether you still see them as fully human—that’s the only measure that isn’t corrupted.
Joe: So Hedges diagnoses the cult, but you’re saying the exit isn’t just intellectual critique or even political resistance?
Frank: Critique is necessary. Hedges does it better than most. But the cult of the self doesn’t die because someone writes a brilliant essay about it. It dies in the small, unrecorded moments when someone chooses dignity over image, loyalty over convenience, truth over applause. When a man keeps his word even though no one will ever know he kept it. When someone helps without posting about it.
The corporate state and the celebrity machine both need the camera on. They need the performance. Turn the camera off—really off—and a different kind of human being becomes possible again. Not the curated self. The actual one.
Joe: And that’s the resistance?
Frank: That’s the only resistance that can’t be co-opted. Everything else—the movements, the platforms, the carefully staged moral stands—eventually gets absorbed into the same cult. But how you treat people when no one’s watching? That stays outside the system. That’s where the real work is.