In the final installment of The Real News Network’s series of interviews on “Reality Asserts Itself,” Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer explains how an infatuation with American culture and an ignorance of American history have led to unbelievable levels of brutality and destruction.

“The arrogance of our culture is numbing,” Scheer says. “It leads to not just insensitivity, it leads to callousness. It leads to brutality. If you want to understand Abu Ghraib, if you want to understand what we did in Guantanamo, you want to understand—I mean, for me, the most compelling experience of my life was to be in Vietnam and to have witnessed, in the North particularly, the effect of the carpet bombing, the napalming—I mean, it’s just incredible—in the South, just what we were doing to a people who—now, right, you’ve got Vietnamese all over the place. You go have some pho at some restaurant, and you don’t say to yourself, oh, I had the right to napalm that person who just served me the pho, I had the right to send or pay for, as a taxpayer, and support a government that sent airplanes over there and just bombed people like that, right, who had no capacity to shoot down this airplane. Right? No military threat to our homeland. And yet we could do that.

“That’s a sickness in any culture. But when you come from the most powerful country in the world that is also the most arrogant because of its claim to be the depository of human freedom, etc., it makes for—it’s a toxic cocktail. You get drunk on the power of this culture and its military, its wealth, and you can become incredibly destructive. And we have been incredibly destructive.”

The interview is part of a 10-part series conducted after the publication of Scheer’s book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.” Watch Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Nine. (Transcript follows video).