“How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the
untrue?”, asked Kurt Andersen,
writing in The Atlantic Magazine. “How many Americans now
inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a
ketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey
research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of
American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly
reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost
certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don't
believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God.
Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds
of Americans believe that 'angels and demons are active in the
world.' More than half say they're absolutely certain heaven exists,
and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a
vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A
third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but
that it's a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and
journalists. A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans
just like us; that the government has, in league with the
pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of natural cancer cures;
that extraterrestrials have visited or are visiting Earth. Almost a
quarter believe that vaccines cause autism, and that Donald Trump won
the popular vote in 2016. A quarter believe that our previous
president maybe or definitely was (or is?) the anti-Christ.
According to a survey by Public Policy Polling, 15 percent believe
that the 'media or the government adds secret mind-controlling
technology to television broadcast signals,' and another 15 percent
think that's possible. Remarkably, the same fraction, or maybe less,
believes that the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—the
same proportion that believes U.S. officials were complicit in the
9/11 attacks.” (1)
How did we get here? How did it come to this?
How did America fall down this rabbit-hole into “fantasyland”.
Andersen traces the origins of our national madness to
several sources, but generally to the 1960's and specifically to the
Esalen Institute. Esalen, founded by two Stanford University
psychology graduates, at Big Sur overlooking the Pacific Ocean became
the epicenter of the “youth rebellion”.
“Esalen is a mother church of a new American
religion for people who think they don't like churches or religions
but who still want to believe in the supernatural. The institute
wholly reinvented psychology, medicine, and philosophy, driven by a
suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking
(also: massage, hot baths, sex, and sex in hot baths). It was the
headquarters for a new religion of no religion, and for 'science'
containing next to no science.” (2)
The institute put emphasis on shamanistic traditions,
mostly Asian but with a smattering of American Indian mixed with the
flotsam and jetsam of other cultures. “Invisible energies, past
lives, astral projections, whatever—the more exotic and wondrous
and unfalsifiable, the better.” (3)
Like Mormonism, whose founder received his revelations
quickly on the heels of having spent time in the slammer for fraud,
one of the co-founders of Esalen had only recently emerged from a
private psychiatric hospital having suffered a nervous breakdown. (4)
Accordingly, “(H)is new institute embraced the radical notion
that psychosis and other mental illnesses were labels imposed by the
straight world on eccentrics and visionaries, that they were primary
tools of coercion and control”, a tenet given currency in a
novel and then by Hollywood in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's
Nest. Soon, 'authorities' arose within the psychiatric
profession publishing books like Thomas Szasz declaring that mental
illness is a myth, “a theory not a fact”, “now the universal
bottom-line argument for anyone—from creationists to climate-change
deniers to anti-vaccine hysterics—who prefers to disregard science
in favor of his own beliefs” (5)
America has always been a haven for cooks and
crack-pots, a catch-basin for the flotsam and jetsam, a sanctuary for
the insane and the criminally insane of those put to sea by other
cultures. One has only to re-read Governor Oglethorpe's complaints
to the crown about the mother country emptying its “jakes”, a
colonial term for privy or outhouse, upon our shores. Accordingly,
America has always been vulnerable to fits of madness. The “Great
Awakening”, the first of the great religious revivals (and there
would be many more), the “Palmer Raids” the McCarthy Era and
other “red' scares. The rise and then fall of the KKK. This,
however, is of a magnitude on an entirely different scale. Yes
Esalen had it's awful impact whose influence is still reverberating
through the universities, newsrooms and corridors of power, but it
had some help along the way.
As Andersen points out, the assassination of JFK and
it's aftermath contributed mightily to the paranoia of the country
spawning whole industries of conspiracy, further feeding paranoia.
The Vietnam war further eroded confidence in governance and
'expertise' a trend. By the end of the decade millions were reading
a book or attending a film in which it was earnestly held that the
great monolithic cultures hadn't built those monuments—Stone Henge,
the Pyramids, but they were instead the handiwork of ancient aliens
from outer space. It would be laughable if it weren't so serious.
This nonsense reververates down the decades, for today one can tune
to YouTube and view “documentaries” telling us that the pyramids
were some kind of ancient battery or power station. No evidence has
yet been unearthed, no power lines, no electric motor casings, no
drawings showing static or any other form of electricity emerging
from these structures. No matter, the thesis is pressed earnestly
with no argument attempting to render readily apparent the obvious.
The height of the madness, perhaps, was reached when thousands
gathered in D.C. To protest the war during which they gathered all
around and attempted to 'levitate' the Pentagon in order to cast out
the demons. That the building didn't move matters not, for the need
to believe...believe anything....is the prime directive, reason and
universal observation be damned.
The sixties didn't invent this of course. We have a
long tradition, in human experience, of embracing fantasy, believing
falsehoods. For every public school there is a smaller private one
in which the exact opposite is being taught. This means that there
has always been a significant minority in la-la land. But the rough
balance between the sane and the insane, between reason and madness,
has been upended in recent decades, now to the point where we have
actors playing roles as leaders and where facts are challenged by
alternate facts, the universe by an alternate counterfeit. In such a
cosmos the citizen alone is left to decide what is true. Truth not
as objective reality but subjective opinion. If truth is subjective
than opinion replaces judgment.
The conservative philosopher Edmund Burke was also a
member of Parliament. After an energetic exchange with one of his
constituents he replied that “If I were to sacrifice my
judgment for your opinion, sir, I would not be serving this
constituency well.” This is a basic principle of
representative governance, judgment must trump opinion. Facts do
matter.
This country was founded by disciples of the
Enlightenment, ardent adherents of Voltaire and Diderot, men
who believed in the primacy of reason over emotion; of fact over
fiction; of discernible, objective, measurable reality over myth; of
the natural over the supernatural. Our republic was founded upon
these principles and depend upon them for its survival.
An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh
Impeach and Imprison
- Andersen, Kurt. “How America Lost Its Mind” The Atlantic Magazine Vol. 320. No.2. September 2017. Pages 76-91. See pages 78-79.
- Ibid page 80
- Ibid
- Ibid
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