Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

It was a symbiotic vicious circle, alarmed and overreaching government fantasists versus alarmed and overreaching antigovernment fantasists.

Instead of taking the correct lesson from Bob Dylan’s 1973 anthem “Forever Young”—to “grow up to be righteous” and “always be courageous”—way too many baby boomers chose to remain in Neverland, to keep believing they’d always have nothing but fun and never resemble mom and dad. The principle set forth in Peter Pan—“All children, except one, grow up”—was just another oppressive and unfair old-fashioned rule to be cast off.

IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length. The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate f...

One of the WWF’s lawyers who lobbied in the 1980s to get pro wrestling deregulated—to persuade the government it wasn’t a real sport, even though for a century it had pretended otherwise—was elected to the Senate in the 1990s and has run for president twice. Rick Santorum disingenuously defends pro wrestling as a genre of “morality plays” that are “a non-elite artifact of our culture that has survived by trying to keep up with the envelope-pushers in Hollywood and New York.”

MIDDLE-AGED PEOPLE WEARING HALLOWEEN COSTUMES or attending Burning Man are expressions of a phenomenon I described earlier—the commitment of Americans, beginning with the baby boom generation, to a fantasy of remaining forever young. The treacly term kids of all ages had popped up when baby boomers were kids. But its currency skyrocketed during the 1980s and ’90s, when American adults, like no adults before them—but like all who followed—began playing videogames and fantasy sports, dressing like kids, grooming themselves and even getting surgery to look more like kids. It’s what I call the Kids “R” Us Syndrome. It became pandemic and permanent. It ranges from the benign to the unfortunate.

Fantasy sports are an expression of two underlying Fantasyland features that appear again and again. It’s a superrealistic fiction, based on athletes’ actual week-to-week performances and years of stats and a free market in make-believe assets. And it has hyperindividualism: each individual fantasy “owner” has a team composed of athletes whose individual performances are all that matter, rendering real teams’ real wins and losses irrelevant.

A MAIN ARGUMENT of this book concerns how so many parts of American life have morphed into forms of entertainment. From 1980 to the end of the century, that tendency reached a tipping point in politics and the political discourse. First a Hollywood celebrity became a beloved president by epitomizing and encouraging the blur between fiction and reality. Then talk radio and TV news turned into forms of politicized show business. And finally the Internet came along, making false beliefs both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam. Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America.

Only a quarter of American Catholics consider the Bible the actual word of God—as opposed to the half of Protestants who do.*5 In fact, Catholics have been fairly reasonable biblical interpreters from the beginning, before modern science even posed any problems, and they’ve stuck with it. Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don’t be stupid. “Shall we say, then,” he wrote about Genesis, “there was such a sense of hearing in that formless and shapeless creation, whatever it was, to which God thus uttered a sound when He said, ‘Let there be light’? Let such absurdities have no place in our thoughts.” In 1996 the conservative pope came out strongly in favor of the scientific consensus about how life works and humans came to be. “Evolution,” John Paul II declared, given the “discoveries in different scholarly disciplines,” is “more than an hypothesis.” And as Pope Francis said in 2014, “When we read about creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so.”*6

I’m focused more on the solid majority of Protestants, at least a quarter of Americans, who are sure “the Bible is the actual word of God…to be taken literally, word for word.” As well as the larger number of Christians, more than a third of all Americans, who believe that God regularly grants them and their fellow charismatics magical powers—to speak in tongues, heal the sick, cast out demons, and so on.

Then there are the happy fairy-tale pastors, most prominently the charismatics who tell believers that prayer will bring them wealth now, in life, on Earth. This has never been as explicit, widespread, or respectable as it has become since the 1980s, the decade in which America renewed its commitment to manic materialism. The Puritans regarded financial success as a possible signal from God—if He had made you

wealthy, maybe you were a “visible saint,” already elected to everlasting life. But in contemporary America, cause and effect have been switched. It is no longer just some dull Protestant work ethic that leads to success. As America’s I’m-a-winner individualism extinguished belief in predestination, hopeful Christians decided that prayer could directly result in a high net worth. It was a way of reconciling two irreconcilable pieces of the American character—the extreme religiosity and the refusal to believe that success isn’t up to each person individually. The solution: you can persuade God to make you rich.

A key passage for prosperity gospel preachers is the line by Jesus in Mark 11:24—“What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” Of course, ironically, absurdly, it goes unmentioned that this comes just a few lines after the scene where Jesus performs his great act of militant anticommercialism, condemning and ransacking the tables of the moneychangers and salesmen in the Temple. Prosperity gospel ministers, Olson says, are promoting an idea of prayer that “makes God into a cosmic slot machine and turns salvation into a self-centered acquisition of physical blessings.” America spent a century making Santa Claus its central Christmas character because he wasn’t a religious figure and adults could wink-wink pretend he was real; the new prosperity gospel makes God a real Santa in whom Christian adults actually believe.

We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.

The Secret takes the American fundamentals, individualism and supernaturalism and belief in belief, and strips away the middlemen and most of the pious packaging—God, Jesus, virtue, hard work rewarded, perfect bliss only in the afterlife. What’s left is a “law of attraction,” and if you just crave anything hard enough, it will become yours. Belief is all. The Secret’s extreme version of magical thinking goes far beyond its predecessors’. It is staggering. A parody would be almost impossible. It was number one on the Times’s nonfiction list for three years and sold around twenty million copies. Its sequels (The Power, The Magic) sold several million more.

He has encouraged viewers to believe that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses—as did Winfrey on her show before him. For a study in the British medical journal BMJ, a team of experienced evidence reviewers analyzed Dr. Oz’s on-air advice—eighty randomly chosen recommendations from 2013. The investigators found legitimate supporting evidence for fewer than half.

Still, I couldn’t read Gilbert Seldes’s 1928 takedown of America’s New Age moment around 1900 and not feel busted. “What then could be the appeal to Americans,” he wrote when he was thirty-five, “of yoga…and the other forms of oriental mysticism?” Maybe it was “that satiety had set in, after all our grasping and possessing, and that we wished to rid ourselves of our encumbrances….Mysticism would then be our escape from the implications of our own materialistic philosophy.” But…not really. Instead, Seldes says, upscale America’s original embrace of yoga and the like “served actually to soothe exasperated nerves” for people who had not the faintest intention of giving up the world. Yoga was for them a mystic way of renouncing whatever was irritating and preserving whatever was pleasing. It was an elaborate game of pretense by which noisy people went into silence and distracted people imagined that they were concentrating. The glamour of renunciation suffused the picture which they had of themselves. Actually nothing was renounced….One was alone with the mysterious spirit and, breathing in a refined way, one returned to conquer the world.

So: live in your bunker with a decade’s worth of twenty-serving cans of teriyaki rice and beef. Pretend you live in a little house on the prairie and shop once a week on the make-believe Via Condotti nearby. When you’re not managing your imaginary NFL all-star team, imagine you’re serving as an officer in the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery Regiment at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Get ready for Jesus’s return. Impersonate mad Dr. Mundo’s summoner in League of Legends, an aristocratic aesthete on Instagram, a truth-telling troll on Twitter. Fantasize that you were born with those perfect artificial breasts. Speak in tongues. Read and believe the books by people who say they died and went to Heaven. Dress like a wizard or a feudal baron. Believe that believing you’ll get rich will make you rich, that burning sage cleared your house of evil spirits, that humans were supernaturally created in a flash the day before yesterday, that alien beings taught us to build computer chips. Go crazy. You have every right. And snug and smug in my own Urban American Redoubt, I have every right to disapprove of my fellow Americans who’ve decided that reason and empiricism are just some of many ways of understanding the world, no better than any other, that everyone is entitled to her truth and his truth. I am free to practice what the liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof scolds writers for doing, to take a “sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself” even though “mocke...

By the 1990s, the fear of a UN military takeover of the United States was so widespread and impassioned that the Indiana Department of Transportation, for instance, was obliged to abandon its internal system for tracking the age of highway signs. Indianans had become convinced the colored dots on the backs of the signs were coded navigation instructions for the impending invasion by the UN’s armed foreigners.

Compared to the strictly political new stars of talk radio, Bell sounded friendly and low-key, almost reasonable, not pushing one clear agenda but open to practically any claim or allegation or belief. Coast to Coast AM became the go-to broadcast venue for the excitingly untrue, and when celebrities appeared, the whole demented buffet seemed all the more legitimate.

But also starting in the 1990s, the farthest-right half of our right half, roughly a quarter of Americans, couldn’t and wouldn’t adjust their beliefs to comport with their side’s victories and the dramatically new and improved realities. They’d made a god out of Reagan, but they ignored or didn’t register that he was practical and reasonable, that he didn’t completely buy his own antigovernment bullshit. After Reagan, his hopped-up true-believer faction began insisting on total victory. In a democracy, total victory by any faction is a fantasy, of course.

Fantasyland, it’s hard for people to know where and when to draw lines or impose limits. Everything’s relative. Everyone has her own truth. Imposing ours is judgmental and undemocratic and elitist.

“If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth (facts or evidence),” Tolkien said in that same 1939 lecture, “then Fantasy would languish until they were cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy will perish.” It turns out he was half right. Many Americans now are in a state in which they don’t want to know or can’t perceive factual truth, yet the perishing of fantasy featuring elves and orcs and superheroes and zombies and angels is nowhere in sight.

most American three-year-olds believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, for instance, while most nine-year-olds do not. Indeed, until they’re about ten, children naturally think everything that exists or happens has a purpose, designed and arranged by somebody or something to fulfill particular roles—hippos to be on display at the zoo, clouds to make rain, Mommy to be nice. Then they get older and are supposed to learn the various truths, counterintuitive and disappointing though they may be. However, if the adults around them still cling to childlike beliefs, as so many do in America concerning religion, children don’t necessarily grow out of the beliefs. A study by a University of Michigan psychologist found that between ages eight and ten, nearly everyone has a creationist explanation for how life emerges; biological evolution doesn’t yet make sense. But by age twelve in the United States, her study found, it’s pretty much only children in fundamentalist Christian households who still believe that animals and people were created supernaturally and simultaneously. Young children, in the phrase of one eminent child psychologist at Boston University, are “intuitive theists” who naturally tend to believe that some kind of God must be running the whole show. A major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular. ...

If the Roman Catholic French or Spanish had been more successful in making more of North America theirs, maybe we would be less rogue-utopian and individualistic. If the Dutch had extended their influence beyond New York and beyond the 1600s, the sensible and cosmopolitan strains of our national character might be more dominant. What if those first hundred radical Puritan extremists hadn’t leased the Mayflower and had stayed instead on their side of the Atlantic? What if we hadn’t been so tolerant of slave labor? What if the American Revolution had failed, or the Confederate secession had succeeded? What if California had remained part of Mexico, or the United States hadn’t fought a war in Vietnam? What if Joseph Smith and P. T. Barnum and Walt Disney and Ronald Reagan and Oprah Winfrey and Donald Trump and a dozen other key channelers of these American tendencies had never appeared? What if Internet search had been designed differently or if, in 2009, some senior Wall Street executives had been imprisoned for their recklessness and fraud? There were so many inflection points along the way. We might now be a warmer Canada, a massive Netherlands, a lumbering Argentina, or the United States the way it was until recently—that is, a country with a penchant for fantasies, but the penchant mostly under control. Instead, it all happened as it happened. We are what we are, in all our sui generis splendor. America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some o...