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Ways of thinking correlate and cluster. Believing in one type of fantasy tends to lead to believing in others.
“individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs” are the main drivers of their exceptional “perception of purpose in life events,” their tendency “to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.” Americans have believed for centuries that the country was inspired and guided by an invisible, omniscient, omnipotent planner and that He and His fellow beings from beyond are perpetually observing and manipulating us. That native religiosity has led since the 1960s both to our special interest in extraterrestrials and to a Third Worldly tendency to believe in conspiracies.
In other words, supernatural belief is the great American gateway to conspiracy belief.
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
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Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the Internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree.
Americans invented and built and dominate the fantasy-industrial complex that mixed fiction and reality until they became indistinguishable.
Pre-Internet information systems, in which accuracy and credibility were determined mainly by experts or otherwise designated deciders, had terrible flaws and annoyances, including complacency, blind spots, snobbishness, and bigotry. But those gates and gatekeepers also managed to keep the worst hogwash out of our mainstream.
Therefore, he declared, the new government must neither ban nor embrace any particular religion. Let people believe whatever they want, because “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
The great compromise between the American religious impulse and the American Enlightenment in the 1700s permitted any and every conceivable sect to bud and blossom. Fine. But that principle isn’t working so well anymore. The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel. Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are now expected to be immune from challenge.
Delusional ideas and magical thinking flood from the private sphere into the public, become so pervasive and deeply rooted, so normal, that they affect everyone. Some American fantasies have become weaponized, literally. In other words, our pockets are being picked and our legs are being broken.
As disbelief in science grows, our whole society may become less prosperous and more vulnerable. As religious belief drives government to make legal contraception and abortions more difficult to get, the rest of us will have our pockets picked in all kinds of ways for years to come.
The neurobiologist James McGaugh, another pioneer in the field, has in his half-century of research seen not “a single instance in which a memory was completely repressed and popped up again. There’s absolutely no proof that it can happen. Zero. None. Niente. Nada. All my research says that strong emotional experiences leave emotionally strong memories. Being sexually molested would certainly qualify.”
If a famous, award-winning, well-connected American journalist (and former presidential adviser) bought the exciting fictions he found on the Internet, why should we expect ordinary people to be any more scrupulous and skeptical?
But the pale, the agreed-upon boundary line between reasonable and deranged, has moved by thousands of miles in Fantasyland. Fantastic beliefs that were beyond the pale twenty years ago are now mainstream.
If more and more of a political party’s members hold more and more extravagantly supernatural beliefs, doesn’t it make sense that the party will be more and more open to make-believe in its politics and policy?
Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of the people who voted Republican in 2012.*1
In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
The Republican position is now to oppose even studying climate change as well as any and all proposals to reduce carbon emissions. Rational people may disagree about how governments might minimize or prepare for the effects of global warming. You are entitled to your own opinion. But refusing to accept its reality is a new and unacceptable posture. You are not entitled to your own facts.
Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven and Hell; and in Arkansas, atheists are technically ineligible to have any state job or to testify in court.
After more than three decades and many hundreds of studies, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that GMO foods are safe to eat. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine commissioned a comprehensive study of the science, and in 2016 their report declared GMOs both safe to eat and environmentally benign. Of the scientists in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent think it’s safe to eat GMO foods. This is almost exactly the same percentage of those scientists who say climate change is real and man-made, the latter a data point regularly used
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The false belief that vaccines cause autism and other terrible illnesses derives from familiar sources—a misplaced nostalgia for the past, excessive mistrust of experts, the conviction that some vicious conspiracy is behind everything bad, and the gatekeeper-free Internet.
Let me put a finer point on what I’m saying. Very, very few of the guns in America are used for hunting. Americans who own guns today keep arsenals in a way people did not forty years ago. It seems plain to me that that’s because they—not all, but many—have given themselves over to fantasies.
think a different Oxford don, J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. “Fantasy,” he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, “is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”
The original child psychologist, Jean Piaget, believed that the minds of children and adults were fundamentally different, that kids were egocentric magical thinkers and adults were rational and reasonable, and that growing up consisted of shifting from one mode to the other. Psychology has revised Piaget’s big idea. Now they cast the difference between children and adults as a continuum, not a sharp break. As Fantasyland emerged, more Americans moved away from the adult end of the continuum. Not coincidentally, psychology has also recast schizophrenia as a point at one end of a spectrum
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Now that we spend so much of our lives immersed in the worlds of the fantasy-industrial complex, it seems we have become more like little children mentally. “There is no inevitable march toward objectivity or enlightenment,” the Harvard child psychologist Paul Harris writes in his book Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others. “The endpoint of cognitive development is not objectivity and equilibrium. It is a mix of the natural and supernatural, of truth and fantasy, of faith and uncertainty.”
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.
It’s correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud. But that’s just one way of explaining it, the one that comfortingly focuses all blame on government and a small class of the rich and powerful and deceitful. The deeper causes were more widespread and unconscious, the fantastical wishfulness affecting at least a large minority of Americans, maybe a majority.
Skepticism of the press and of academic experts has been a paramount fetish on the right for years, which effectively trained two generations of Americans to disbelieve facts at odds with their opinions.
in 1961, the historian Daniel Boorstin already saw what was coming in politics, what would make Trump president. “Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals,” because we live in a “world where fantasy is more real than reality,” Boorstin wrote. “Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image. An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.”
Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots,*5 irrationality in rationalist drag. You get phrenology and homeopathy and intelligent design.
As we did with our founding religious legacy, we’ve taken from our Enlightenment legacy certain pieces of the program—skepticism, freedom of thought, mutable truth—and selectively amped them to extremes at the expense of other Enlightenment virtues, such as reasonableness and rigorous self-doubt. It’s what pathologists call hypertrophy, when an organ or muscle grows too big, or like an autoimmune disease, when an essential process that normally keeps us healthy runs amok and makes us sick.
As a way to make the world seem understandable again, to focus on a single enemy, the idea of the existence of some kind of elite cabal became irresistible to more and more Americans. Somebody must be pulling the strings. It can be simultaneously terrifying and comforting to believe that bad people are tyrannizing you. So conspiracists squint at the real world and see the exercise of power as both ridiculously simple and brilliantly complex. They fictionalize reality. Instead
“In my opinion,” Albert Einstein wrote, “the idea of a personal God is a childlike one…but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist….I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.” Indeed, he wrote, the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious….He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed….To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom
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As far as religion goes, then, America isn’t so much secularizing as splitting into two distinct societies, one more secular and reality-based, one much less so. Rationalism and reasonableness are gaining some ground, but the true believers, still the bigger cohort, are sticking to their guns. We are polarizing religiously the way we have been polarizing politically. As I’ve said, that’s not coincidental, it’s synergistic.
a George Orwell essay from 1943 about the civil war in Spain, four years after the fascists won. One subtle but profound effect of the fascist regimes in Spain and Italy and Germany, he wrote, was how their propaganda “often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.”
“The essential conviction shared by all ranks” in a totalitarian movement, Arendt wrote, “from fellow-traveler to leader, is that politics is a game of cheating.” When I read the next paragraph, I was staggered. I stopped and read it again. It gave me goosebumps. A mixture of gullibility and cynicism have been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that
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Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was…like the present period.”
