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

by Kurt Andersen

When Clairol sold its first home hair-coloring line in 1956, maybe one in fifteen American women colored her hair. By 1970, two-thirds did. Everyone agreed to pretend that women’s hair no longer turned gray.

It was in the 1960s that we first learned of our inner child, that we should each attend to his or her wishes and aspire to be more childlike as adults. That was one of the heartfelt, enduring takeaways of the era, part of nearly all the therapeutic and pop-psychology strands spun out of Esalen and its kin. If it feels good, do it: invented by Americans barely past childhood, that motto made the inner child idea actionable, and although the phrase faded quickly, the ethos lived on.

Before entering politics, the current president of the United States had sponsored WWE events at one of his casinos, then became a WWE character pretending to slap and body-slam McMahon on stage, and finally got inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.

As Las Vegas turned into a city posing as a theme park—with hotel-casinos that were huge new simulations of ancient Egypt (the Luxor), medieval England (the Excalibur), the seventeenth-century Caribbean (Treasure Island), Renaissance Italy (the Venetian), contemporary France (Paris Las Vegas), and New York City (New York–New York)—the number of visitors tripled.

Not so long ago, American adults never dressed up in costumes, certainly not as an annual ritual. When my daughters reached their early twenties, obsessing more than ever over their Halloween costumes, they were shocked when I told them that. The change happened recently, and it is another small expression of the new protocols. In the 1980s, after the Halloween parades invented by freshly out gay people in San Francisco and New York, dressing up on Halloween became a thing straight adults routinely did in every corner of America.

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.

Oh, Ronald Reagan, lovable, shrewd, twinkly, out-of-it, blithe, brilliant Ronald Reagan. The transmutation of presidential politics and governing into entertainment had started a generation earlier, in the 1960s, with John Kennedy. JFK was like a movie star and like a fictional character. He was young and dashing, witty and sexy. He’d been a war hero, and Hollywood made a movie about those heroics, PT 109, while he was president, a production on which he gave notes. His glamorous patrician wife was even younger, only thirty-one when she became First Lady, and one of his girlfriends was a real movie star, Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate sexual fantasy figure. But that projection of youth and extreme vitality was a fiction, a lie, a fantasy presented to the public: he was secretly very ill with osteoporosis and Addison’s disease, among others, and took painkillers, antianxiety drugs, sleeping pills, and stimulants.

As JFK was about to be elected, Norman Mailer wrote that “America’s politics would now be also America’s favorite movie, America’s first soap opera, America’s best-seller.”

Academic research shows that religious belief leads people to think that almost nothing happens accidentally or randomly: as the authors of some recent cognitive science studies at Yale put it, “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.

“The likelihood of supporting conspiracy theories is strongly predicted,” they concluded, by two key pieces of our national character that derive from our particular Christian culture: “a propensity to attribute the source of unexplained or extraordinary events to unseen, intentional forces” and a weakness for “melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events, particularly those that interpret history relative to universal struggles between good and evil.” In fact, they found the single strongest driver of conspiracy belief to be belief in end-time prophecies. Belief in things such as ghosts and psychic healing also “significantly predicted belief in five specific conspiracy theories,” according to the Chicago research. In other words, supernatural belief is the great American gateway to conspiracy belief.

Today the great majority of Protestants identify as evangelicals, the way all Americans call themselves middle class. Conservative evangelicals (né fundamentalists) believe that God created everything at once around 4000 B.C.E. and that Roman Catholics are going to Hell, whereas other evangelicals concede that He probably created Earth billions of years ago and that non-Protestant Christians might get to Heaven.

The way evangelical replaced and subsumed fundamentalist, charismatic did the same for Pentecostal. Pentecostals are now just one old-school type of charismatic. The new coinage has made ecstatic outbursts and miraculous stunts—spontaneous shouting, shaking, and crying, hearing directly from God, channeling the Holy Spirit to get rich or cure illness or exorcise demons or speak in tongues—acceptable to Christians for whom Pentecostal has down-market white-yokel or black-ghetto connotations. Pentecostals are more or less fundamentalist charismatics who insist on speaking in tongues; for other charismatics, tongues are just one way to channel the Holy Spirit. Charismatic Christianity, both the term and the looser doctrines, gave respectable people permission to feast at the whole buffet of magical and miraculous signs and wonders.

A fifth of Americans call themselves Catholic. The Roman Catholic Church is in every meaningful way mainline, with its stable hierarchy that shapes and enforces doctrine and practice. In this sense, America has been a four-hundred-year-long natural experiment testing how religion develops with and without a powerful central organization. In other words, a big reason American Catholics are more reality-based than Protestants is because tenured grown-ups, from the Vatican on down, have consistently been in command, tamping down and pinching off undesirable offshoots. 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.

It’s not only a matter of more education tending to make Jews more rational, although that correlation is striking: only one or two in ten Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists, and charismatics graduated college, versus six in ten Jews. An overwhelming majority of Protestants are fundamentalist, evangelical, or charismatic; maybe a sixth of Jews are Orthodox, ultra-Orthodox, or associated with the little New Age-y branch called Renewalist. American Judaism has not gone nuts.

Most translations of Ephesians make it even clearer that the supernatural evil is not on Earth at all—not in “high places” like the White House or the Vatican but “in the heavens” or “heavenly realms.” Thus the further folly of biblical literalism: what some see as the obvious meaning—in a passage translated from ancient Hebrew to ancient Greek to Old Latin to New Latin to Middle English to Modern English—others will not.

The economists also don’t have much of an answer to a very specifically economic conundrum: the fact that, country by country, prosperity and a sense of security correlate with less religious belief almost everywhere—except America.

Marx famously called religion the opium of the people, and when Lenin founded the Soviet Union, he agreed, saying it was “used for the…stupefaction of the working class.” But neither man had ever been to the United States, to see that for Americans it was as much or more a stimulant and hallucinogen than a stupefying opiate.

More than any other single American by far, outside conventional religion and politics, Oprah Winfrey is responsible for giving a national platform and credibility to magical thinking, New Age and otherwise. In her broad domain, she is the Cotton Mather, John Wesley, Brigham Young, and Billy Graham, the first New Age pope. If Ronald Reagan was the first king of his Fantasyland realm, Oprah Winfrey is still queen of hers. Like Reagan too, I believe she’s both sincere and a brilliant Barnumesque promoter of her dreamworld.

New Age, Oprah-style, shares with American Christianities their special mixtures of superstition, selfishness, and a refusal to believe in the random. “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she has said. “Nothing. A lot of grace. A lot of blessings. A lot of divine order. But I don’t believe in luck.”

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.

Thanks to the coenabling usual suspects—academia, media, government, and business—we are living in two worlds at once, an amazing scientific present and a revived prescientific past, where robotic surgery and 3-D-printed bionic ears coexist with spurious folk remedies.

Arguments for harnessing placebo power are like arguments that it doesn’t matter if the premises of Mormonism and conversations with Jesus and paranormal experiences are “real.” They’re like the arguments of Donald Trump’s defenders who say it doesn’t matter if he lies as long as what he says feels true. It’s what the author of The Secret explained about her fundamental “law of attraction”—the life-changing fantasy that definitely isn’t a fantasy, but if it is, so what: “The placebo effect is an example of the law of attraction in action. When a patient truly believes the tablet is a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.” Maybe most of the millions of Americans who spend billions of dollars a year on homeopathic remedies for their asthma, depression, migraines, allergies, arthritis, or hypertension—six of the ten illnesses most commonly treated—do experience placebo effects and feel better. But some of them are failing to get diagnoses and take medicines that would actually treat their illnesses.

Maybe prompt surgical treatment of Steve Jobs’s relatively curable form of pancreatic cancer would have made him live longer, maybe not. In any case, for most of a year, according to his biographer Walter Isaacson, he resorted to “fruit juices…acupuncture…herbal remedies…treatments he found on the Internet…a psychic,” and so on. “I think that he kind of felt that if you don’t want something to exist,” Isaacson says, “you can have magical thinking” and make it go away. I think of Steve Jobs when I see my neighbors at Whole Foods flipping through the monthly magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You and the book Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, by an author whose advanced degree is an M.H.—master herbalist. And browsing the aisles full of homeopathic supplements and elixirs that promise to “build better blood.” And buying expensive gluten-free snacks even though only a minuscule percentage of them have any medical reason to do so.

in no other developed country, of course, are so many citizens evangelical or fundamentalist Christians. America is exceptional.

In America, even people whose lives were mangled by this fantasy epidemic stick with magical thinking. Around the time Patricia Burgus was paid a $10.6 million settlement because her psychiatrist had convinced her she was a mass-murdering satanist cannibal who’d raped her children, she took them and her husband to the Vatican. “We wanted to thank God for seeing us through this ordeal,” she explained, “and rededicate our lives to Him.”

economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican.

In a democracy, total victory by any faction is a fantasy, of course.

For a while, realist Republican leaders effectively encouraged and exploited the predispositions of their fantastical partisans. That was the stone-cold cynicism of Karl Rove, like the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat just before he won a second term for George Bush, explaining that the “judicious study of discernible reality” had been rendered obsolete. They were rational people who understood that a large fraction of Americans don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that many voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and scared won them elections.

“The problem is that Republicans have purposefully torn down the validating institutions,” says the political journalist Josh Barro, a Republican until 2016. “They have convinced voters that the media cannot be trusted; they have gotten them used to ignoring inconvenient facts about policy; and they have abolished standards of discourse.”

WHILE POLITICIANS of all stripes propagate politically useful make-believe, Republicans let this habit get the best of them in several consequential areas. Environmental science had the bad luck to recognize and start to publicize global warming in the early 2000s, just as full Fantasyland dawned. At first, Republicans were officially reasonable on the subject. As recently as 2008, their party platform mentioned “climate change” thirteen times, stipulating it was caused by “human economic activity,” and they committed themselves to “decreasing the long term demand for oil” in order “to address the challenge.” Four years later they had switched to denialism, the next platform mentioning “climate change” once, in scare quotes, only to disparage concern about it.

In 2008 three-quarters of the GOP presidential primary candidates said they believed in evolution, but in 2012 it was down to a third, and then in 2016 only one did. That one, Jeb Bush, was careful to say evolutionary biology was only his truth, that “it does not need to be in the curriculum” of public schools, and if it is, ought to be accompanied by creationist teaching.

Most people aligned with the white pan-Christian party today don’t have a strong secular vision of America. A two-to-one majority of Republicans say they “support establishing Christianity as the national religion.” (And a large majority of all Americans believe that the “Constitution establishes [the United States as] a Christian nation” already.)*5 I’m pretty sure we’re never going to become a Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran, but are we not already close to something like Turkey, officially secular but with a distinctly religious party in charge?

Only four presidents have lacked a Christian denominational affiliation, the most recent one in the 1880s.

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.

fewer of us now own any kind of gun for any reason—even as the number of guns has increased phenomenally. In the 1970s about half of Americans had a gun, and it was almost always just a gun, one on average. Today only about a quarter of Americans own guns—but the average owner has three or four. Fewer than eight million people, only 3 percent of all American adults, own roughly half the guns. Members of that tiny minority of superenthusiasts own an average of seventeen guns apiece.

Spectacular mass killings happen in America far more often than anywhere else, and not just because we make massacre-perfect weapons so easy to buy. Such killers are also engaged in role-play and are motivated by our besetting national dream of overnight fame. The experts say that most mass killers are not psychotics or paranoid schizophrenics in the throes of clinical delusion; rather, they’re citizens of Fantasyland, unhappy people with flaws and failures they blame on others, the system, the elitists, the world. They worry those resentments into sensational fantasies of paramilitary vengeance, and they know that acting out those fantasies will make a big splash and force the rest of us to pay attention to them for the first time.

When the ban on semiautomatic weapons expired in 2004, it was not renewed. Even more amazingly, what Chief Justice Burger had denounced as a fraud in the 1990s had become respectable jurisprudence by the 2000s. In cases in 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court finally agreed to decide the fundamental meaning of the Second Amendment. Four of the justices still interpreted it the old way. In the 2010 case, for instance, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote an opinion noting that back in 1791, “the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense. There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, ‘fundamental.’ ” But in both cases, five justices went with the new reading. Now our Constitution does indeed guarantee each one of us the right to own firearms. We can argue all we want about how different guns were in the 1790s, when it took a minute to fire three shots, and about the correlation between the numbers of guns and gun deaths in the contemporary world, and how Australia’s 1996 roundup program worked. Those debates are academic, however. In this instance, the Constitution apparently is a suicide pact, and not just metaphorically. So that’s how we got here. The NRA has won. Yet they and their compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns. The wholesale confiscation of guns was never seriously bruited in the United St...

The relentless propagation of the confiscation fantasy paved the way both for the revised new understanding of the Second Amendment and for our three-hundred-million-gun stockpile. Both in turn make really meaningful gun control in the United States impossible: at this point, short of amending the Constitution and buying up guns—that is, fairly confiscating them, as Australia did—what else would do the trick? But doing any such thing, of course, is now a total political fantasy.

The fantasy-industrial complex has grown by enabling the suspension of disbelief more and more powerfully and ubiquitously: movies, then radio, then TV, then Disney’s theme parks and all their amateur spin-offs—Renaissance Faires, war reenactments, cosplay—and then videogames. Each new wave of entertaining fiction was more immersive than earlier ones, seemed more real. As this output seeped and then gushed into everyday life, the old willing suspension of belief was joined by unconscious suspension of disbelief, all the unreality that we tend to forget is unreal. By that I mean everything from a brand-new Mediterranean villa in Wichita or an eighteen-room log cabin in Scottsdale, each with a lawn meant to evoke Currier & Ives or Downton Abbey, to the shopping centers simulating the simulations of Main Street USA and EPCOT, to surgically fictionalized faces and bodies.

The fantasy-industrial complex comprises, at one end, goods and services and experiences that we know are entertaining confections, and at the other end things we don’t consider fantasies at all. In between is the large zone of fictions we probably know are make-believe but sometimes—we lose track, get immersed, become confused—almost, kind of, sort of, actually do believe are real.

What do the brattiest children do? They shout and name-call and exaggerate, like the new generation of political commentators, like Internet trolls, like Trump. They cover their ears and refuse to listen to unpleasant facts and tell ridiculous lies. They’re selfish, and anytime they’re thwarted or someone else gets something they want, no matter how justly or reasonably, they scream That’s not fair! In politics and elsewhere, this childish style often goes hand in hand with childlike beliefs—that is, fantasies.

The UC Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik studies the minds of small children and sees them as little geniuses, models of creativity and innovation. “They live twenty-four/seven in these crazy pretend worlds,” she says. “They have a zillion different imaginary friends.” While at some level, they “know the difference between imagination and reality…it’s just they’d rather live in imaginary worlds than in real ones. Who could blame them?” But what happens when that set of mental habits persists into adulthood too generally and inappropriately? A monster under the bed is true for her, the stuffed animal that talks is true for him, speaking in tongues and homeopathy and vaccines that cause autism and Trilateral Commission conspiracies are true for them.

In addition to our uniquely entrepreneurial approach to religion, America also developed an unusually religious approach to entrepreneurialism, especially since the 1960s. At Amway, Mary Kay, Walmart, Chick-fil-A, Apple, the Oprah Winfrey empire, Martha Stewart in her heyday, Whole Foods, and Amazon—among employees as well as customers—those businesses cultivated a cultish, evangelical vibe.

Most of the Americans who have recently been most certain that America is both wrecked and the best place ever call themselves Republicans.

A tipping point came in the 1960s, when our yin began to be overwhelmed by our yang. We discarded the good residue of our founding Puritan ethos—discipline, austerity, hyperliteracy—and doubled down on the old Puritan beliefs in magic and an imminent apocalypse and utopia.

Then the economic climate changed again. Postwar prosperity had afforded fantasy-prone Americans the luxury of indulging more and more fantasies, and the Internet allowed them to inhabit more all-encompassing fantasies even more of the time. But around the turn of this century, the economic balminess ended for at least half of America. As a chilly dead-end dusk and gloom descended on the disappointed and newly disempowered, we did not as a nation cope by reverting en masse to old Yankee virtues—self-restraint, realism, pragmatism, and compromise. Too many of us had become too habituated to our various forms of magical thinking. As the American dream of endless upward economic mobility came to seem increasingly like myth, all sorts of pure myths and fantasies became still more appealing and seemed more real. The unprecedented and broadly shared affluence of our twentieth century—with its go-go blowout starting in the 1960s—was a prerequisite to Fantasyland, but the arrival of full Fantasyland was accompanied by the end of those economic glory days for most people.

According to psychologists, stress can trigger delusions, and engaging in fantasy can provide relief from stress and loneliness. According to sociologists, religion flourishes more in societies where people frequently feel in economic jeopardy. According to social psychologists, belief in conspiracy theories flourishes among people who feel bad about themselves; they may be powerless to improve their lives, but knowing about all the alleged secret plots gives them a compensatory jolt of what feels like power.

When Barack Obama first ran for president, his most memorable campaign gaffe was to describe this dynamic. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he told a group of supporters in San Francisco in 2008, “and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment…as a way to explain their frustrations.” Sure, it was condescending, but it was also true. The political scientists who wrote Ame...

Instead of the real-life Rube Goldberg contraption with no single designer or operator, they imagine a few puppet-masters in charge of a global Borg in which all the circuits and software operate in perfect synchrony. It’s the way religious fundamentalists see physical reality as God’s perfectly designed masterwork rather than as it really is, a somewhat kludgy but astounding accumulation of happy accidents with nobody in charge.

“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 and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.