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

by Kurt Andersen

the Founders all came along in the eighteenth. They were rationalists and pragmatists, men who liked money and fine living but didn’t expect to get rich overnight by stumbling into some North American El Dorado. They produced our national mission statement (the Declaration of Independence) and operating manual (the Constitution). The war those documents book-ended was a modern one, concerning politics rather than religion, to replace a monarchy with a republic.

Franklin was astonished by how Whitefield could “bring men to tears by pronouncing Mesopotamia,” and “how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common Abuse of them,

“The motto of enlightenment,” Kant wrote the year after America won its war of independence, “is…Sapere aude!” or Dare to know. “Have courage to use your own understanding!”

It may go without saying, but I’ll say it: “tongues” are gibberish.

But what other place on Earth has been more congenial to believers and promoters of mad dreams and schemes of so many kinds? California is America squared.

an aspirational template for his wankers to reimagine their everyday lives fantastically.

The dreams of freedom and abundance in modern America include an unprecedented abundance of choice.

For many people, drugs’ fantasy-encouraging effects extend beyond the minutes or hours of being high, leaching into everyday thought, not always usefully.

We rationalist laypeople believe the incomprehensible things our scientists tell us the same way Third World magical thinkers trust their wizards.

Because what they believe is always true.

“You are not in control, your consciousness is not planning, your self seems to disappear—that’s

I do despair of our devolution toward unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.