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

by Kurt Andersen

“The easiest thing of all is to deceive oneself; for we believe whatever we want to believe.” —DEMOSTHENES

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

With everybody's view and belief legitimate then absolute relativism is the result!

Americans had the peculiar fate of believing they could and must answer those religious questions the same way mathematicians and historians and natural philosophers answered theirs.

Belief that religious questions need answering the same way as scientific ones. Unfortunately religious faith is outside the realms of science. We have lost the capacity to live with mystery!

America was created by people resistant to reality checks and convinced they had special access to the truth, a place founded to enact grand fantasies.

American's special access to truth.

The nineteenth-century awakenings in Britain and Europe and Australia were altogether different phenomena. The revivalists were quieter, nerdier, more about returning to stripped-down Protestant piety, less about the individual emotional convulsions of spiritual crisis and rebirth, let alone radical new theological twists. They remained blips, important not for propagating supernatural (and selfish) fantasies but for establishing organizations like the YMCA and Salvation Army to practice Christ-like generosity toward the needy, the poor, and the lame. They were a sideshow to the secularization of Europe and, except for the United States, the rest of modernizing Christendom.

Differences between European and American Christian revivalism…

Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But in this book Clarke’s aphorism has a converse meaning as well: technology that seems magical and miraculous can encourage and confirm credulous people’s belief in make-believe magic and miracles.

Arthur Clarke's quote about technology and magic…scary that Americans have lost the ability for critical thinking.

Fortunately, American skepticism was still exceptionally robust and correctly focused. In fact, it was as if the First Great Delirium and its outbreaks of wishful fantasy triggered antibodies.

First Great Delerium (age of quackery) and resultant pushback w/healthy skepticism…unfortunately it doesn’t seem to exist today.

P. T. Barnum was the great early American merchandiser of exciting secular fantasies and half-truths. His extremely successful precircus career derived from and fed a fundamental Fantasyland mindset: If some imaginary proposition is exciting, and nobody can prove it’s untrue, then it’s my right as an American to believe it’s true. Barnum’s response to his naturalist was a perfect perversion of Enlightenment empiricism and logic: Disbelieving in mermaids isn’t proof that this creature isn’t a mermaid. The exhibits and performances at his American Museum freely mixed and confused the authentic with the fake artifact, the didactic with the imaginary, the real with the dubious with the totally counterfeit. “If I have exhibited a questionable dead mermaid in my Museum,” Barnum wrote, “I should hope that a little ‘clap-trap’ occasionally…might find an offset [from] the wonderful, instructive, and amusing realities.”

bowdlerize in various ways at the time, trying to make

Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism was realistic; McCarthyism was fantastical.

An example of a conspiracist mindset going too far...very much like today perhaps? What we end up with is a President who believes whole-heartedly in all encompassing conspiracies!

The tendency to explain the world in terms of conspiracies, conspiracies on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such ventures in the history of man, didn’t begin with McCarthyism. McCarthy as an individual was rather quickly discredited, and McCarthyism became a universal pejorative for false and hysterical and unfair accusation. Exaggerated fears of Communist subversion, however, lasted for the whole Cold War, letting modern Americans’ antisubversion fantasies take root and spread and grow as never before. The basic McCarthyist vision—a conviction that a powerful conspiracy of Americans in government, media, and academia, in alliance with foreign Communists, was hell-bent on the ruin of their own country—had several generations, from 1940s into the 1990s, to become an entrenched American habit of mind. —

McCarthyism...the same then as now, the original "fake news".

“Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.

Just flip sides of the same coin...unfettered freedom...the left gets fhe freedom to behave without constraints and the right gets economic freedom with no regulation or constraints and both with no social opprobrium.

Dedicated to blurring the lines between the fictional and the real, people in the living history world became focused on what they called the authenticity of their simulations. Living history boomed and acquired academic legitimacy, no longer just tourist traps but centers for “experimental archaeology” and “imitative experiments.” In 1967 one of the foremost archaeologists of the American colonial era became assistant director of Plimoth Plantation, the built-from-scratch re-creation of the Pilgrims’ village. Soon all the “interpreters” at Plimoth playing the parts of Pilgrims started doing full first person, speaking seventeenth-century English in the historically correct regional dialects of England and never stepping out of character. As the professor-in-charge said, they “actually build houses and outbuildings….They cook food, and even eat it in period fashion” and “get dirty and tousled in their work in the fields.” They are P. T. Barnum’s descendants with advanced degrees and none of his winks about humbug.

We see this in our children and exclaim “How cute and imaginative.” We seem to have descended back into childhood where we didn’t have to face our fears. It isn’t so cute with adults!

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 fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

When I was little, a thousand American children died from polio every year, and thousands more were permanently paralyzed. The year I turned three, a flu epidemic killed seventy thousand people in the United States, and I spent two weeks in the hospital with unstoppable diarrhea caused by a retrovirus, and nearly died. Back then, as many as a thousand American kids died every year from diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough. Several hundred Americans were dying every year from measles, and the disease rendered many hundreds more deaf or, as we said then, retarded. But during the 1950s and early ’60s, vaccines appeared that prevented all those, and every kid got them. Many thousands of unnecessary deaths and cripplings were prevented. There was no antivaccine movement.

The insanity of the anti-vaccination believers!

The case of the “cannibal cop” is extreme, but it is a cautionary tale. The more conscious we are of consuming any particular fantasy, the less problematic it is. I don’t take the hard line of the biologist and professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who’s practically Maoist on the subject. He argues that reading fairy tales to children may dangerously “inculcate a view of the world which includes supernaturalism.” Rather, I 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 extremes of fantasy...

“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.

...the continuation of previous note on Tolkien and extremes of fantasy.

And gaming is dominated by fantasy fictions. Is that connected to the larger transformation? Or is it just because digital technology got so good at faking and transmuting reality? Those are different ways of asking the same question.

Gaming so good at making fantasy real or making reality seem fantastic?

Such “social gaming” often amounts to a breathtaking parody of the fantasy underpinnings of our consumer economy: inessential wants are conjured—for the first time, totally imaginary wants—and turned into lucrative needs. There’s also the part that parodied the global sweatshop economy: American players started paying real money to low-wage workers in China, including labor camp inmates, to do online “gold farming” for them, the tedious game-world work that generates virtual currency.

Reality and virtual reality will be seamlessly blended.

Scary blending of reality and fantasy! It’s so easy to ignore reality now.

Not all lies are fantasies, and not all fantasies are lies; people who believe untrue things can pass lie detector tests. Trump’s version of unreality is a patchwork of knowing falsehoods and sincerely believed fantasies, which is more troubling than if he were just a liar. His insistence that he didn’t grab or kiss any of the dozen women who in 2016 said he had, unbidden—“Nothing ever happened. Didn’t exist. This was all fantasyland”—is a lie, I’m close to certain. But he probably really believed that “the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in forty-seven years,” the total and dangerous falsehood he told leaders of the National Sheriffs Association in the Oval Office. Whatever he believes or doesn’t, he makes untrue assertions more frequently than any U.S. leader in recorded history. The fact-checking organization PolitiFact looked at four hundred of his factual statements as a candidate and as president and found that 50 percent were completely false and another 20 percent mostly false. After he became president, according to The Washington Post, he issued an average of more than four falsehoods or “misleading claims” per day.

Not all lies are fantasies and not all fantasies are lies...scary!

Which makes America exceptional in a curious new way. Instead of the Puritans’ shining city upon a hill, a newly invented model society to which the rest of the world should aspire, we’ve become a warts-and-all model of the messy, mistrustful rest of the whole world—split between cosmopolitan seculars and tribal fundamentalists, between educated people hopeful about possible futures and others desperate to return to some dreamy past.

The new American exceptionalism?

DURING THE EARLY months of the Trump administration, I was reminded of 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.” His contemporary Hannah Arendt escaped Germany as a young woman in 1933, when the Nazis took over, and emigrated to America, where she became one of the most important political philosophers of the age. Her first big book, in 1951, was The Origins of Totalitarianism. I’d never read it until 2016, around the time Trump made “rigged elections” a recurring theme of his campaign. “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 nothing was true….Mass propaganda d...

A chilling example of the past maybe looking far too much like fhe present or the future...maybe the most important take away from this book. Herd mentality does have its drawbacks as many blacks during the era between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement can attest to.

Fantasyland has been the norm for the run of humanity; the unusually rational and scientific centuries here and there along the way, like the last few, are exceptions. Dominant cultures have had their enlightenments and golden ages before, then returned to primitivism and murk.

Is Fantasyland the default mode of human existence, the norm while unfortunately rationalism is the exception?

Remember when viral was a bad thing, referring only to the spread of disease? The same goes for what you read and watch and believe.

Viral spread is a bad thing whether it be disease or information...know and understand the source!