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August 11, 2020 - January 13, 2021
If one has enough belief in the supernatural plan, if one’s personal faith is strong enough, false prophecies are just unfortunate miscalculations that don’t falsify anything. If you’re fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction.
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.
Here in improvisation nation,
Yet
Thinking on trumpkins and non-
I am sad sometimes with politics cuz my old fam says things to disparage my non-christian friends, and vice versa. Difference is, my non-christian friends I can have interesting convos with. They judge me less, there's no passive aggression or holier-than-thouism. It seems the more confident one is about something, the more danger they present.
Darby more or less invented the idea of “the rapture,” a moment just before all hell breaks loose when Jesus will arrive incognito and take Christians away to heavenly safety to wait out the earthly horrors.
Although the Catholic Tocqueville didn’t attend a camp meeting during his tour, he noted in Democracy in America that “strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”
Arthur C. Clarke’s famous third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
the big American idea that opinions and feelings are the same as facts.
Our moxie always came in the two basic types. We possessed the unexciting virtues embodied by the Puritans and their secular descendants like Ben Franklin: steady hard work, frugality, sobriety, and common sense. And then there’s our wilder, faster, and looser side, that packet of attributes that also makes us American: impatient, overexcited gamblers with a weakness for stories too good to be true.
consider Protestantism—an alternative system of truth-telling to replace the Vatican conspiracy’s false and corrupted version. The Puritans, oppressed by conniving elites, developed a self-identity focused on victimhood that sent them into American self-exile. When the Dissenters’ new American society promptly produced its own dissenters, the subversives and oppressors each saw the other as a conspiracy.
Freud called displacement—in place of anxiety about the looming national crackup over slavery, it was simpler and easier to vent about imaginary fears.
Each side was sincerely convinced that it was carrying out God’s orders. In the North and the South, soldiers and ministers and civilians believed and said again and again, “God is on our side.”
John Muir, the nature-worshipping American who actually walked the walk a generation later, mocked Thoreau as a poseur pretending to “see forests in orchards and patches of huckleberry brush” a “mere saunter” from Concord.
Thoreau epitomized this particular have-your-cake-and-eat-it American fantasy, a life in harmony with nature as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.
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.
the innovation of the medicine show was closer to that of the advertising-dependent penny press: pay nothing to be entertained by musicians, magicians, comedians, and flea circuses in exchange for watching and listening to interstitial live advertisements for dubious medical products.
Christianity—purely Protestant, ultra-orthodox, and insular, with church and community practically synonymous.
The Bible was an extraordinary construction, divinely inspired but the product of fallible ancient authors.
Indeed, watching movies makes it seem “as if reality has lost its own emphasis,” that the “outer world…has been freed from space, time and causality.”
Loathing cities had always been a defining American impulse, but as cities rapidly filled up with millions of black and Catholic and Jewish and otherwise not-quite-white immigrants, a lot of native-born people found cities even more loathsome. So in addition to nostalgia for the undefiled green republic, suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people.
invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semiretired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary, or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb.
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crazy joyriders.”
it became the most consequential piece of fake news in American history.
what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same coins minted around 1967. All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more. Anything goes meant anything went.
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.
entrenched commitment to an egocentric and cerebral mode of consciousness.” Although thanks, science and technology, for making “economic security…something [youth] can take for granted,” because “we have an economy of cybernated abundance that does not need their labor.” Oh, the cybernated abundance of Big Rock Candy Mountain! He disparages previous American fantasists—“Theosophists and fundamentalists, spiritualists and flat-earthers, occultists and Satanists”—yet in the same sentence pivots to extol the current ones, welcomes the “radical rejection of science and
homeopathy recovered from its own near-death experience, first in California and the Pacific Northwest, then everywhere. During the 1970s, U.S. sales of homeopathy’s placebo medicines increased more than tenfold.
You and I now have astounding access to information and ideas and cultural artifacts and people. In every pocket there is now a library, a phonograph, a radio, a movie theater, and a television, as well as a post office, a printing press, a telegraph, a still and video camera, a recording studio, a navigation system, and a radio and TV station. It is advanced technology indistinguishable from magic.
“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.
Instead, think of American Protestantism as a Venn diagram of four highly overlapping blobs—evangelical, fundamentalist, charismatic, and mainline.
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.
Our “high percentage of doubters of Darwinism” is because “this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field.”
Aesthetics and the illusions of pastoral life aside, they wound up creating a highly problematic national dependence on cars and oil, made commutes too long and too many good jobs too far away from where workers live, and encouraged people to become unnecessarily overweight and therefore unnecessarily expensive for society to keep alive.
“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.”
Another is the fantasy that patriots will be obliged to become terrorist rebels, as Americans did in 1776 and 1861, this time to defend liberty against the U.S. government before it fully reveals itself as a tyrannical fascist-socialist-globalist regime and tries to confiscate every private gun.
He hired actors to play enthusiastic supporters at the kickoff of his candidacy.
And it has all worked for him, because a critical mass of Americans is eager to believe almost any conspiracy theory, no matter how implausible, as long as it jibes with their opinions and feelings.
“From the point of view of political psychology,” the University of Connecticut philosophy professor Michael Lynch explains, “the more blatant the contradiction, the better….If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really meant….The most disturbing power of contradiction is that its repeated use can dull our sensitivity to the value of truth itself.”
“Do you think that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?” the anchor of ABC World News Tonight asked President Trump. “No,” he replied, “not at all! Not at all—because many people feel the same way that I do.”
My skepticism is profound (Enlightenment) except concerning my own beliefs (Protestant).
Most of the Americans who have recently been most certain that America is both wrecked and the best place ever call themselves Republicans.
The zone between make-believe and true was expanded and became a quintessential product of entrepreneurial America.
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.
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:
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
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out….I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.
make America reality-based again.
