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

by Kurt Andersen

In politics and elsewhere, this childish style often goes hand in hand with childlike beliefs—that is, fantasies. 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 running from delusional to rational. 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 ...