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February 26 - March 26, 2020
The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control.
In fact, it began as multiple fantasies, each embraced around 1600 by people so convinced of their thrilling, wishful fictions that most of them abandoned everything—friends, families, jobs, good sense, England, the known world—to enact their dreams or die trying. A lot of them died trying.
American civilization [has] been shaped by the fact that there was a kind of natural selection here of those people who were willing to believe in advertising.”
Western civilization’s first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.
But rationalists and cynics—that is, most modern scholars—are comfortable imputing only rational and cynical motives.
Among this hard core were a pair of ministers and their congregants in and around the perfectly named village of Scrooby.
But changing where they lived didn’t change who they were—sticklers and malcontents.
Four years later the several dozen Leiden ultra-Puritans sailed away from corrupt, contentious Europe for this latest Edenic piece of the New World, to create their New Jerusalem in New England. In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.
A religion that doesn’t get the believer’s blood pumping right now can be like a marriage without sex.
After his very first sermon, at age twenty-one, he wrote in his diary that “most of those present seemed struck, and”—1735 humblebrag—“a complaint has been made to the Bishop that I drove fifteen mad at the first sermon.”
George Washington “is an unbeliever,” Jefferson once reckoned, and only “has divines constantly about him because he thinks it right to keep up appearances.”
When somebody asked Alexander Hamilton why the Framers hadn’t mentioned God in the Constitution, his answer was deadpan hilarious: “We forgot.”
But America was different. We had got started as a land of excitable escapees (and of hustlers and the hustled) determined to spread and devise fantastic new truths, and those origins defined us.
On the frontier, nobody much objected to one more freak.
God had entered people.
Hot
Put another way: the Book of Mormon is more than twice as long as The Hobbit but not as long as The Lord of the Rings.
from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.
that land in central Nebraska—the middle of nowhere then, the middle of nowhere still—had increased in value a dozen-fold in the previous dozen years.
Rude but fair
Honest Abe, conspiracy theorist.
(Actually, Mr. Scopes had been out sick the day his class was taught evolution, but…whatever.)
“We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”
“a halo seemed to surround her head and face, and she began speaking in the Chinese language and was unable to speak English for three days.” Although a local Chinese person said that what she spoke wasn’t Chinese at all, the believers believed, and soon more Topekans, including the minister and his clerical peers, were excitedly speaking dozens of different made-up foreign languages.
Going to the movies wasn’t like reading a novel at home, privately imagining a fictional world, but more like going to church—quietly gathering for an hour or two in a special hall every week with a crowd of neighbors to experience a magical, dreamlike virtual reality simultaneously.
In 1900 only two of the twenty largest cities, New Orleans and San Francisco, had temperatures that seldom got below freezing. Today, fourteen of the twenty largest cities are places where there ain’t no snow and the sun shines every day.
Another moral of the Oz story, what the con man/wizard teaches the lion and scarecrow and tin man, is an underlying theme of this book: for Americans, wishfully believing that something is true, even when it’s false, makes it effectively true.
who finally concluded Reich was nuts: he “salutes in the genital orgasm,” Freud wrote a colleague, as “the antidote to every neurosis.” He got nuttier,
Lolz
It was not true. But the press continued covering the allegation—he was a U.S. senator!—and it became the most consequential piece of fake news in American history.*5
To allow the enormously influential medium of television to be used week after week to allow undocumented ‘miracles’…seems contrary to the spirit…of the industry’s code governing mature and responsible broadcasting.”
“Today the advent of McCarthyism has thrown real fear into the hearts of some,” a young Washington reporter wrote a few months after McCarthy’s speech in 1950, “fear of what a demagogue can do to America while the press helplessly gives its sometimes unwilling cooperation….But who knows? One greater than McCarthy may come.”
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.
In 1965 fewer than a million Americans had smoked pot; in 1972 the number was twenty-four million.
