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

by Kurt Andersen

Like Reich with the orgone accumulator, Hubbard put a gadget at the center of his purification scheme—the patented electropsychometer, or e-meter, transistorized and battery-powered, totally 1950s-modern. And as a spiritual leader, he was ahead of his time. Decades before New Age therapists/shamans started hypnotizing people to fantasize past lives, Scientology “auditors” were doing that with e-meters.

IN THE SPRING of 1957, a few months before Wilhelm Reich died in prison, another persecuted, angry, reckless, middle-aged anti-Communist zealot died in a different federal facility, Bethesda Naval Hospital—Senator Joseph McCarthy, the man who had proudly given his name to McCarthyism.

“In the past,” Walt Disney told the congressmen when asked about subversives at his studio, “I had some people that I definitely feel were Communists.” He was still pissed about the five-week strike by his animators six years earlier, which he told the committee had resulted in “smear campaigns” by “Commie periodicals” and “all the Commie groups.” One animator he named, an “artist in my plant,” had been “the real brains of” the strike. “I looked into his record and I found that … he had no religion.” A congressman asked about two other animators who’d been leaders of the strike. “In my opinion,” Disney said, “they are Communists. No one has any way of proving those things.”

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.

Graham’s crusades went national, attracting phenomenally huge crowds everywhere. He pushed no particular denomination and avoided doctrinal niggling. He declined to get into disputes over exactly how and when God created everything, and he downplayed the end-time. He carved out a new Christian space between liberals and fundamentalists: theologically backward and enthusiastic compared to the mainline Protestant denominations but apparently not too deranged.

American go-getterism was also ripe for a certain kind of Christianizing in the 1950s. For two decades, the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had been one of New York City’s big-deal pastors, with a fancy Presbyterian church right off Fifth Avenue, CEO pals, and his own vaguely Protestant radio show and national magazine. In 1955 he published The Power of Positive Thinking, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for three years.

One Saturday four decades later I went again, invited to give a talk about the 1960s. Most of the audience that morning consisted of people older than me who probably still thought of themselves as members of the Woodstock Generation. During the question and answer session, a bearded man with white hair pleadingly asked why, did I suppose, had the revolution they’d imagined been won in so many social and cultural zones—civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, natural foods and medicine, millions of old guys like him wearing jeans and long hair—but lost in the economic realm, with free-market ideas victorious?

Our Woodstock-branded popular understanding of what grew out of the 1960s is selective, cherry-picked to please and flatter one side and appall the other. People on the left “still swear by the values of the ’60s,” Charles Reich, author of The Greening of America, recently said. They focus only on the 1960s legacies of freedom that they define as progress. And people on the political and cultural right still demonize the decade from around 1963 to 1973 as the source of everything they loathe.

A kind of unspoken grand bargain was forged between the anti-Establishment and the Establishment. Going forward, individuals would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes, or social opprobrium. “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.

The hundreds of older Beats begat thousands of beatniks. But in the 1960s and ’70s, the whole baby boom generation came of age. Suddenly America had more teenagers than ever before, and a much larger fraction of young people living together on college campuses, plus prosperity, mass media reflecting the new youthquake back to the youth, and an escalating war that teenagers were drafted to fight.fn1 The American bohemian idea could roll out and cross over and scale, from the angsty Beat beta version to the 1960s mass-market viral app fully compatible with the ever-expanding fantasy-industrial complex.

Esalen was the center of the cyclone of the youth rebellion. It was one of the central places, like Mecca for the Islamic culture. Esalen was a pilgrimage center for hundreds and thousands of youth interested in some sense of transcendence, breakthrough consciousness, LSD, the sexual revolution, encounter, being sensitive, finding your body, yoga—all of these things were at first filtered into the culture through Esalen. By 1966, ’67 and ’68, Esalen was making a world impact. At that time, many people came here looking for … the golden elixir.

This is not overstatement. Essentially everything that became known by the 1970s as New Age was invented, developed, or popularized at the Esalen Institute.

Esalen developed and popularized a wholesale reinvention of psychology and medicine and philosophy driven by a suspicion of science and reason and an embrace of magical thinking (also massage, hot baths, sex, and sex in hot baths). Esalen was a headquarters for a new religion of no religion, as they came to say, and of “science” containing next to no science.

And within the psychiatric profession itself, this idea had two influential proponents, who both published unorthodox manifestos at the beginning of the decade—R. D. Laing (The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness) and Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness). “Madness,” Laing wrote when Esalen was new, “is potentially liberation and renewal.” Psychosis and schizophrenia are a “potentially natural process that we do not allow to happen,” “an initiation ceremonial,” and a “natural way of healing our appalling state of alienation called normality.” The Esalen founders were big Laing fans, and the institute became a hotbed for the idea that madness was just an alternative and often superior way of perceiving reality.

That line is from The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, published three weeks after the Woodstock Festival in 1969. Its author was Theodore Roszak, age thirty-five, a professor in the Bay Area, who thereby coined the word counterculture. Roszak, thoughtful and expert in history and literature, spent 270 pages, more or less reasonably and rationally, glorying in the younger generation’s “brave” rejection of expertise, rationality, “all that our culture values as ‘reason’ and ‘reality.’”

THE GREAT CONTEMPORANEOUS firsthand account of this 1960s, I think, is The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s book about Kesey and his acid-dropping Merry Prankster adventures. Eight years later, in the mid-1970s, as the Big Bang of subjectivity and hedonism blasted its new elements and energies through the American universe, Wolfe memorialized the larger transformation. He wrote an essay in New York magazine that’s remembered today for coining a term, the Me Decade, still used as a catchphrase for the touchy-feely narcissism of the 1970s’ newfangled self-improvement schemes.

Real scientists got caught up in the mysticism as well. In 1965 a chemist designing life-detection instruments for NASA’s Viking mission to Mars had a revelation: the entire Earth, he became convinced, its atmosphere and forests and seas and creatures, is a single organism perfectly and mysteriously tweaked to produce life—what he called “the Gaia hypothesis,” Gaia being his name from Greek mythology for “this creature.” He proceeded to develop the idea in collaboration with a microbiologist, publishing scientific papers and then in the 1970s a popular Oxford University Press book called Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.fn4 Gaia, he writes, “is now through us awake and aware of herself.” And so on.

James remained an empiricist and a rationalist, but he had come to understand the allure and significance of radically different, entirely subjective modes of perception. I realized that he’d figured out in the 1890s the sense of existential fluidity that was in the 1970s quickly becoming an everyday principle, the way modern Americans were supposed to think, whether or not they were high. I have my truth, you have your truth, we each have our truth.

In a nutshell: all beliefs and approximations of truth, science as much as any fable or religion, are mere stories devised by people to serve their own needs or interests. Reality itself is a social construction, a tableau of useful or wishful myths that members of a society or tribe have been persuaded to believe. The borders between fiction and nonfiction are permeable, maybe nonexistent. Superstitions, magical thinking, and delusions—any of those may be as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science. The takeaway: Believe whatever you want, because it’s pretty much all equally true and false.

It really got started right at the beginning of the 1960s. In 1961 the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization, echoing the new skepticism of the concept of mental illness, and by the 1970s he argued that rationality itself is a coercive “regime of truth,” oppression by other means.

Meanwhile in 1966, over in sociology, a pair of professors in their thirties published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field.

In 1968 the University of California Press published the master’s degree dissertation of a UCLA anthropology student who’d gone to Arizona to conduct a field study of southwestern Indians’ medicinal plants. In the Yuma bus depot, the student, Carlos Castaneda, met an old guy named Juan Matus, who turned out to be a Toltec sorcerer. Matus fed him hallucinogens—jimsonweed, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms—and told him he would reveal the “secrets that make up the lot of a man of knowledge.” Under the influence of drugs, Castaneda says he turned into a crow, talked to coyotes, and communed with the spirits. The M.A. thesis became The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, which was followed in 1971 and 1972 by two more bestsellers about Don Juan.

I STILL REMEMBER the day at the end of sixth grade when I came home from school and saw the cover of the latest issue of Time, with no picture, just huge red letters against a plain black background: IS GOD DEAD? I didn’t read it at the time, but it pleased me. Finally, the official publication of upper-middle Americanism was ratifying what the smart people knew but were too polite to say in public: in the modern world, religion had reached its sell-by date. That 1966 story, written by a pious Roman Catholic who later became an editor of mine at Time, is a rueful, reasonable, intellectually subtle fifty-eight-hundred-word essay on metaphysics in the modern age.

THE “CONSERVATIVE EVANGELICALS,” as fundamentalists were now calling themselves, doubled down on their literal readings of the Bible, on Heaven and Hell being as real as Disneyland and Las Vegas, and on the end of the world and Jesus’s return coming soon. Because it was the 1960s, that dogma was about to get even more amazing.

But then in 1961 a pair of diehards, a Bible teacher at a fundamentalist seminary and a civil engineering professor, published Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications.

As the new modes of Christian hysteria boomed, Americans lost interest in the reasonable and nebulous on Sunday mornings. The Southern Baptists became the biggest American denomination around 1965 and kept growing.

At his second National Prayer Breakfast as president, in 1978, he remarked that “the words ‘born again’ were [now] vividly impressed on the consciousness of many Americans who were not familiar with their meaning.” Indeed so. A decade earlier, if a president had been Carteresque in this way—indeed, if any famous or powerful nonpreacher had been so religiously out of the closet—most people would’ve been weirded out.

But then during and after the 1960s and ’70s, supernatural beliefs intensified, proliferated, and achieved permanent traction. This time as never before, America’s renegade magical-thinking extremists won. False ideas from the past about the primordial past (creationism) suddenly had a huge dedicated constituency, as did wild ideas from the past about the predestined future (the end-time). And the conviction that the present is just like the magical past of Jesus’s time—tongues, faith healing, personal messages from Heaven—spread like mad.

Both countercultural types were present at the March on the Pentagon to Confront the War Makers, the remarkable protests in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1967, as the war approached its ferocious peak. In his book about those spectacles, The Armies of the Night, forty-four-year-old Norman Mailer wrote of “the generation [that] believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, in revolution,” how “now suddenly an entire generation of acid-heads seemed to have said goodbye to easy visions of heaven.” He described chants—“‘Out, demons, out—back to darkness, ye servants of Satan’”—and the circle of hundreds of protesters intending “to form a ring of exorcism sufficiently powerful to raise the Pentagon three hundred feet.” They were hoping the building would “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this levitation. At that point the war in Vietnam would end.”

Then, kaboom, the Big Bang. Anything and everything became believable. Reason was chucked. Dystopian and utopian fantasies seemed plausible. Mailer had written that the New Left, feeling “the militancy of the blacks as a reproof,” were “these mad middle-class children with … their lust for apocalypse.” SDS became the New Left institution, and in 1969 its most apocalyptic and charismatic faction, calling itself Weatherman, split off and got all the attention. Its members believed they and other young white Americans, aligned with black insurgents, would be the vanguard in a new civil war. They issued statements about “the need for armed struggle as the only road to revolution” and how “dope is one of our weapons.… Guns and grass are united in the youth underground.” And then they went to work making and setting off bombs. Some got a lot of attention—such as the ones in 1970 at New York police headquarters, in 1971 at the U.S. Capitol, and in 1972 at the Pentagon—but during an average week in 1969 and 1970, at least ten bombs were set off by the far left in America.

It wasn’t only political extremists who became unhinged. In the 1970s the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency set up the infamous Project Star Gate to see if they could gather intelligence and conduct espionage by means of ESP.fn1

THE FANTASY FAR right had its own glorious 1960s moment. Right after Senator McCarthy died, one of his wealthy supporters, Robert Welch, founded the John Birch Society. According to Welch, both Republican and Democratic cabinets included “conscious, deliberate, dedicated agent[s] of the Soviet conspiracy” determined to create “a world-wide police state, absolutely and brutally governed from the Kremlin.”

As a result, more Americans than ever would become reflexive conspiracy theorists. Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow, a complicated global fantasy about the interconnections among militarists and Illuminati and hashish, and the validity of paranoid thinking, won the 1974 National Book Award.

A revived will to believe in all-powerful conspiracies spread and grew from the 1960s on, an invasive species that became a permanent feature of the American mental landscape—like a new superkudzu that thrived everywhere, not just in the Southern heat and humidity. Within a few decades, the conviction that a web of villainous elites covertly seeks to impose a malevolent global regime made its way from the lunatic right to the mainstream.

Gun nut became a phrase in the 1960s because gun nuts really didn’t exist until then—and they emerged on the far right and left simultaneously. The John Birch Society, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers were our first modern gun rights absolutists. The Panthers’ self-conception, as a heavily armed and well-regulated militia ready to defend Oakland’s black community against the police, led quickly to a California law, sponsored by a Republican and signed by Governor Reagan, that made it illegal to carry loaded guns in public. Huey Newton, twenty-five-year-old cofounder of the Panthers, condemned it as part of “the plot to disarm” Americans.

AMERICANS FELT NEWLY entitled to believe absolutely anything, to mix up fiction and reality at will. I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking suddenly unloosed.

The couple were undoubtedly sincere believers. The sincerely credulous are also perfect suckers, and in the late 1960s a convicted thief and embezzler named Erich von Däniken decided to take advantage of as many Americans as possible. Chariots of the Gods? posited that extraterrestrials had come to Earth thousands of years ago to help build the Egyptian pyramids, Stonehenge, and the giant stone heads on Easter Island.

THE LAST FOUR chapters were about how Americans suddenly ramped up their beliefs that all sorts of iffy and unreal things were actually, factually real and true. This chapter is about what happened in the realms that are supposed to be fictional—movies, novels, Disney World, Dungeons and Dragons, war reenactments, pop culture. And how in the 1960s and ’70s we also began massively expanding the zone that combined fantasy with everyday reality—by making downtowns and suburbs more like Disneyland, theming restaurants, normalizing cosmetic surgery and gambling and pornography and so much more, turning American life into an exceptional hybrid of the authentic and make-believe.

A little over a decade later, I remember very clearly the moment when I realized fantasy would now rule pop culture. The first Star Wars, which a majority of Americans paid to see, was an epochal success for many reasons. But one of those reasons was that it wasn’t just science fiction but had a spiritual fantasy at its core—the Force, the energy field that turned physics into metaphysics and vice versa, giving Jedis their telepathic and telekinetic powers. A mélange of affiliated New Age notions had just been mainstreamed, making 1977 the perfect moment to introduce an ecumenical new mysticism to the most religious rich country on Earth.

As everything started morphing into entertainment, more of America became DIY mini-Disneylands.

Self-conscious fan fiction was another 1960s invention that permitted consumers of fiction to enter fictions. It started with Star Trek. During the show’s first season in 1966, young Americans began publishing homemade magazines that included their stories about the Enterprise and the Federation. Four years later, after the original show was canceled, there were dozens of such ’zines, and soon many more. Chekov and McCoy and Scotty and Spock actually corresponded with the ’zines—only the actors, but still—and appeared in costume at fan conventions. And in their stories, the young amateurs often included heroic and beloved and very young new characters—that is, fictional versions of themselves having adventures (and sometimes sex) in the twenty-third century with the Star Trek characters. Which became a trope in all fan-fiction genres as they emerged. Before that moment, there had not been hordes of people living in their own private Disneylands or inserting themselves into familiar fiction and sharing their stories with the world.

IN 1967 YOUNG Tom Stoppard had his breakthrough hit, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a brilliant play about actors playing characters playing actors playing characters, and the amusing, confusing jumble of fiction and reality. Stoppard knew he was onto something new and important. “I have a feeling,” he said at the time, “that almost everybody today is more trying to match himself up with an external image he has of himself, almost as if he’s seen himself on a screen.” Exactly.

A new national fantasy of permanent youthfulness kicked in. No matter how old you got, you could continue dressing like a kid. You could continue riding your skateboard, continue listening to rock music and smoking pot, continue obsessing over ever-more-amazing ice cream and cookies, continue watching cartoons and comic book movies and reading comic books, continue going to Disneyland.

It was in the 1960s that we first learned of our inner child, that we should each attend to his or her wishes and aspire to be more childlike as adults. That was one of the heartfelt, enduring takeaways of the era, part of nearly all the therapeutic and pop-psychology strands spun out of Esalen and its kin. If it feels good, do it: invented by Americans barely past childhood, that motto made the inner child idea actionable, and although the phrase faded quickly, the ethos lived on.

IT IS NOT much of a stretch to say that in the 1980s and ’90s, our country became an amazing coast-to-coast theme park, open twenty-four hours. The boundaries between entertainment and the rest of life were definitively dismantled. America became addicted to the make-believe of drag—by which I mean everything from new buildings meant to look old or foreign to the geeks at Comic-Cons and Burning Mans dressing up as fictional beings.

As I’ve described, America’s suburbanization after World War II amounted to the first step in the absorption of real estate development into the fantasy-industrial complex. Then came the theming of suburban chain restaurants and the rest of retail, followed by nostalgically reinvented downtowns.

At the other end of Nevada in the 1990s, a different adult fantasy theme park, chic and singular, was established for one week a year—Burning Man. On the Fantasyland family tree, Burning Man has deep roots in the late 1800s (the original world’s fairs), but the main trunk is from the 1960s (hallucinogens, happenings, be-ins, Woodstock, costumes-as-clothes, worship of nature and the primitive), and adjacent stalks from the 1980s (live action role-playing) and ’90s (cosplay).

Not so long ago, American adults never dressed up in costumes, certainly not as an annual ritual. When my daughters reached their early twenties, obsessing more than ever over their Halloween costumes, they were shocked when I told them that. The change happened recently, and it is another small expression of the new protocols. In the 1980s, after the Halloween parades invented by freshly out gay people in San Francisco and New York, dressing up on Halloween became a thing straight adults routinely did in every corner of America.

One of the points of LARPing is to remain in character, to be a fictional being for hours or days at a time. LARPers have a disparaging phrase for real life, mundania, and people who never LARP are called mundies, like muggles in Harry Potter.

MIDDLE-AGED PEOPLE WEARING Halloween costumes or attending Burning Man are expressions of a phenomenon I described earlier—the commitment of Americans, beginning with the baby boom generation, to a fantasy of remaining forever young. The treacly term kids of all ages had popped up when baby boomers were kids. But its currency skyrocketed during the 1980s and ’90s, when American adults, like no adults before them—but like all who followed—began playing videogames and fantasy sports, dressing like kids, grooming themselves and even getting surgery to look more like kids. It’s what I call the Kids “R” Us Syndrome. It became pandemic and permanent. It ranges from the benign to the unfortunate.