In the beginning there was denial. And then, thanks to Sigmund Freud and big tobacco and all-politics-is-personal, came denialism. The organized rejection of reality in favor of fantasy. That all-consuming industry of denying science, denying experts, denying truth itself. The world is flat. The holocaust never happened. 911 was an inside job. Vaccines cause autism. COVID-19 is a hoax. The election was stolen. We don’t want to die, so we pretend we won’t. And when you get right down to it, if we can deny our own deaths, we can deny anything.
