What's Going to Happen to a Nation of Delusional Fantasists?

At this point, whichever road we choose to go down won't be good.

The line between subjective opinion and consensual reality, between fantasy and truth, is crumbling faster than ever before in the United States. It’s a topic I addressed in a recent article called “What’s Real Anymore?”

Because our private/semi-public musings are fair game for Amazon’s clinically invasive spy bots, a book was recently recommended to me via email (Amazon is all too aware of my susceptibility to sociology and history) called FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire, written by “cultural omnivore,” bestselling novelist, and co-founder of Spy magazine Kurt Andersen. I highly recommend it.

In a scourging of near-Biblical proportions, Andersen applies his lash to our American propensity for self-delusion and the perpetuation of the “fantasy-industrial complex.” If I didn’t live in Europe, I might not see so clearly that he is right. Europe continues to embrace (for the most part) the Rationalism of Hegel and Locke. It’s easier not to be a fantasist when your country’s been invaded, on average, once every hundred years. It’s also one of the reasons why Italy was an early adopter of masks, vaccines, and social distancing. Much, but not all, of the European Union listened to experts in the field of epidemiology. Much of the U.S. got its information from YouTube.

“Fake news,” is not merely a part of our cultural effluvia; it is symptomatic of a far graver disorder, one that’s been with us since the founding of our country. “The myth we’ve constructed says that the first non-native new Americans who mattered were the idealists, the hyper-religious people seeking freedom to believe and act out their passionate, elaborate, all-consuming fantasies,” Andersen writes. “America is now a nation where every individual is gloriously free to construct any version of reality he or she devoutly believes to be true.”

The real-life reductio ad absurdum of America is that if you think it’s true, no matter how ridiculous, it’s true. We are trading in (as Trump mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway said without a trace of irony during a Meet the Press interview) “alternative facts.” America wasn’t founded by pilgrims; it was overrun with Puritans—religious zealots who swore to kill any Catholic or Quaker who dared to land on our shores. Those Protestant-based religions morphed into a hydra of offshoots: Adventism, Anabaptism, Baptists, Calvinists, Lutheranism, Methodism, Pentecostalism, the Charismatics, the Prosperity Gospel mongers, and a handful of Kool-Aid-drinking Jonesian cults, each sect claiming to possess a One Irrefutable Truth.

My, how dangerous that is.

There are 4,000 recognized religions in the world, including the five majors: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Suffice it to say that everyone is personally entitled to their One True God (or gods), but not when they try to speak for the plurality of others. That’s where we run into trouble. The infiltration of Evangelical religious nuttery into politics, women’s reproductive rights, education, and foreign policy has exploded since the 1960s. It is the driving force behind fantasist legislation like Texas’s “Heartbeat bill,” prohibiting abortion six weeks after conception because, contrary to actual science, its proponents believe a four-chambered, autonomously functioning heart is viable at six weeks. This is a patent falsehood with no basis whatsoever in medical fact.

Yet here again we have a small segment of the population creating its own version of reality. The actual reality, a reality they choose to ignore, is that women will continue seeking abortions for unwanted pregnancies regardless of the legal status of the procedure. Banning abortion won’t outlaw abortion. Banning abortion will just kill more women.

This point is brilliantly made by Senator Karen Berg of Kentucky, which you can watch from about the one-minute mark. I strongly urge you to do so.

Author Kurt Andersen successfully makes his point that the fantasy-industrial complex of America came of age in the tumultuous decade of the sixties. A beloved American president was assassinated in 1963. His brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was gunned down in 1968. The Reverend Martin Luther King in 1968. Malcolm X in 1965. There was also a wildly unpopular war. This had an unsettling effect on a nation still resting on its post-WWII laurels. People were looking for answers. From this protean broth came right-wing advocacy groups like the John Bircher Society, whose political influence continues to be felt even today in the rotting carcass of populist Republicanism.

Magical thinking has always been woven into the fabric of human history, but reality as a social construct, as a tableau of cultural myths, is now scary new currency—much like crypto, which is itself a fantasy since it doesn’t actually exist. Per Andersen: “The 1960s gave license to everyone in America to let their freak flags fly—super-selfish Ayn Randians as well as New Age shamans; fundamentalists and evangelicals and charismatics; Scientologists, homeopaths, spiritual cultists, and academic relativists; left-wing and ring-wing conspiracists; war reenactors and those abducted by Satan or extraterrestrials; compulsive pornhounds and gamblers and gun-lovers …. Find your own truth.”

Author Kurt Andersen

Drugs fall firmly into this category of fantasy and escape. In 1965, fewer than a million Americans had smoked pot. By 1972, that number grew to 24 million. Four years later, a third of all Americans were getting high ever day. Magazines like Playboy and Penthouse perpetuated the myth of beautiful, sexually available women. The Harry Potter franchise made us believe we were magic. Fifty Shades fed into the ultimate regressive fantasy of sexual domination by a hot young billionaire. It convinced us that obsession was an exciting upgrade from the more pedestrianism stagecraft of real love.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began, America became a boiling cauldron of conspiracy theories. If Dr. Fauci said one thing, Fox News said another. Masks weren’t prophylactic; they were an infringement on personal freedom. Vaccines had microchips. Animal de-wormer Ivermectin was the true cure. Former President Trump publicly touted the benefits of injecting bleach.

Trump is, perhaps the apotheosis of fantasy overriding facts. He is an unholy amalgam of a long-running TV “reality” show, the WWE (World Wrestling Federation), and his own apocryphal PR. Yet no matter how many lawsuits are filed against him in his capacity as President of the United States, his diehard fantasists will never desert him.

American advertising is, by its very definition, a fantasy, one intended to manipulate people into identifying with its products. A certain type of person (woke, conscientious, aligned with healthy practices) shops at Whole Foods. An entirely different type of person pushes a cart through Walmart.

Instagram is a dangerous fantasy factory, one that directly impacts the mental health of men and women alike. Shamelessly distorted images of Instagram influencers motivate young men to adopt unhealthy standards in order to achieve an “Instabod.” Young women are inundated with digitally altered photos of impossible beauty ideals that have led to unprecedented amounts of depression, self-loathing, self-harm, and eating disorders.

In terms of its global impact, the greatest fantasy of them all is climate change denialism, especially in the United States. Armed with conspiracy factoids and the senseless blatherings of millionaire Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, American armchair denialists refuse to listen to scientific facts. Not so with chemtrails, however, “a conspiracy theory positing the erroneous belief that long-lasting condensation trails are "chemtrails" consisting of chemical or biological agents left in the sky by high-flying aircraft, sprayed for nefarious purposes undisclosed to the general public.” To these unfortunate souls, science is the enemy; Kylie Jenner is not.

United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” What does it augur for a nation that categorically refuses to make the distinction?

Who among us has the courage to actually speak the truth?

I will.

Fifty is not the “new forty.” It’s fifty.

The concept of “God’s truth” is not one thing and remains open to interpretation—4,000 interpretations—or possibly none at all.

Guns are a proven public menace and must be regulated.

Vaccines work.

Racism continues to exist (and along those same lines, Rachel Dolezal, despite her fervent protestations to the contrary, is not Black).

There is no evidence whatsoever of life after death.

Hillary Clinton does not sift children for their chemicals.

The idea of an Illuminati and Freemasons has existed since a 1797 book called Proofs of a Conspiracy, and yet no proofs of either cabal exist.

No hard evidence exists that President Kennedy was assassinated by anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald.

Facts are not open to interpretation. They can, however, be reexamined by qualified individuals when new facts emerge casting doubt on the old ones. “Qualified individuals” do not include do-it-yourselfers or Tucker Carlson.

More than at any other time in our nation’s history, we need to reacquaint ourselves with facts. They are the one thing that might save us from ourselves and from our darker impulses to reinvent the world in our own subverted, fantasist image.

We have no time to lose.

Would you like to chime in here? I hope the answer is yes. Feel free to leave your comments below.