![]() H ow widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. ![]() We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. We believe that the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous and shocking truths from us, concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of aids, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.Īnd this was all true before we became familiar with the terms post-factual and post-truth, before we elected a president with an astoundingly open mind about conspiracy theories, what’s true and what’s false, the nature of reality. ![]() If the 1960s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it. Much more than the other billion or so people in the developed world, we Americans believe- really believe-in the supernatural and the miraculous, in Satan on Earth, in reports of recent trips to and from heaven, and in a story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation-small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies-every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. What’s problematic is going overboard-letting the subjective entirely override the objective thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. View MoreĮach of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. And if the ’60s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. For all the fun, and all the many salutary effects of the 1960s-the main decade of my childhood-I saw that those years had also been the big-bang moment for truthiness. America had changed since I was young, when truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made any sense as jokes. I don’t trust books-they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen-the gut.” Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. “Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. ![]() In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. W hen did America become untethered from reality? Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.”
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