History is a labyrinth circling back on itself. This explains a metamorphosis in America that has sent the country reeling into intellectual dystopia, the national mind untethered from objective reality and cast into a nothingness of its own devising.
“Facts,” John Adams famously declared, “are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
But facts no longer are stubborn things in America. Facts are dead things in a place where everyone’s reality is their own. Wishes, inclinations and dictates of passion are everything. If one presents facts another does not prefer, those facts are deemed fake and summarily dismissed. Swept from beneath us has been the footing upon which discourse once was founded. Reason is for sheep.
In this world, things that happened did not and things that work do not. Occurrences are not events as they unfolded but events as one perceives them. Cause has no precise effect but only the effect one believes it has, or perhaps no effect at all. Declarations to the contrary represent not rationality but weakness of will.
Not that many people especially care, but how did we get here? Kurt Andersen, writing for The Atlantic in 2017, offered a possible answer. In a piece fittingly titled “How America Lost Its Mind,” he traces the roots of our present drift to the 1960s, when the country suffered what he describes as “a national nervous breakdown.” He adds, “we are probably mistaken to consider ourselves over it.”
Following that systemic disruption in the national psyche, “America has mutated into Fantasyland.”
“[B]eing American means we can believe anything we want,” Andersen writes, “that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.”
This mindset bloomed in the 1960s, Andersen explains, when the counterculture emerged and social mores were dismantled. By the end of the decade, “reason and rationality were over.” This initially was embraced by the left, by those such as former Supreme Court clerk Charles Reich and others turning on, tuning in and dropping out.
Reich’s “wishful error,” Andersen writes, “was believing that once the tidal surge of new sensibility brought down the flood walls, the waters would flow in only one direction, carving out a peaceful, cooperative, groovy new continental utopia, hearts and minds changed like his, all of America Berkeleyized and Vermontified.”
Now, one of the left and Vermont’s own, Sen. Bernie Sanders, is left amusingly attempting to persuade West Virginians, of all people, to compel one of their own, Sen. Joe Manchin, to support President Joe Biden’s so-called Build Back Better package, valued at $3.5 trillion. How one views that spending monolith depends not on reason but upon which side one stands.
Alas, it has not happened as Reich envisioned. When one side abandons order, logic or right things, a hazard prevails that the opposing side one day will do the same. Forsake rationality in the name of a good high or free love and one risks the other side forsaking rationality for ulterior purposes, ranging from merely self-aggrandizing to nefarious. This is how a country wakes up to a reality-show president.
It also is a factor in the systemic decimation of what’s left of journalism in America. Notice how many of the institutions, entities and public figures journalists cover are staffed by their own public relations armies. They are their own media, telling their own stories, stories shaped not by what is but by what they want told.
Those who report based on what is, who attempt objectivity and context, are apt to be accused of fake news, taking cheap shots or being on the take. After all, the truth isn’t what is, it’s what one decides it is and wants everyone else to believe it is. To purvey that kind of truth, failings, misdeeds and other wrong actions must be concealed.
From the origins of recorded humanity, people in power and people of means, no matter their stated ideology (frequently different from what they actually believe), have engaged in obfuscation while seeking to portray themselves in the most flattering light. This is human nature. But the present day facilitates the resultant fallacies to an extent unrivaled in American history.
A once-great country winds now through a new labyrinth circling back on itself, subject only to the fleeting dictates of manufactured truths.