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Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History Hardcover – September 5, 2017
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How did we get here?
In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw
“[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday
“Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice
“A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian
“This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateSeptember 5, 2017
- Dimensions6.35 x 1.4 x 9.51 inches
- ISBN-101400067219
- ISBN-13978-1400067213
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian
“A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.”—Kirkus Reviews
“A provocative new study of America’s cultural history . . . In this absorbing, must-read polemic, Andersen exhaustively chronicles a development eating away at the very foundation of Americanism.”—Newsday
“Andersen exhaustively explores with wit and extensive research.”—HuffPost
“A staggering amount of research that’s both compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice
“A stunning, sweeping explanation of how we got to Trump . . . the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC
“This is a blockbuster of a book. Kurt Andersen is a dazzling writer and a perceptive student of the many layers of American life. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw
“This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump. It’s an eye-opening history filled with brilliant insights, a saga of how we were always susceptible to fantasy, from the Puritan fanatics to the talk-radio and Internet wackos who mix show business, hucksterism, and conspiracy theories. Even the parts you think you know already are put into an eye-opening context.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
“Kurt Andersen is America’s voice of reason. What is he—Canadian? The people who should read this book won’t—because it’s a book—but reality-based citizens will still get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.”—Sarah Vowell
“Fantasyland presents the very best kind of idea—one that, in retrospect, seems obvious, but that took a seer like Kurt Andersen to piece together. The thinking and the writing are both dazzling; it is at once a history lesson and an oh-so-modern cri de coeur; it’s an absolute joy to read and will leave your brain dancing with excitement long after you’re done.”—Stephen Dubner
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This book has been germinating for a long time. In the late 1990s I wrote a few articles pointing toward it—about American politics morphing into show business and baby boomers trying to stay forever young, about un- true conspiracy theories being mainstreamed and the explosion of talk radio as it became more and more about the hosts’ wild opinions. In 1999 I published a novel about a TV producer who created two groundbreaking shows— a police drama in which the fictional characters interact with real police arresting real criminals, and a news program featuring scenes of the anchors’ private lives.
But the ideas and arguments really started crystallizing in 2004 and 2005. First President George W. Bush’s political mastermind Karl Rove introduced the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People “in the reality- based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He said it with a sense of humor, but he was also deadly serious. A year later The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of his first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing populist character, per- formed a feature called The Word in which he riffed on a phrase. “Truthiness,” he said.
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. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. 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. 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.
Whoa, yes, I thought: exactly. America had changed in this particular, peculiar way, I realized. Until the 2000s, truthiness and reality-based community wouldn’t have made much sense as jokes.
My understanding of how this change occurred became clearer a few years later, when I started work on a novel about a group of kids who in the early 1960s role-play James Bond stories, and then in 1968, as college students, undertake a real-life Bond-like antigovernment plot. During the 1960s, reality and fantasy blurred problematically, for my characters and for plenty of real Americans. In the course of researching and thinking through that story, I came to understand the era and its impacts in a new way. For all the fun, and all the various positive effects of the social and cultural upheavals, I saw that it was also the Big Bang moment for truthiness. And if the 1960s amounted to a national nervous breakdown, we are mistaken to consider ourselves over it, because what people say about recovery is true: you’re never really cured.
I realized too that this complicated American phenomenon I was trying to figure out had been not just decades but centuries in the making. In order to understand our weakness for fantasy of all kinds, I needed to follow the tendrils and branches and roots further back—all the way back, to America’s beginnings.
You’re not going to agree with me about all the various mental habits and beliefs and behaviors I classify here as imaginary or fantastical. You may find me too judgmental about matters of deep personal conviction. As I pass by fish in barrels, I will often shoot them. But I don’t consider all religion or all alternative belief systems or all conspiracy theories or all impossible dreams misguided. Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense.
What’s problematic is going overboard, letting the subjective entirely override the objective, people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, every individual free to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. 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, each of us free to reinvent himself by imagination and will. In America those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts.
Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the last half-century, 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. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become. The cliché would be the frog in the gradually warming pot, oblivious to its doom until too late.*
Much more than the other billion or two people in the rich world, we Americans believe—really believe—in the supernatural and miraculous, in Satan on Earth now, reports of recent trips to and from Heaven, and a several- thousand-year-old story of life’s instantaneous creation several thousand years ago.
At the turn of the millennium, our financial industry fantasized that risky debt was no longer risky, so many tens of millions of Americans fantasized that they could live like rich people, given our fantasy that real estate would always and only increase in value.
We believe the government and its co-conspirators are hiding all sorts of monstrous truths from us—concerning assassinations, extraterrestrials, the genesis of AIDS, the 9/11 attacks, the dangers of vaccines, and so much more.
We stockpile guns because we fantasize about our pioneer past, or in anticipation of imaginary shootouts with thugs and terrorists. We acquire military costumes and props in order to pretend we’re soldiers—or elves or zombies—fighting battles in which nobody dies, and enter fabulously realistic virtual worlds to do the same.
And that was all 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.
We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole.
America has mutated into Fantasyland.
How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of people’s beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think, but from reams of research, drilling down and cross-checking and distilling data from the last twenty years, a rough, useful census of American belief, credulity, and delusion does emerge.
By my reckoning, the more or less solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, believe with some certainty that CO2 emissions from cars and factories are the main cause of Earth’s warming. Only a third are sure the tale of creation in Genesis isn’t a literal, factual account. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts.
Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” At least half are absolutely certain Heaven exists, ruled over by a personal God—not some vague force or universal spirit but a guy. More than a third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists, government, and journalists.
A third believe that our earliest ancestors were humans just like humans today; that the government has, in league with the pharmaceutical industry, hidden evidence of “natural” cancer cures; that extraterrestrials have recently visited (or now reside on) Earth.
A quarter believe vaccines cause autism and that Donald Trump won the popular vote in the 2016 general election. A quarter believe that our previous president was (or is?) the Antichrist. A quarter believe in witches. Remark- ably, no more than one in five Americans believe the Bible consists mainly of legends and fables—around the same number who believe that “the media or the government adds secret mind-controlling technology to television broad- cast signals” and that U.S. officials were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.
When I say that a third believe X or a quarter believe Y, it’s important to understand that those are different thirds and quarters of the U.S. population. Various fantasy constituencies overlap and feed each other—for instance, belief in extraterrestrial visitation and abduction can lead to belief in vast government cover-ups, which can lead to belief in still more wide-ranging plots and cabals, which can jibe with a belief in an impending Armageddon involving Jesus. Fantasyland operates like the European Union, a collection of disparate domains of various sizes overlaid with a Schengen Area that al- lows citizens of any of the dozens of lands to travel freely among the others, the way Hungarians and Maltese can visit France or Iceland at will.
And like intra-European antipathies, the mutual contempt among Fantasyland regions can be as intense as their contempt for the reality-based. To many evangelicals, Pentecostals are heretics, and to evangelicals and Pentecostals, Mormons are heretics; Pat Robertson has called Scientology satanic; the Vatican considers Oprah’s apostles misguided fools; different kinds of truthers regard each other as deluded. A lot of the people certain that GMOs are unsafe to eat, despite overwhelming scientific consensus to the contrary, deride deniers of climate science. Indeed, the history of Fantasyland could be rendered bracketologically, like college basketball, centuries of continuous playoffs, with particular teams losing (Puritans) and winning (Mormons) along the way and continuing to fight it out today.
Why are we like this?
That’s what this book will explore. The short answer is because we’re Americans, because being American means we can believe any damn thing we want, 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.
The word mainstream has recently become a pejorative, shorthand for bias, lies, oppression by the elites. Yet that hated Establishment, the institutions and forces that once kept us from overdoing the flagrantly untrue or absurd—media, academia, politics, government, corporate America, professional associations, respectable opinion in the aggregate—has enabled and encouraged every species of fantasy over the last few decades.
A senior physician at one of America’s most prestigious university hospitals promotes miracle cures on his daily TV show. Major cable channels air documentaries treating mermaids, monsters, ghosts, and angels as real. A CNN anchor speculated on the air that the disappearance of a Malaysian airliner was a supernatural event. State legislatures and one of our two big political parties pass resolutions to resist the imaginary impositions of a New World Order and Islamic law. When a political scientist attacks the idea that “there is some ‘public’ that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged,” col- leagues just nod and grant tenure. A white woman felt black, pretended to be, and under those fantasy auspices became an NAACP official—and then, busted, said, “It’s not a costume . . . not something that I can put on and take off anymore. I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black.” Bill Gates’s foundation has funded an institute devoted to creationist pseudo- science. Despite his nonstop lies and obvious fantasies—rather, because of them—Donald Trump was elected president. The old fringes have been folded into the new center. The irrational has become respectable and often unstoppable. As particular fantasies get traction and become contagious, other fantasists are encouraged by a cascade of out-of-control tolerance. It’s a kind of twisted Golden Rule unconsciously followed: If those people believe that, then certainly we can believe this.
Our whole social environment and each of its overlapping parts— cultural, religious, political, intellectual, psychological—have become conducive to spectacular fallacy and make-believe. There are many slippery slopes, leading in various directions to other exciting nonsense. During the last several decades, those naturally slippery slopes have been turned into a colossal and permanent complex of interconnected, crisscrossing bobsled tracks with no easy exit. Voilà: Fantasyland.
The scope of this book extends way beyond the contagion of clear-cut, fact- checkable untruths. America’s transformation finally clicked into focus for me when I stepped back and broadened my field of vision. I saw that the proliferation of delusions and illusions concerning the large subjects that people have always debated—politics, religion, even science—is connected to the proliferation and glut of the fictional and quasi-fictional coursing through everyday American life.
What I’m calling Fantasyland isn’t only a matter of falsehoods fervently believed but of people assembling make-believe lifestyles as well. Both kinds of fantasy—conspiracy theories and belief in magic on one hand and fantasy football and virtual reality on the other—make everyday existence more ex- citing and dramatic. And the modern tipping points for both kinds were the result of the same two momentous changes.
The first was that profound shift in thinking that swelled up in the 1960s, whereby Americans ever since have had a new rule set in their mental operating systems, even if they’re certain they possess the real truth: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative. The paradigm can be explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, but it’s the way we are now.
The second big enabling change was the new era of information and communications. Digital technology empowers real-seeming fictions of both types, the lifestyle and entertainment kinds as well as the ideological and religious and pseudoscientific kinds, in subtypes bright and dark. Among the one billion websites, believers in anything and everything can find thousands of fellow fantasists who share their beliefs, with collages of facts and “facts” to back them up. Before the Internet, crackpots were mostly isolated and surely had a harder time remaining convinced of their alternate realities. Now their devoutly believed opinions are all over the airwaves and the Web, just like actual news. Now all the fantasies look real.
Computers make fantasies that we (mostly) understand to be fantasies seem much more authentic as well. We can pretend we’re anybody or any- thing from any time or galaxy. But online fantasy doesn’t end when we exit the CGI realms of Dr. Ludvig Maxis and Lady Jaina Proudmoore. There’s an immense gray zone outside the obvious fictions of games. Because we are anonymous online, we can become fictionalized versions of ourselves in real life, real people interacting with other real people in ways that not long ago we’d never dream or dare to do.
Each of the small fantasies and simulations we insert into our lives is harmless enough, replacing a small piece of the authentic but mundane here, another over there. The world looks a little more like a movie set and seems a little more exciting and glamorous, like Hitchcock’s definition of drama—life with the dull bits cut out. Each of us can feel like a sexier hero in a cooler story, younger than we actually are if we’re old or older if we’re young. Over time the patches of unreality take up more and more space in our lives. Eventually the whole lawn becomes AstroTurf.
We stop registering the differences between simulated and authentic, real and unreal.
In the old days, if you wanted a shot at becoming instantly rich, you had to travel to Las Vegas. In order to spend time walking around a razzle-dazzling fictional realm, if you weren’t psychotic, you had to go to Disneyland. Theme was not a verb. Pornography was not ubiquitous. Cosmetic surgery was rare; breasts were not preternaturally large and firm, faces artificially smooth and tight. We didn’t reenact military battles with realistic props for days on end. We hadn’t yet fabricated the mongrel of melodrama and pseudodocumentary called reality TV.
Of course, having fake boobs or playing League of Legends probably doesn’t make any individual more inclined to believe that she needs a dozen semiautomatic rifles for self-protection or that vaccines cause autism or that the Earth is six thousand years old. But we are freer than ever to custom- make reality, to believe whatever or to pretend to be whomever we wish. Which makes all the lines between actual and fictional blur and disappear more easily. Truth in general becomes flexible, a matter of personal prefer- ence. There is a functioning synergy among our multiplying fantasies, the large and small ones, the toxic and the individually entertaining ones, the ones we know to be fiction, the ones we kinda sorta believe, and the religious and political and scientific ones we’re convinced aren’t fantasies at all. Scientists warn about the “cocktail effect” concerning chemicals in the environment and drugs in the brain, where various substances “potentiate” other substances. I think it’s like that. We’ve been drinking bottomless American cocktails mixed from all the different fantasy ingredients, and those various fantasies, conscious and semiconscious and unconscious, intensify the effects of the others.
We like this new ultrafreedom to binge, we insist on it, even as we fear and loathe the ways so many of our wrong-headed fellow Americans abuse it. When John Adams said in the 1700s that “facts are stubborn things,” the overriding American principle of personal freedom was not yet enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution, and the United States of America was itself still a dream. Two and a half centuries later the nation Adams cofounded has become a majority-rule de facto refutation of his truism: “our wishes, our inclinations” and “the dictates of our passions” now apparently do “alter the state of facts and evidence,” because extreme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness rule.
This is not unique to America, people treating real life as fantasy and vice versa, and taking preposterous ideas seriously. We’re just uniquely immersed. In the developed world, our predilection is extreme, distinctly different in the breadth and depth of our embrace of fantasies of many different kinds. Sure, the physician whose fraudulent research launched the antivaccine movement was a Brit, and young Japanese otaku invented cosplay, dressing up as fantasy characters. And while there are believers in flamboyant supernaturalism and prophecy and religious pseudoscience in other developed countries, nowhere else in the rich world are such beliefs central to the self-identities of so many people. We are Fantasyland’s global crucible and epicenter. This is American exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. America has always been a one-of-a-kind place. Our singularity is different now. We’re still rich and free, still more influential and powerful than any nation, practically a synonym for developed country. But at the same time, our drift toward credulity, doing our own thing, and having an altogether uncertain grip on reality has overwhelmed our other exceptional national traits and turned us into a less-developed country as well.
People tend to regard the Trump moment—this post-truth, alternative facts moment—as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon. In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history—and really, from its prehistory. What I’m trying to do with this book is define and pin down our condition, to portray its scale and scope, to offer some fresh explanations of how our national journey deposited us here.
America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.
I hope we’re only on a long temporary detour, that we’ll manage somehow to get back on track. If we’re on a bender, suffering the effects of guzzling too much fantasy cocktail for too long, if that’s why we’re stumbling, manic and hysterical, mightn’t we somehow sober up and recover? You would think. But first you need to understand how deeply this tendency has been encoded in our national DNA.
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition, Later Printing (September 5, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400067219
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400067213
- Item Weight : 1.6 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.35 x 1.4 x 9.51 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #403,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #829 in Political Commentary & Opinion
- #1,254 in Popular Culture in Social Sciences
- #3,004 in Historical Study (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
![Kurt Andersen](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/31Lmynz-XqL._SY600_.jpg)
New York Times bestselling author Kurt Andersen is host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast. He co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker and contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times. Read more about him at his website: http://www.kurtandersen.com/
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Customers find the book frightening, outrageous, and shocking. They also describe the content as interesting, thorough, and witty. However, some customers feel the religious content is dismissive and biased. Opinions differ on readability, with some finding it exceptional and easy to read, while others find it choppy and oversimplified.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the content interesting, challenging, and well-researched. They also say it's clever, humorous, and has a crucial message. Readers also say the book is rich and varied, with a detailed and highly selective treatment. They say the facts are obvious and well documented, and it'd be a good addition to any history collection.
"...Author Andersen brilliantly, and entertainingly, and shockingly, goes back to the beginning of the founding of our nation and how this all..." Read more
"...history, and almost every page of this important book was filled with eye-opening points." Read more
"...Fantasyland is chock full of delightful observations about our 21st century Civil War re-enactment world...." Read more
"...Well-researched and beautifully crafted and written; stylistically sometimes hyperbolic, and you might not need the frequent reminders of how each..." Read more
Customers find the book frightening, shocking, and disturbing. They also say the chapter on Donald Trump is particularly chilling. Readers also mention that the humor lies a trenchant and devastating critique of the interplay of reason.
"...Author Andersen brilliantly, and entertainingly, and shockingly, goes back to the beginning of the founding of our nation and how this all..." Read more
"...above, Mr. Andersen writes very well and his chapter on Donald Trump is particularly chilling...." Read more
"...It is not that alarming, even with the rise of a national nightmare in the form of President Donald Trump...." Read more
"...The history is necessarily skimpy but it drives the point home; the "fantasy-industrial complex" is creating a poison that leads to bizarre..." Read more
Customers are mixed about the readability of the book. Some mention it's well-researched, well-written, and easy to read. However, others say that the writing is choppy, childlike, and ludicrous. They also say the case seems oversimplified and the author is extremely flippant.
"...Author Andersen brilliantly, and entertainingly, and shockingly, goes back to the beginning of the founding of our nation and how this all..." Read more
"...Andersen is extremely flippant in how he describes some articles of Christian faith...." Read more
"...Andersen is an astute writer on many levels, and I appreciated his decision to insert his own thoughts and experiences into the book at times...." Read more
"...context, thoroughly and thoughtfully engaged and intuitively and superbly written thesis, Trump is the apotheosis; not the bug, the feature; the..." Read more
Customers find the religious content in the book dismissive, biased, and nutty. They also say the book overgeneralizes and treats American historical movements unfairly.
"...But these nutty beliefs are picking our pockets (deregulation, cutting the budget of the FDA and other watchdog agencies) and breaking our legs..." Read more
"...Jews and Catholics get a pass (sort of), Mormons are viciously skewered, and Protestants are graded on a curve...." Read more
"...the entertainment value of the book itself ironically invites wholesale historical distortions....." Read more
"...It's therefore not an unbiased account. Although the blurbs around the book refer to Trump's election, it's not politically one-sided...." Read more
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![Great survey of American religious history--but terrible footnote typography](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/transparent-pixel._V192234675_.gif)
Great survey of American religious history--but terrible footnote typography
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You might also consider searching on my post at energyskeptic “What percent of Americans are rational?“ for what pollsters have discovered about American beliefs.
This is the best book I've ever read on how America because the most superstitious, unrealistic, irrational nation on earth. Author Andersen brilliantly, and entertainingly, and shockingly, goes back to the beginning of the founding of our nation and how this all began.
What's the harm? It's literally costing us our lives. The U.S. is 26th out of the 36 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), yet we are the richest nation that has ever existed, or will exist. There’s no better sign of a country’s health and wealth than height. Americans used to tower over all other nations, now we are 40th due to poor health care and diets. We are 108 out of 140 nations in happiness. This irrationality is affecting all of us - the destruction of women's rights to birth control and abortion, the election of Trump, denial of climate change and evolution, Republican gerrymandering of districts to gain an unfair advantage, dark money allowed after Citizens United, and on and on.
Thomas Jefferson once said that as long as a belief didn’t pick his pocket or break his leg, he was fine with it. But these nutty beliefs are picking our pockets (deregulation, cutting the budget of the FDA and other watchdog agencies) and breaking our legs (getting rid of Obama care, not getting children vaccinated, alternative medicine).
Two hundred innocent people went to jail and lost their careers, businesses, and families after being accused of being satanic cult baby killers in the 1980s and 1990s (and meanwhile Catholic priests were getting away with raping children). This was as bad, if not worse than the Salem Witch Hunt, which lasted just months. But these satanic baby killing cult trials went on for a decade. For example, these cases: Kern County child abuse cases, McMartin preschool trial, Ricky Kasso, West Memphis 3, Little Rascals Day Care Center, Oak Hill satanic ritual abuse trial, Fells Acres Day Care Center preschool trial, and Pace memorandum. A third of Americans saw Geraldo Rivera’s TV show where he estimated that there are over 1 million Satanists in America linked in a highly organized secret network dedicated to satanic ritual child abuse and satanic murders. Americans agonized for 3 centuries over the Salem witch trial, but I haven’t read anything or heard anyone talk about this since then. And there are still regular satanic ritual abuse conferences!
I place the blame on the crazy religious beliefs made worse by corporations, see One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America , the widely held idea that all beliefs are as valid as science, magical thinking like what's promoted in "The Secret" that believing you will be wealthy can make you so (the prosperity gospel of Trump and many others), and so on.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The wacko beliefs in America go all the way back to our founding 500 years ago. Let's hope we're not doomed by a genetic legacy...
In the good old days the centrist Republicans and media stepped in to nip the nuttiness in the bud. But now that all media needs to make a profit, no longer believe that serving the public good was paramount, all hell has broken loose as Fantasyland spins out of control toward madness. Apparently even NPR/PBS needs money given the huge number of corporate sponsors they have because Republicans don’t want to fund rational media.
Even academia has abandoned reason as one of the pillars they stand for. Heaven forbid they trample on any student’s right to believe in anything by criticizing it.
And so the gyre keeps widening and spinning into what seems to me to be psychotic beliefs.
The Tea Party and NRA have totally cowed the more middle-of-the-road, reasonable old school Republicans into total submission. Nor are there enough rational staff to advise them, because Newt Gingrich began the Republican practice of cutting the budget for congressional staff n the 1980s. So now politicians have to get advice from lobbyists instead. Chapter 40 is “When the GOP went off the rails” about how religion is a factor, the GOP is very explicitly Christian where more and more Republican leaders have off-the-wall supernatural beliefs, no doubt making it harder for them to make sensible policies in office. Agenda 21 was a 1992 Earth Summit paper detailing the ideas of sustainable development and what to do to improve the environment. FOX and the Republicans accuse I of being a one-world totalitarian and Communist manifesto. The last two GOP platforms have had anti-Agenda 21 planks, and a dozen state legislatures have passed resolutions cursing it.
Republicans are especially good at cherry-picking: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individual shave gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs, and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism (the favorite author of House speaker Paul ryan).
The overarching harm Republicans have done is to convince voters that the media can’t be trusted, to ignore facts about their policies – inflexible and absolutely hysterical like the gun lobby. “Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: NO new taxes, NO regulation, ABOLISH the EPA, IRS, and Federal Reserve, forbid funding of studies on guns or global warming.”
There’s simply no evidence that Democrats are doing as much harm or believe in so many untrue conspiracies or religious beliefs. Those who accuse Democrats of being socialists conveniently forget that Denmark is a real country, and like other “socialist” Scandinavian nations are the happiest, healthiest, and wealthiest per capita nations on earth.
When all of this spins out of control after peak oil, I expect New Age, Pentecostal, evangelical, fundamentalist, and Charismatic (PEFC) beliefs to dominate even more, with scientists hiding their books so they aren’t burned for being Possessed By Satan or killed themselves. The witch trials and subjugation of women will come back with a vengeance.
This may even be a sign of collapse. If you look at the Greeks, the age of reason only lasted for two of the seven centuries they existed. After that the Greeks returned to astrology, magical cures, and alchemy, perhaps because they found freedom too scary, and were frightened by the idea that their lives and fates weren’t predestined or managed by gods – of being on their own. America’s Age of Enlightenment also appears to have only lasted for 200 years, from roughly 1800 to 2000.
If that sounds crazy, then read this book and tell me why you think so (not covered in my energyskeptic review which will be out in August 2018).
1. Evangelical Christian’s involvement in national politics.
2. Drug use: speed, weed, psychedelics, tranquilizers, etc
3. Scientology and what their main beliefs are (will save you tens of thousands of dollars to learn from this book rather than take courses…)
4. The McCarthy persecution of imaginary communists, with Hollywood cooperation, ruining the careers and lives of many innocent people.
5. Preacher Billy Graham: “communism was master-minded by Satan”.
6. Since the 1920s, a hundred evangelical Bible institutes, plus colleges had opened.
7. Fundamentalist and Pentecostal churches multiplied.
8. Eisenhower baptized at age 63 while President, appeared at 1st National Prayer Breakfast organized by fundamentalist Christians, added “under God” into the 87-year-old Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on the currency, made prayer a regular part of cabinet meetings
9. Norman Vincent Peale: one of the first who marketed magical thinking about wealth and success, such as repeating bullet-point affirmations over and over
10. Oral Roberts bought time on hundreds of TV stations to faith-heal people
11. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network
12. Jim Bakker & Tammy Faye
13. Satan and the antichrist were taking over the world (the late great planet earth), which led to endless new satanic agents after that: China! Iran! Vaccines! Obama! Pope Francis! ISIS!
14. Craziness existed on both the left and right. Anything goes meant leftist beliefs were just fine if you wanted to believe them, i.e. New Age shamans, astrology, ESP, homeopathy, healing crystals for particular invisible bodily chakra’s, non-christian faith healing via Reiki, channeling the spirits of the dead, channeling totally fictional people who never existed like Seth and Ramtha, getting touch with past lives.
15. Dr Oz and half or more of everything he ever said on Oprah or his own TV show. He promotes miracle elixirs, homeopathy, imaginary energies, psychics who communicate with the dead, green coffee beans as a magical weight-loss cure, vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.
16. Andrew Weil: Reiki, herbal, aromatherapy, magical energies.
17. Alternative medicine. Replace the word “alternative” with “untested”. Why can’t supplement companies and others selling snake oil who are earning billions of dollars afford to test what they’re selling, to not only make sure it’s effective, but SAFE?
18. The Secret: the law of attraction. If you crave anything hard enough, it will become yours! This book sold 20 million copies! Guess what, the only reason a person doesn’t have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with your thoughts. Leave the details to the Universe about how it will happen. But this magic can be wrecked by understanding the real world, such as watching the news or reading newspapers.
19. Since reality was whatever you liked, this even more increased right wing extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, capitalist removal of regulations and taxes than beliefs on the left .
20. Both left and right abandoned claims of reason and rationality.
21. But the right used the anything goes idea to believe in far more dangerous and crazy things: gun rights, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, biblical literacy, white supremacy, speaking in tongues, driving demons out of the possessed, Creationism and the denial of evolution, FEMA concentration camps, heaven, angels, hell, and Satan are REAL. Homeschooling and bible churches to teach creationism and keep children from being exposed to science.
22. The setting of dates for The End of the World: the 2012 Mayan calendar, and too many cult and PEFC dates to list
23. In the 1960s the idea that you could believe whatever you wish blossomed. Find your own truth. Mistrust authority. This empowered the right way more than the left.
24. Esalen: a mother church for people who don’t like churches or religious but still want to believe in the supernatural. Especially other understandings of reality, such as Native American, Asian, or shamanistic traditions. Invisible energies, past lives, astral projection, Gestalt therapy,
25. Mental illness as a superior way of perceiving reality and the dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities, science is a sinister scheme.
26. Guru Maharaj Ji: followers were told that believers would be able to lift the Astrodome from the earth, and that Majaraj Ji would soon be revealed to be the One who was waited for by every religion for all times.
27. The role of LSD and other drugs in helping to turn America into Fantasyland
28. Flying saucer cults and abduction by aliens
29. Starting in 1961, academics such as Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, Charles Tart, and too many mentioned in the book to list, promoted the idea that all beliefs and approximations of truth, science as much as fables or religion, are merely stories devised by people to suit their own needs or interests. Reality is itself a social construction of useful or wishful myths that members of society have been persuaded to believe. Superstitions, magical thinking, and delusions are as legitimate as the supposed truths contrived by Western reason and science.
30. In short, academia said that you can believe whatever you want, because it’s pretty much all equally true and false.
31. Anthropologists decided that oracles, diviners, incantations, and magical objects should be not just respected by considered equivalent to reason and science.
32. Carlos Castaneda “Teachings of Don Juan”
33. Parapsychology at UCLA, Princeton
34. The war in Viet Nam longer than need be due to McNamara and Herman Kahn believing their shiny computerized approach was telling them the truth and solving complex military problems by feeding in the right variables. Lack of realizing that emotion drove the war far more than reason, as well as exaggerated fear of communism and concern for America’s superpower reputation
35. SDS and other underground militant cells setting off hundreds of bombs and robbing banks
36. John Birch Society. They believed 50-70% of the federal government was under the control of the Communist party, as well as academia, foundations, news media, the AMA, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Communism was a part of a greater global master conspiracy going back to the 18th century Illuminati. Even Eisenhower was obeying Communist orders, and had been for his whole life! But because the rise of the Birchers happened in the early 60s, before the forces of reason really started losing control, the mainstream media was able to quash it. Especially by the establishment right, leaders of the conservative movement such as William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk.
37. Not that it did any good. The book “None dare call it treason” authors accused a conspiracy of wealthy, educated, cultured insiders like the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, academia, mass media, and Illuminati were intent on creating a “world supra-government”.
38. JFK conspiracies
39. Christian home schooling to keep them within Bible-based bubbles of family and church
40. Convicted their and embezzler Erich von Daniken’s book “Chariot of the Gods” which said that extraterrestrials had built the pyramids, Stonehenge, and more – this book sold tens of millions of copies.
41. Fantasyland was further magnified by TV, movies, the internet, computer games, and other media. Disney land, civil war re-enactments, Middle Ages Society for Creative Anachronism. Theme shopping malls, Old West steakhouses, Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores, and architecture. It permeates our society.
42. Lotteries, gambling, pornography, cosmetic surgery, pro-wrestling, Celebrities, Reality TV,
43. Casino fantasy themes – ancient Egypt (the Luxor), medieval England (Excalibur), 17th century Caribbean (Treasure Island), Renaissance Italy (Venetian) and so on.
44. Adults wearing costumes at Halloween, reading comic books, fantasy sports and camps,
45. True right-wing believers had a fundamentalist religious faith in markets, a knee-jerk opposition to the government making markets work more fairly and better, and taxes of any kind. Now selfishness could be cloaked as righteousness, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the fiction book “Greed is good”. Real people claimed their moneymaking lust and skill made the virtuous.
46. Ronald Reagan who made it known he expected apocalyptic biblical prophecies to be fulfilled soon due to his Christian end-of-days beliefs since the late 1960s. His many end-time proclamations would have been a shocking national embarrassment a decade earlier.
47. The end of the Fairness Doctrine, which allowed Rush Limbaughs national right-wing radio show to flourish in 1988, followed by Fox News.
48. In 1992 when author Andersen was reporting in Time magazine about talk radio, Roger Ailes was at NBC (later Fox). Ailes phoned Andersen out of the blue to yell at him about an article that didn’t exist. He said “How would you like it if I sent a CNBC camera crew to follow your kids home from school?” My daughters were four and six. Anderson replied “Wow, I’m sure Jack Welch, the CEO of GE which owned NBC, would be interested to hear that his new news executive is planning to stalk a journalist’s children.
49. Limbaugh and Fox meant that media stopped serving an important Democratic function – the presentation of a shared set of facts.
50. Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists. David Koresh took 75 of his disciples with him.
51. Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber
52. 9-11 was a government conspiracy
53. Vincent Foster’s suicide
54. Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM which hosts conspiracy theorists and promoters of political, paranormal, pseudoscientific, and apocalyptic beliefs of all kinds
55. Alex Jones who rants against gun regulation, government subsidized healthcare, taxes, climate change is a hoax, Sandy Hook never happened and was staged with fake actors, cancer viruses in vaccines, and is followed by President Trump!!!!
56. Conspiracies in The New World Order and Behold a Pale Horse about everyone from the Illuminate to the Federal Reserve in league to create a satanic one-world government as predicted in Revelation
57. recovered memories of daughters that led them to accuse their fathers of raping them and participating in satanic rituals of human sacrifice and cannibalism, the invention of the fake diagnosis of multiple personality disorder,
58. Two hundred people went to jail, are still in jail, lost their careers, businesses, and families after being accused of being satanic cult baby killers in the 1980s and 1990s. This was as bad if not worse than the Salem Witch Hunt which lasted just months, versus the satanic baby killing cult trials that went on for a decade and convicted innocent people. For example, these cases: Kern County child abuse cases, McMartin preschool trial, Ricky Kasso, West Memphis 3, Little Rascals Day Care Center, Oak Hill satanic ritual abuse trial, Fells Acres Day Care Center preschool trial, and Pace memorandum.
59. Shape shifting reptilian humanoids (see Time magazine’s article “The Reptilian Elite”
60. A movement called the Third Wave or dominionism to replace secular laws and constitutions with Biblical laws and a fully theocratic nation
61. Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was a Muslim
62. The Tea Party, Drudge Report, Infowars, Breitbart
63. Spy magazine wrote dozens of articles about Trump from 1986 to 1993, exposing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. In return he sent threatening letters and called them in public “a piece of garbage”. Trump is driven by resentment of the Establishment. He doesn’t like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend that fictions are facts, to FEEL the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploits the myths of white racial victimhood. He’s a spoiled, impulsive, moody, 70-year-old BRAT. And many more pages about Trump that are great but too long to paraphrase.
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