American fantasyland
I recently ran across a couple of newspaper articles that reminded me of why religion perpetuates, particularly in America.
One was a small story in my local daily that promoted the publishing of a children’s book titled Peanut Butter and Aliens. Harmless enough in the grand scheme of things, I’m sure. But it’s disturbing on another level. Teaching kids to flex their imaginations is a good thing, certainly. But implying that unsubstantiated beings—aliens (and zombies, which also populate the book)—might actually exist in the “real world”? Not so much.
I know. I know. Most people see made-up aliens and zombies in a kids’ book, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and imaginary childhood friends, as a normal part of children’s development. It’s the way kids suss-out their world, we’re told. Perfectly natural, they say. But, to me, it’s a tiny baby step from a child believing these things to believing in an equally unverified invisible supreme being.
The problem is, once embedded, these wishful ideas grow up with us and metastasize. And they fundamentally affect our most important decisions, too often negatively.
So, we have become a country awash in fantasies, and it’s causing problems, starting with our perplexing election of a president in 2016 who is manifestly unfit for the job and strikingly unendowed with the nation’s ostensibly long-venerated, traditional values. Except for maybe aggressive competitiveness.
The other article I ran across was a Sept. 22 Washington Post article titled “Is Trump mentally ill? Or is America? Psychiatrists weigh in,” which talks about three recently published books concerning the nation’s current so-called “post-truth” milieu. The article mentions author Kurt Andersen’s 2016 book Fantasyland, which stresses that the American enthrallment with delusions—from religion to politics—is an “expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history.” Indeed, we are direct descendants of the colonial New World Puritans, a post-truth group if there ever was one. Their religious and theocratic fantasies plague America still.
So, we still have books (not least, the Bible) indoctrinating American children in phantasms from nearly the cradle onward, while all adults—true believers and pagans alike—carry in their brains and unconscious lives the legacy of hundreds of thousands of years of our species’ extravagant otherworldly dreaminess, reinforced daily.
To imagine these airy ideas have little if any delusive effect on what we deeply believe and compulsively defend is a delusion in itself.
