Blending reality with fantasy
In much of the human landscape, feelings trump 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.
—Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland
The world is filled with people who live out their lives believing in things that are not real. In 2017, author Kurt Andersen wrote a bestselling novel about this phenomenon and its effects in and on the United States of America, which is where I currently live, and which had elected a severely mentally ill con man as national leader the year before.
This essay will be about human fantasies and borrow liberally from Fantasyland, which, if you have not read, I can highly recommend.
“By my reckoning, the more or less solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half…
