We all live in two worlds. One is the real world, the objective world, and the other world is inside of us: the world where sensory data is received and processed, where experiences are sorted, where thoughts and dreams swirl, where imagination reigns and reality is interpretted. While we are drawn by our senses to what is real, we are drawn by hopes and desires to what is imaginary.
Over 100 years ago, in his study titled The Crowd, Gustave Le Bon wrote: "Concerning the faculty of observation possessed by the crowd, our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible, and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who, by a process of contagion, has influenced his fellows...." According to Le Bon, "It is legendary heroes, and not for a moment real heroes, who have impressed the minds of crowds."
The human mind craves fantasy. But fantasy itself isn't stable. Myths and legends are constantly shifting. What was believed yesterday, is laughed at today. Every age thinks itself wise and looks back with disdain on the folly of earlier ages. But the lesson we should draw is this: If people in earlier times were foolish and gullible, then we are fatally foolish and gullible ourselves. We ought to have learned something, especially regarding our own nature, by studying the past.
Given the deadly situation we find ourselves in today, our fantasies must prove fatal. A fatal fantasy is one that gets people killed. The Nazis, for example, were homicidally obsessed with their own racial superiority. In earlier centuries the Spanish Inquisition burned thousands as heretics, and various communities throughout Europe burned thousands more as witches.
This last example illustrates my point. Witches are now considered fantastical. The casting of spells, flying through the air, the summoning of spirits and reliance on feline familiars no longer occasions judicial inquiry. Yet we are no less fantastical in our beliefs than our witch-burning forebears. Instead of burning witches, we destroy entire industries in order to save spotted owls; we squander trillions fighting imaginary man-made global warming; and we dehumanize ourselves with the unstated assumption that consciousness is the epiphenomena of chemical reactions within the brain. And what testifies to this bottom-line assumption of ours better than modern psychiatry? If you feel bad, take a pill. (There is no question of properly ordering one's conscience.) As we become increasingly depressed and deranged, the final remedy is to prescribe drugs. We even prefer to medicate our children instead of spanking them. And with regard to our political and economic fantasies, medieval and ancient thinkers would ridicule us as the greatest fools of all history; for we believe in universal human equality and the U.S. dollar.
Our fantasies are many, and fatal. We think that society necessarily advances toward greater and greater prosperity; that world wars belong to the past; that ideologists inherently hostile to our Constitution can carry forward the legacy of the Founders without disruption or discontinuity. It does not occur to Americans that material progress produces psychological deficits, as well as financial deficits; that prosperity contains in itself the seeds of its own undoing; that peace is the prologue to war; that egalitarianism prefigures administrative fascism.
The fatal fantasy, in each instance, begins with the irresistible allure of a charming myth that leads to a series of unsustainable civilization-wide experiments (with the unwinding of instinct and the contradiction of common sense). For what are we to make of permissive child rearing, the displacement of paternal authority by bureaucratic authority, the retreat of the sacred and the decline of character? Consider, as well, the politicization of sex, class and race; the emasculation of masculinity; the cheapening of the feminine; the celebration of the deviant; the elevation of the celebrity in place of the hero; and the eradication of nobility by the ennoblement of the victim.
The United States has entered a crisis. Will this country exist in four years time, or will it crumble and collapse? But I forgot that nearly everyone believes in the absurd notion that America is somehow indestructible. In this way, you can curse America and behave as irresponsibly as you please. Nothing catastrophic is going to happen because we are dealing with a country that can "take a licking and keep on ticking."
Here is the distilled essence of our fatal fantasy. Everything in this world is breakable, destructible and mortal. Everything passes away. Everything is overturned. Everyone dies. What is precious, what is breakable, deserves to be handled with care. Yet we are determined to break the foundation of all that we possess as a people. We are determined to make a revolution, even as we balk at a few intermediate steps (like universal "free" health care). We might as well be illiterates now, for all our the good our educational establishment has done us. Learning today merely serves to reinforce the fatal fictions that promise our undoing. Gustave Le Bon once wrote: "All civilized societies inevitably drag behind them a residue of degenerates, of unadapted persons affected by various taints...."
And what happens when the degenerates themselves posses a sophisticated organization, sophisticated methods and tools? What happens when we all slip into degeneracy? "In ordinary times," warned Le Bon, "these waste products of civilization are more or less restrained by the police. During revolution nothing restrains them and they can easily gratify their instincts to murder and plunder."
I am told that the word "counterrevolution" is a bad word because it is "negative." What then shall we make of that great counterrevolutionary document, Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke? Here is what Burke said that is relevant to this column: "Who will labour without knowing the amount of his pay? Who will study to increase what none estimate? who will accumulate, when he does not know the value of what he saves? If you abstract it from its uses in gaming, to accumulate your paper wealth, would be not the providence of man, but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw."
