“This article on “How America Went Haywire” may help our friends and colleagues on our global Advisory Board and Judges Panel for our EthicMark® Awards understand what’s going on in my beloved adopted country. It summarizes the thinking of many important voices, many of whose books I have reviewed (see www.ethicalmarkets.com /Books and Reviews) including Kurt Andersen’s “Fantasyland” (2017) which roots our extreme religiosity and gullibility in our history: our attention to showmanship, advertising and all forms of hucksterism; our extreme belief in individualism and our right to believe anything we want, regardless of evidence. I have commented since 1996 on the wider global problem of the rise of “Mediocracies and their Attention Economies “ ( in 3BL, Just Means and on our home page) and picked up in the cover story in The Economist on the downside of social media. Many such analyses are seen as leading to today’s televised presidency beginning with JFK and culminating in Trump! Well worth reading and our thanks to our colleague Jeff Hutner for this link.
Hazel Henderson, Editor “
When did America become untethered from reality?
I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness. “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.”