Truth, Repetition and Fantasy

As young children most of us were taught that it’s important to tell the truth. At home, we learned about right and wrong and began to form our values. At school we learned about proof and fact, the true and the false.

For thousands of years philosophers and the metaphysically unbalanced have been trying to define truth. We don’t need them anymore: we have Trump—for whom truth doesn’t count. A fact now is whatever we define it to be.

To me and the way I was brought up that means a denial of reality—that the world exists objectively and independently of how we think about and describe it. Anti-realism has become a growth industry in academia and language studies for many years now. This has percolated into much of American life.

The American preoccupation with fantasy, entertainment and “find your own reality” is well documented in Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. It’s a fascinating, horrifying book that tells us how we got to Trump and the denial of truth. All the forces that Andersen marshals here—the history of American magical thinking, the predominance of 1960s relativism, the hatred of government—have produced our figmented post-factual world where truth dies.


The fantasy world inhabits much of our information media, those quaintly cheery TV ads, our movies and theater, and mostly our politics. The Republicans have exploited the gullibility of the masses—and everyone else—by working to abolish all institutions that stood in the way of their agenda and any inconvenient facts supporting them.

Republican messages are repeated constantly in the major media, even in such locales as MSNBC which opposes them. We see Donald Trump in endless video clips addressing rallies, talking nonsense to the press, in interviews. Video coverage of those Democrats opposing him is virtually nonexistent. Why is Trump always on the front page?

His lies have become acceptable in the sense that we pass over them, accede to them as something expected. Repetition dulls the brain yet reinforces the message. At the same time, I think the outrage on both sides is palpable and growing because there is no longer a respected standard of debate or discourse. Facts represent a social contract that is now broken.

Given America’s historic preoccupation with unreality, it’s no wonder that we have arrived at a politics of profligate relativism where truth is the first casualty. The situation promises to be with us for a while.

4 thoughts on “Truth, Repetition and Fantasy

  1. Tinka

    Asociating with so many fantasy-based folk here on the beach, puts me in less that the 1/3 solidly reality-based people. I recently have had discussions where friends tell me that they are guided by their ”angels” of whatever you want to call the presences or voices leading their lives. Being such a minority, I can’t call myself ”normal” anymore. It’s refreshing to have you a a buddy!!!


