If you alone found out what the lie was, then you’re probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.

Daniel Quinn

Last time, we looked at how the US is being ruled by dangerous but fundamentally unserious despots. What is it that allows so many millions of people to remain faithful to such profoundly bad actors? And what can be done to combat this MAGA movement of unreality? This is essentially the same question as, “How do we break through the intense polarization that bedevils our politics and our culture?” [a question that haunts this blog year after year]

Specifically, we’re talking about how to engage these pillars of unreality: hyper-dualized, evangelical religion, where the earth is seen as a cosmic battleground of good vs. evil; and the more general, free-floating dualism that has leaked out from evangelical Christianity into the wider American political and cultural spheres. This latter development allows people who are not explicitly religious to still adopt a baseline attitude of conflict against both domestic and international enemies, antagonistic foes who are seen as one huge, shadowy cabal of evil.

This dualism also bleeds creates the surging penchant for conspiracy theories. When the universe is populated by demonic adversaries, then every bad thing that happens can be tied into a nefarious, secret plot. This expands even into what should be the objective spheres of science, medicine, and nonreligious, rational ways of understanding the world and human nature. These Enlightenment-spawned realms of study and discourse thrive in societies of open inquiry, but dissolve in a corrosive environment of dualism, conspiracy theories, and irrational devotion to ancient texts as the source of unchanging truth.

One last feature of this unserious conservative universe is the delusional lust for absolute control: over nature, over other people, and over history itself. Every Trumpian effort to roll back advances made by women, by people of color, and by increasingly “secular” views of the world is an irrational desire to equate difference and change with evil, sweeping anything uncomfortable or ambiguous into a tattered, rickety dustbin of archaic religious certitude.

When we look at all these features of this dangerous but unserious worldview, a couple connected things jump to our attention. First, these behaviors and habits of thinking are not particularly helpful in day-to-day life. When you go to your job, an obsession with seeing anything you don’t like as part of an evil conspiracy is not really going to facilitate getting projects done, meeting deadlines, satisfying clients and customers, or just generally meeting business goals and objectives. And with regards to other people in particular, a belief that anyone who thinks differently than you do — politically, philosophically, culturally, religiously — is in service to demonic forces, is not that conducive to quality customer service or to internal team morale.

Similarly, outside of work, a general distrust of any type of scientific, medical, or professional expertise that smacks too much of “elitism” or “liberalism” is not a great recipe for building and maintaining a complex modern economy and society. The irrational hatred of specific kinds of people bleeds over into anything and everything that those people might touch, which can quickly cloud up and sabotage functions that are necessary to keep the lights on and the trains running. It is hard to squelch the spread of conspiracies once they hit a critical mass.

The second thing to notice is our review of unserious tyranny is closely related to this non-functionality of the Trumpian worldview, in relation to the practical mechanics of our society. And that development is the collapse of real spaces and places, and their replacement by virtual, unreal life.

This is both an easy and a hard thing to see. At first glance, it is a commonplace observation that we spend too much time online. Too much social media, too much doom-scrolling, too much binge-streaming (or is it stream-binging?), too much TikTok-ing, comment reading, etc. And it is almost universally acknowledged now that this excessive immersion in digital “life” is not good for people in general, and especially not for adolescents and children. In some way, we’re all trying to unplug and reduce our screen-time.

But the less visible side of this rise of digital-everything is the simple fact that it subsists on the destruction of real places by consumer-industrial capitalism. Our retreat to the unreal sphere of online life is not arbitrary, and is not just an outgrowth of the development of the technology itself. No, we have been forced into the Unreal by the systematic decimation or absorption of our real places and spaces. As it has been described by many, capitalism is a colonizing entity, continually on the prowl for features and aspects of non-economic value that it can strip-mine, commodify, and then sell back to us on the “free market.”

But what happens when the real stuff of life gets commodified and sold back to us as a product with a price? Well, it becomes unreal to us, because it is out of our control, and is subject only to the fickle, distant demands of the invisible hand of the marketplace. It becomes fully economized, and thus fully de-humanized. Things that were once under the control of human agency, morality, and emotion are now free-floating economic objects, interchangeable monetized entities. Things that we used to create through our collective effort and trust now look back at us as indifferent, cold, alien commodities, fleeting dopamine hits that quickly dissipate, and that must be purchased again to keep our economy “moving forward.”

The only way to combat the Unreal is by building new, real places and spaces, completely different structures that will generate a new reality to slowly replace the old. The current polarized plutocracy has economic, cultural, and political reality locked up tight, hermetically sealed against any attempts to fundamentally change the contours and pathways of power. Revival and salvation will only come by going around the ruling reality of the Unreal, not through it.