“In America, cognitive dissonance among those with some awareness of the national predicament is handled not by resolution, but rather through coping mechanisms. They keep inconsistencies below a certain pain cum embarrassment threshold. That artless strategy has proven viable in part because Americans, beguiled by their leaders and the country’s entire political class, have learned to live in a virtual reality. The actual and the imagined have become fused so that the former has no clear precedence in its hold on the individual and collective mind. The mythic and the real are interchangeable. Thus, Zero Dark Thirty and Argo. Thus, the fabricated yet fabled hero David Petraeus; countries manufacture the heroes they need – and that they are prepared to pay the price for. Thus, the ‘success’ of the surge in Iraq. Thus the solemn pronouncements that judgment on our tragic adventures there and in Afghanistan must ‘await the verdict of history.’ – just as the historians’ jury is still out on Krakatoa. Moreover, a collectivity of the self-worshipful militates toward the same outcome. In America today, a vague patriotism, itself an abstracted form of national self-worship, is the only sealant that bonds otherwise separate egoists. Its effect is made all the more powerful by the common experience of being accessories to the shameful acts of their government. This phenomenon is at once cause and reinforced effect of our flight from information and knowledge. A queer feature of contemporary American life is the equation of ignorance and freedom. New information is instinctively seen as a threat instead of something carrying possible value to be embraced. For it asks engagement, some mental effort, – and it promises the pain of owning up to behaviors we cannot stand contemplating.”
— Fear By Another Name (via theamericanbear)
(via disobey)
