Kurt Andersen QUOTES

61 " History doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes, "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

62 " Such a colossal irony: after socialists and Communists in the 1930s and then the New Left in the 1960s had tried and failed to achieve a radical class-based reordering of the American political economy, the economic far right took its shot at doing that in the 1970s and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest hope or fear. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

63 " Starting in the 2000s, broadband Internet allowed for massively multiplayer online worlds populated by countless other real people in fantasy form, fellow émigrés from real life. The newer, more ultimate-Fantasyland business model for game makers involves making the commercial transaction itself part of the fantasy. You joined Farmville for free on Facebook because you were bored by life and real people, including yourself, so you killed time by pretending to be a farmer raising livestock and growing crops. But the standard production cycles of the pretend sheep and rutabagas were too slow—that is, too realistic, thus boring. So you spent real money to make your imaginary farming happen supernaturally fast. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

64 " The consequence of such mingling is that an individual who enters the communications system pursuing one interest soon becomes aware of stigmatized material on a broad range of subjects. As a result, those who come across one form of stigmatized knowledge will learn of others, in connections that imply that stigmatized knowledge is a unified domain, an alternative worldview, rather than a collection of unrelated ideas. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

65 " corporate funds” used “for political purposes” were “one of the principal sources of corruption” and had “tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

66 " Since the turn of the century, American fundamentalists had reveled in their sense of persecution by an infidel elite, but in the 1960s the atheist tyranny became official. In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court decided in two cases, with only one dissenter in each instance, that it was unconstitutional for public schools to conduct organized prayer or Bible readings, and in 1968 the court finally ruled—unanimously—that states could not ban the teaching of evolution. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

67 " YOU KNOW HOW young people always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it? And how before their frontal lobes, the neural seat of reason and rationality, are fully wired, they can be especially prone to fantasy? In the 1960s the universe cooperated and did seem to revolve around young people, affirming their adolescent self-regard, making their fantasies of importance real and their fantasies of instant transformation and easy revolution feel plausible. Practically overnight, America turned its full attention to the young and everything they believed and imagined and wished. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

68 " During the 1980s, prudent New Deal rules concerning mortgage loans were repealed, allowing people to get home loans with too little money down and interest rates that would “adjust” to unaffordable heights. So during the 1980s, the average price of a house in America doubled. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

69 " Anyhow, my point is that you know now that nonfiction is never the entire truth, and fiction is almost never pure fabrication. "

― Kurt Andersen , True Believers

70 " If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

71 " IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length. The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

72 " the choice isn’t between automation and non-automation,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, one of the MIT economists focused on digital technology and work. “It’s between whether you use the technology in a way that creates shared prosperity, or more concentration of wealth. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

73 " Why did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan begin remarking frequently during the 1980s and ’90s that people were entitled to their own opinions but not to their own facts? Because until then, it hadn’t seemed like a serious problem in America. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

74 " A lot of the financial players since the 1970s have indeed evolved into parasites, like tapeworms. Tapeworms live in the gut, to which they attach themselves by “hooks” and “suckers,” then “get food by eating the host’s partly digested food, depriving the host of nutrients.” They can grow hideously large, many feet long, and live inside hosts for decades. Thinking about the future of our political economy, though, I was heartened when I read that “hosts also develop ways of getting rid of or protecting themselves from parasites. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

75 " also trying to act in good faith and also becoming useful idiots for big business and the rich. Another of them was Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard superstar who became the new president’s chief economic adviser—but only nominally, because Reagan ignored him. Feldstein actually hated deficits, as true conservatives did, and called his supply-side colleagues “extremists.” Stockman’s chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget—who left in 1983 to earn a fortune on Wall Street, then become a cocaine addict and TV pundit—said that Feldstein “has failed at making the transition from academic economist to political economist.” That was thirty-six-year-old Larry Kudlow, defining political economist to mean not an expert on political economics but an economist willing and eager to dissemble and lie to suit his political masters, thirty-five years before he returned to government work as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

76 " Asked in a class in the late 1970s at Harvard Business School about a hypothetical CEO who discovers his product could kill customers, young Jeff Skilling said he “would keep making and selling the product. My job as a businessman is to be a profit center and to maximize return to the shareholders. It’s the government’s job to step in if a product is dangerous. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

77 " Starting in the 1900s, from coast to coast and seven days a week, Americans more than anyone on Earth could immerse in the virtuosic fantasies created and sold by show business and the media. This was a new condition. As we spent more and more fabulous hours engaged in the knowing and willing suspension of disbelief, experiencing the unreal as real, we became more habituated to suspending disbelief unconsciously and involuntarily as well. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

78 " Libertarians fantasize that they’re action heroes and entirely self-made. They tend to exempt themselves from the truism that there but for the grace of God goes each one of them, because an implicit premise of their ultra-individualism is that anybody in America can make it on their own and that unfair disadvantages either don’t exist or can’t be helped. I have a hunch that the demographic profile of self-identified libertarians—94 percent white, 68 percent male, 62 percent in their forties or younger—has something to do with those beliefs and fantasies. "

― Kurt Andersen , Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

79 " major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular. The fantasies of perpetual youth, Kids “R” Us Syndrome, also appeared fifty years ago, when American adults started becoming more than ever like adolescents and children in our tastes and ways of thinking. These simultaneous spikes could be a coincidence, but they look to me like another case of cultural symbiosis. And childlike magical thinking synergy isn’t limited to Christian kinds. “How do you get yourself to a point of believing?” Rhonda Byrne asks in The Secret, the Oprah-endorsed New Age guide to success-by-wishing-and-pretending. “Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make believe you will begin to believe you have received….Your belief that you have it, that undying faith, is your greatest power. When you believe you are receiving, get ready, and watch the magic begin! "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

80 " Libertarianism used to have a robust left wing as well. Both disliked government. Both were driven by a fantastically nostalgic conviction that a country of three hundred million people at the turn of the twenty-first century could and should revert to something like its nineteenth-century self. Both had a familiar American magical-thinking fetish for gold—to return to gold as the foundation of U.S. currency because, they think, only gold is real. However, as the post-Reagan Republican mother ship maintained extreme and accelerating antigovernment fervor—acquiring escape velocity during the 2000s, leaving Earth orbit in the 2010s—libertarianism became a right-wing movement. (Also helpful was the fact that extreme economic libertarians included extremely rich people like the Koch brothers who could finance its spread.) Most Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: let business do whatever it wants, but don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. "

― Kurt Andersen , Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History