Americans Love Bullsh*t Peddlers and Miracle Cures
This isn’t complicated. Lots of us love stupid miracle cures—especially when celebrities are hawking them.
It’s a requirement for a certain sort of political journalist to file
at least one heavy-breathing dispatch on the cynical brilliance of
Donald Trump, stuffed with clichés about the Republican nominee’s
“genius… ability to make facts irrelevant” and his supposed skill at
“hypnotizing” voters into believing things that are demonstrably false.
These are often accompanied by a compulsory comment from a Trump
supporter denouncing an “elite media” that doesn’t understand ordinary,
salt-of-the-Earth types susceptible
tocheering-New-Jersey-Muslims-on-9/11 conspiracy theories.
During an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last week, I
made the uncontroversial point that Americans believe many stupid
things and that it was necessary to challenge those stupidities. This
provoked a barely coherent Trump-supporter named Wayne Allyn Root to
suggest that my “elitism” betrayed a disconnect with those in real
America. Later in the show, Root, author of the autobiographical bookMillionaire Republican
(“The real key to becoming a Millionaire Republican is to do the
opposite of what the masses do”), boasted that he went to Columbia and
his daughter attended Harvard. (Live television, I decided, was no place
to admit penury and a degree from a state university.)
The question, of course, remained unanswered: if Trump has such a
fraught relationship with reality, why are voters—those stolid and
honest middle Americans—so easily charmed by his lies? There now exists a
significant literature on this question, most of which forgoes simple
explanations in favor of needlessly complicated ones. The boring truth
is that Americans of all backgrounds believe all manner of dumb things.
Why would we expect voters to exhibit a degree of rationality they
rarely display in other aspects of life?
Indeed, Americans have a particular talent for transforming
charlatans, cranks, and frauds into celebrities—and a particular
tolerance for fact-free fads promoted by already-existing celebrities.
Our favorite medical man is arguably Dr. Oz, who indulges all sorts of
unscientific mysticism. We’ve made the absurd television “medium” John
Edwardabsurdly wealthy for pretending he can communicate with your dead
pet newt. Ours is a culture in which an Oscar-winning actress has a
second act as a lifestyle guru peddlingpseudoscientific nonsense,
forcing Canadian academic Timothy Caufield to publish the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? (Spoiler: pretty much.)
Believing stupid things is, alas, a habit of both plebs and elites,
celebrities and nobodies. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
On any given night in New York City, dinner parties are thrown,
forthcoming Hamptons holidays compared, and fantastically ignorant
conversations about politics and “wellness” trends are had (sound baths,
steamed vaginas, vinegar diets, child sacrifice, etc). I was once in
the unpleasant company of an obscenely wealthy literary agent when she
advised her guests that this summer they should all commit to hiring her
German-born “energy person” in Southampton, who would tinker with their
chakras and free their radicals, while draining their bank accounts for
the privilege.
You would be unsurprised to discover that my host diligently ate
organic, shunned gluten, ingested handfuls of probiotics, and avoided
Genetically Modified Organisms. And most well-informed people would also
be unsurprised that last month the National Academy of Science released
an authoritative report aggregating 20 years of research on genetic
modification showing no evidence exists to support claims that GMOs are
harmful to humans or the environment. But like the dozens of studies
that preceded it, the new report will have no effect on those friends
convinced that tinkering with nature inevitably precipitates
civilizational disaster.
0 comments: