It’s deeply disconcerting to read the news each morning and find oneself thinking that the true prophet of our current condition is Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland. Each day brings the feeling that we’ve truly passed down the rabbit hole. Here we are, in a “Mad Hatter” universe, where the voices all around us insist, with Humpty Dumpty, that words only mean what they want them to mean. We are then expected, indeed required, to accept even the most blatant falsehoods and the most ludicrous fantasies as simple truth. And, this done, we are told we must order our political, economic, and cultural priorities accordingly.

If we hope to solve the problems that confront us today, we must put an end to the magical thinking that dominates our public discourse. Hard reality looms on every front, and the first step to confronting it — before it is too late — is to aggressively challenge these fantasies. We need to start insisting on “truth,” not “my truth,” or “your truth,” or “Humpty Dumpty’s truth,” but rather an honest and objective representation of things as they are, that is, “the truth,” as once upon a time we understood it. At present, “the” truth isn’t simply ignored, but rather inverted, turned upside down, divested of all legitimate meaning ….


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