NEWFANE — We keep hearing a recurring refrain these days: How can people not accept facts? How can people believe that the government is lying about the election being fair? Why can't people just accept reality?
Why indeed? While the current crop of “denied truths” seem incomprehensible to most Americans, it is just the latest preferred fiction that we use to guide our conduct and social organization.
Let's start at the beginning and close to home. When predominantly British settlers expanded inland from the New England coastline, they needed a rationalization for their actions. They couldn't very well say, “We have to murder everyone who tries to prevent us from stealing their land,” as it would clash with their religious views, which were purportedly built on the foundation of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, who would have been unlikely to countenance their actions.
Instead, they raised cries about unprovoked assaults threatening their innocents. They told themselves the lie that the Native peoples were not people at all but savages who need to be extirpated from the Earth.
Now they could feel that they were doing the Lord's work as they burned towns and slaughtered men, women, and children whenever possible.
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Here in what is now Vermont, a highly complex set of societal, ecological, and spiritual relationships governed the actions of the Native peoples throughout the region.
This social construct had served those people well for generations and maintained their sustainable viability on the land. However, litigious speculators like Ethan and Ira Allen wanted to make profits by “buying” and “owning” massive tracts of that land.
So they had to create a lie that could convince the courts that the Native peoples, if they ever even lived here at all, certainly were not “settled” in any sense and in fact, since they didn't build “houses” and despoil the forest around them, they shouldn't have any land rights at all.
The courts agreed.
A new fact was born: Empty land can be granted to white people by the “Crown,” and these grants were to enjoy the full protection of the law and its constabulary.
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Enshrined in our venerable Constitution is the lie that Black people are only 60 percent of a human. This agreed-upon “self-evident” norm was reinforced over the next 150 years or so by numerous court rulings “proving” that Black Americans were inferior, naturally born to be enslaved, couldn't possibly govern themselves, and other notions settled by law that we know to be bald-faced lies.
These lies were used to rationalize slavery, Jim Crow laws, and various other forms of discrimination that we haven't fully shed even today.
Only by degrading Black and Brown and Indigenous bodies to be seen as subhuman could we possibly be able to murder, rape, and disenfranchise them to the extent that we do.
That's right - we're still at it.
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Let's fast forward to 1917. Woodrow Wilson, who campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” had cajoled the Congress into entering World War I. Conscripted troops were being shipped en masse to training camps in various locations.
At the same time, a virulent flu had started to show up and kill people. It found its way to some of the basic training camps in the United States and was taking a terrible toll on the troops.
But Wilson's government was worried that knowledge of this outbreak in the military camps would extinguish the already-sluggish public enthusiasm for the war, so his administration decided to keep the news of the flu secret, even as they shipped men around the country and then across the ocean to save a crowned leader from the wrath of an emperor.
Every country that was involved in that conflict was afflicted by the killer flu, but they all shared Wilson's attitude that it would hurt the war effort to tell people about the flu danger.
When the flu reached Spain, it had finally found a country not involved in the foolish war, and the press was allowed to report on the ravages of the flu in Spain. Thus, the world finally learned about the pandemic, which was then dubbed the “Spanish Flu.”
More Americans died from that flu than from combat during that war.
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Fast-forward to the post-World-War-II era. Americans looked to the white-coated scientists to instruct us as to the latest scientific discoveries and facts.
They had already extolled the wondrous qualities of lead and asbestos, advance men for the industries that introduced those deadly materials into our environment on a mass-production level.
Now they were filling us in on all sorts of chemical wonders for our enjoyment.
In the early 1960s, the drug maker Richardson-Merrell, to protect future possible profits, employed doctors to calm fears about thalidomide which, it turns out, caused terrible birth defects.
And who can forget when the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company told us that more doctors smoke Camels than any other brand?
We may not have noticed because we were fighting a war in Vietnam in order to “save us from communism.” Execution of that war involved lying about the illegal bombing of Cambodia, which destroyed the stability of that nation and opened the door for the Khmer Rouge to come in and kill millions.
In 1989, George H.W. Bush launched “Operation Just Cause” to take out Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, who had ceased being a U.S. intelligence asset and was showing too much affection for the Cubans and Russians for our liking.
On day two or three of the invasion, the lying propaganda operation called Radio Havana reported on the bombing of a neighborhood that resulted in 300 people being buried in a mass grave.
U.S. reporters, who were on the ground in the first instance of Pentagon “embedding” (not to be confused with “sleeping with”) with the invasion force, didn't notice the bombed neighborhood or the mass grave, so the Cuban reports were ignored entirely.
I vividly remember about three weeks later, buried deep in The New York Times (“All the News That's Fit to Print”) - lo and behold - was a short article about the “discovery” of a mass grave of around 300 people. No details were readily available.
The Times didn't rest on their delayed news laurels, but also made stuff up. Some years later, reporter Judith Miller latched onto a convicted internationally known liar, Ahmed Chalabi, to write breathless reports about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
These reports from the liberal Gray Lady of the news world, along with Colin Powell's disgraceful lies presented to the nation on the same topic, were instrumental in getting public approval for George W. Bush's war on Iraq that killed more than a million and birthed ISIS, which still wreaks havoc as part of the geopolitical landscape.
A less significant batch of lies were the utterly fabricated Times stories written by Jayson Blair. They didn't spark bellicosity and murder in the populace, they just further undermined our faith in journalism integrity.
These are just a few examples of Americans choosing to believe a lie when the truth is inconvenient. So why would we expect us to act any differently now, especially after four straight years of repeated lies delivered by one of history's most accomplished liars, Donald Trump?
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Our (and other nations') reliance on lies to live by are not because we are evil and vile creatures. Probably, 17th-century Yankees weren't all murderers at heart. But the knowledge that they were in fact murdering and robbing as a matter of course was more than most of them could handle emotionally.
The trauma that they were inflicting and that was being visited back upon them in retaliation was more than their collective consciousness could absorb. When faced with an overwhelming traumatic event, our brain shuts down its frontal cortex, where the reason lives. The amygdala, or reptile brain, kicks in a non-reasoned and non-negotiable response to flee, fight, or freeze.
The United States, and most other countries that have lived and grown through war, conquering, and subjugation, have developed a collective trauma response that denies the actual reality and instead embraces a fake one that allows us to continue to function on at least a nominal level.
As long as we refuse to take an honest look at our actions, as long as we prefer to choose to believe some myth that reflects favorably upon our horrific actions, then we are condemned to repeat these actions and never emerge from this endless cycle of inflicting harm and being harmed.
The terrible void that we feel in such a senseless and cruel world will never be filled by buying things to distract and entertain us. Those distractions not only are insufficient, but in fact perpetuate the trauma.
Somewhere deep down inside, we feel on some level that how we have currently organized our society is a terrible failure. Our society is disintegrating as a result.
* * *
Our job is not to correct the false notions of those who believe Trump's lies. The real work we must do is to seriously address the collective trauma that holds us all in its grasp.
Trauma can be healed. Brains can be rewired when given a safe and protective environment in which to function.
Nothing about this is easy. But if we want to really change our miserable collective psyche, none of this is optional, either.
We have been successful when a difficult danger presents itself, to which we respond by going to war. We have never been good at choosing difficult paths that stress empathy and understanding. We may think that we have been good at just bucking up, holding our emotions inside, and carrying on, but this is exactly what is killing us, slowly but surely.
We can choose to face our trauma, or we can continue to watch the United States slowly devolve into a morass of inequality, grief, and disfunction.
Even the billionaires who have profited from exploiting and manipulating our system have no happiness. Money can't buy that. Just ask the former occupant of the White House.