Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

This is a scripted episode and one that I did quite a bit of work on putting together, so I want your full attention. If you can see me on YouTube, you can see that I’m smiling when I say that, but we do have some serious issues to go over this week, which is why I’m calling this one “What is Wrong with the US.” I think that if you think about what I’m going to talk about here and extrapolate out some of these ideas, you might agree that some of what I’m talking about has a lot to do with a lot of things and this is not just a political or academic rant.

Recently I’ve done some work describing how bad actors can work behind the scenes to disrupt people they have chosen as adversaries and try to distract, annoy, anger or even radicalize them. Tory Magoo and I talked about how this happens in Scientology but I think anyone who has been watching the news lately is aware that these sorts of operations are global in nature and go far beyond Scientology’s Office of Special Affairs messing with Church critics.

There is a cultural problem we are in the midst of which assists and even reinforces these kind of covert activities and which makes us fight one another over things we really shouldn’t be fighting over. Now I get into trouble all the time because I make unwarranted assumptions about the good nature of people and how they can get along. Recently, I’ve had my eyes opened that that’s not always the case and that people who I thought were friends were in fact working against me behind the scenes. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. To me, the work I am doing is far more important than a few people who for whatever reason have it in their heads that I’m a bad guy. But this whole experience has had me looking both in a microcosm and macrocosm at how these conflicts can happen. Being a person who thinks a lot about how people think, and who wants to figure out how to use education and critical thinking to make the world an easier-to-live in place for everyone, my attention was drawn to a long and quite interesting article by Kurt Anderson, based on his book “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire – A 500-Year History.” Now I don’t agree with everything in the article but it was long enough and had stuffed with enough interesting facts that I thought a podcast about it would definitely be in order. This is that podcast.

Kurt’s article in The Atlantic is titled “How America Lost Its Mind” and the path and conclusions that Anderson makes are not simpleton or politically partisan ideas. It’s the kind of article I like best – one that traces the origins of modern thought and culture back through recent history, showing how it’s always a large number of factors and incidents that come together like a series of dominoes falling down which lead us to where we are today. In fact, to make that analogy even more accurate, it would be multiple lines of dominoes from different directions which converge in the here-and-now and then keep going their separate ways and here we are trying to figure out what’s going on.

The US has gradually but very certainly become a country that does not really trust itself so much anymore. There are a lot of reasons for this, some valid and some totally crazy. We can go back in time as far as we want and find influencers, such as how the European and English feudal system created a classism that survives to this day in the haves and have-nots. How the Industrial Revolution and the independent spirit of inventors and entepreneurs brought about a lot of the problems with modern capitalism. Or we could talk about how religious minorities fleeing from religious persecution in Europe created a new country which was supposed to embody religious freedom but has now devolved into the same kind of persecution all over again in the vicious cycle of society’s pendulum swings. But for what ails the United States today, at least as far as this subject I’m