An assault on American intelligence

New Roman"”>“America was a concept under which we built a nation. If you remove the concept you remove the basic fundamental character.” 

The United States was formed on the basis of the ideas of the Enlightenment, with adaptations and improvements being made as societies and “civilization” developed. Since then, those who rejected these ideas represented the negative phenomena in society and were often overpowered by the progressive or forward-thinking mainstream. Now, those who represent the negative segments of society are threatening to become mainstream.

“This is a rejection of the way of thinking that developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Enlightenment. I don’t want to overemphasize this but the Western man, after that period, was generally pragmatic. Our definition of truth was the best working theory we could develop at the moment of objective reality. That dynamic is what I think is under threat,” Hayden explained.

Hayden described the predicament that our society currently finds itself as a three-layer cake with each layer representing the major “players.”

“The basic layer and therefore the most important one is us,” he said. “It is the American population where our political culture is moving in the direction of a post-truth reality.”

This is where the group from the anecdote fits in, as well as everyone else. Although Hayden places all of American society in the biggest layer at the bottom, he says that people who compose the third layer are very different. “The winds of globalization have been at my back for 50 years. The people I grew up with, the winds of globalization have largely been in their face and the uneven effects of globalization have created grievances,” he said.

The grievances are more cultural rather than economic, but it creates the conditions for people with seemingly “simple” answers to appeal to their grievances and “tribe loyalties” and actually make their case to them. Also like the group in the opening anecdote, this group relies on social media outlets for their news — as well as their facts.

“Social media knows you as well as you know yourself. The business model for social media is to keep you there, keep you on the site, so it gives you