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Reflections on Post Truth Politics: America’s Orwellian New Normal
In our fabled land, the promotion of unhinged lies has buried the morality bar six feet under
Eric Hoffer, the so called “longshoreman philosopher” was a fascinating and unconventional intellectual, certainly one who, as an observer of America and the world, would come to give us, perhaps unexpectedly, insights that today seem to be more applicable than ever.
Prophetically he wrote:
A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics and consolidated by men of action.
Source: True Believers : Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951
When I first came across this sentence, I was struck by how well Hoffer intuited the life cycle of that collective effort by a group of men and women, small or large, to operate, live or act according to a set of common goals or beliefs, the concept that we often call by the more familiar name of “movement”. When classified, “movements” can tagged as political, religious, cultural, literary or intellectual, but often they manifest themselves as multi-faceted, a clever combination of any of those. Today in America we undoubtedly dealing with a movement of a conseqentiality and maturity, that have not seen in years: MAGAism.
Hoffer’s correct intuition hinged upon three well sequenced verbs, pioneered, materialized, and consolidated that helped me visualize how movements, almost as if they were living organisms, were conceived, moved on to mature, and then eventually came to an natural end. There was in his statement a sense that naively reminded me of the world of industrial agriculture, a forced, unnatural world with its own cycles of creation, thriving, and eventual death. From there I realized that it would be easy for me to construct an impromptu fable, my version of an allegorical story, to help me capture for others this sense of evolution in a more tangible way.
Movements start by some spark, often by words, perhaps spread serendipitously, just like the first seeds of some newly discovered hybrid species. Let’s enter the fable.
Tales From The Farm
