Culturally Collectively Fantasizing

 THE ANSWER IS: The several if not many distinctly extraordinary occasions upon which a large percentage of the American people strongly embraced a common blatantly false belief. The question could be articulated thus: What do the William Miller double rapture, the War of the Worlds, America's supposed, alleged founding upon freedom, the anti-vaxxing movement, and the stolen election of 2020 have in common? And these, bear in mind, art but the tip of the proverbial hackneyed iceberg. In this our great American cultural fun house, where everything is a scam, and nothing is what it seems, bizarre mass delusion run rampant. There is always at least one afoot at any given time. We are never without them.We are accomplished as self deception, through hard practice. WE Americans have deceived ourselves for generations that our country was born in freedom rather than violence, slavery, and genocide. We once deceived ourselves that slavery was beneficial to the enslaved, because it gave them civilization and the christian faith. When the reverend William Miller's national rapture failed to manifest in 1843, he tried again in 1844, with the same results, only with fewer victims, fewer bankrupt, scammed votaries. In 1938, Orson Welles couldn't back up his radio broadcast with actual Martians, the national relief was offset somewhat by a vague sense of disappointment, almost as if the country wanted some distraction, any distraction, from the great depression. Two facts stand out. The United States of America is conceived in fantasy and dedicated to the proposition that all realities are created equal. The self delusion started early and often, in the land of the sucker. Noticeable is that over the years we seem to have improved if not perfected our technique. Future generations might marvel that in the computerized security state year of twenty twenty there could have been as serious debate over who won the presidential election, when the results were so transparent for all to see. they might even more that tens of millions of ostensibly intelligent people bought into the fantasy that it was stolen, through some means which nobody was ever able to make apparent. Even after the lack of evidence was obvious to all, the fantasy persisted that Donald Trump's presidency was stolen from him, and, of all the great delusions which have marked the American experience, this may well be the most inexplicable, the most amazing of all.