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The Lies We Live: America’s Illusions and the Cost of Believing Them [1]

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Date: 2025-06-01

“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” James Baldwin

America is not working—and it never really has. Its famous Declaration of Independence, which claimed that all men are created equal, excluded women, Black men (who only counted as three-fifths of a person), Native Americans, and any white man without land. Equality? Hardly.

From the beginning, this nation has been fed illusions—carefully crafted stories designed to obscure deeper realities. This is hypernormalization, a state in which the abnormal is not only accepted but also expected. And because we embraced these fantasies—sometimes eagerly, sometimes passively—we became complicit: as actors, bystanders, or victims of persistent discrimination who suffer in silence.

An enduring triad of control has always underpinned this dysfunction: the political elite, the corporate elite, and the wealthy elite. Their success has not come from solving collective problems but from manipulating the masses. These modern-day Wizards of Oz are not imaginary figures in some far-off emerald city but real men—mostly—operating in Washington, D.C., New York City, Silicon Valley, Houston, Chicago, and other centers of influence. Hidden behind curtains of power, they pull levers for their own benefit—too many wizards, too powerful, and too greedy.

Again and again, the public has been encouraged—or forced—to accept the abnormal as normal. This takes effort. It takes propaganda, repetition, and emotional manipulation, all with a single aim: to exhaust the people physically and emotionally so that resistance becomes nearly impossible.

To normalize the abnormal is not merely to tell a lie. It is to live a lie, to become a lie, and to help sustain the very deception that crushes us.

This process demands the surrender of one’s ideals and moral clarity. It is hyper because of the energy required to sustain the illusion. It is normal because the illusion becomes the only reality we know, embedded in our culture, until it feels natural—inevitable. If this seems difficult to grasp, watch Adam Curtis’s documentary HyperNormalisation (2016), available on YouTube. In it, he examines how Putin’s regime employed overwhelming spectacle, fabricated opposition, and contradictory narratives to confuse, disorient, and pacify the Russian people.

How strange—and painful—that America and Russia, two nations born of entirely different visions, should arrive at such a similar place, both dysfunctional and drowning in despair.

The language of illusion is seductive. It soothes. It reassures. It distracts. Like lemmings racing toward a cliff, we believe we are moving toward safety, even as we fall to our deaths. That image is familiar. But did you know it’s false?

In the 19th century, naturalists speculated that sudden drops in lemming populations must be caused by mass suicide—lemmings blindly following each other off cliffs. That myth entered American consciousness in 1958 through Disney’s White Wilderness, part of its “True Life Adventure” series. In the film, producers staged a mass plunge: they imported twenty lemmings from the Arctic to Alberta, Canada, placed them on a spinning turntable to simulate chaotic running around in circles, and then pushed them off a cliff.

They presented this cruelty as truth—a tragic parable of instinct gone wrong.

It was a lie. A made-for-TV illusion about obedience and doom. A perfect metaphor for hypernormalization. People believed it because it aligned with existing myths—or simply because they had no reason to doubt what Disney told them. Institutions, whether private or public, often prefer myth to messy reality. Myth sells. Reality resists.

We fall—like Adam and Eve, like the lemmings—not because we are fools but because we are deceived by those who hide venom behind soft voices, polished images, comforting stories, and disarming smiles. And once we accept the illusion, we begin to defend it. We pour our labor, our time, our votes, and our faith into maintaining what, deep down, we may suspect isn’t true.

This internal conflict—this dissonance between what we are told and what we feel—takes a high toll.

It echoes what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk: the pain of seeing oneself through the eyes of a dominant culture that devalues and distorts you. For Du Bois, this was the experience of Black Americans—forced to live in both Black and white worlds, reconciling two opposing aspects of their identity. Though rooted in race, his insight also applies more broadly to a society in which millions must navigate between the official illusion and the reality they glimpse underneath.

It seems that hypernormalization also describes the dynamic explored in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? — where voters, especially in working-class and rural communities, consistently support political candidates and policies that undermine their own material interests. This phenomenon, often labeled as “voting against one’s self-interest,” is not simply a matter of ignorance or irrationality. Rather, hypernormalization makes it possible. When the dominant narrative tells people who they are, what they should value, and who to blame—again and again, through trusted leaders, institutions, including churches, and cultural cues—many internalize the illusion. The emotional weight of belonging, fear, and identity becomes stronger than facts. People are not fools. They are caught in a web of expertly spun distortions, acting rationally within a false reality. Within that distortion of illusion, they are voting for their self-interest.

To live in such a system is to live with fractured consciousness.

One of America’s founding illusions is the idea that we are a “city upon a hill.” In 1630, aboard the Arbella, Puritan leader John Winthrop delivered his sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity.” Citing Matthew 5:14—“A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid”—he warned his followers that their conduct would be scrutinized. This was not a boast; it was a caution. The Puritans believed they had entered a covenant with God. If they failed, they would be judged and their faith discredited.

They did not seek empire. They feared moral collapse.

Winthrop first landed at Salem, then Charlestown, and finally crossed the Charles River to what became Boston. There, they built a theocratic, hierarchical, and deeply intolerant society. They enslaved Indigenous and African people, crushed dissenters, and practiced public shaming and execution. By 1638, African slaves were present in the colony. By 1641, slavery was legalized. By 1692, Salem became infamous for its witch trials—two hundred accused, twenty executed, and many others brutalized or driven mad.

Centuries later, Ronald Reagan resurrected Winthrop’s phrase—but stripped it of its original warning. He spoke not of moral responsibility but of American greatness. His “shining city on a hill” turned a biblical caution into a nationalist fantasy.

The illusion hardened. The fractures deepened.

This is hypernormalization. The dream hides the cost. The illusion masks the system. The lie becomes so vast, so rooted, that even the powerful no longer know where performance ends and truth begins.

And so, the questions become: How do we see clearly again? How do we pierce the illusion, confront the truth, and begin to build something real?

Day 133: days left to January 20, 2029: 1,329 days

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