"A million years ago, during the George W. Bush administration, a White House official dismissively told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” meaning that they believed solutions to the nation’s problems came from studying reality and finding answers. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” the official told Suskind. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
--Heather Cox Richardson. (N.B. Not all thoughts offered here are those that I agree with but sometimes "bad thoughts" (like examples of hubris) can spur deeper and, one hopes, better thoughts.
In many indigenous societies, the deeper instructive and affective connections skip a generation. Since both grandparents and grandchildren are partly marginalized, the young fantast joins the old eccentric against a common opponent, the adult generation between them.
All our historical sources are based in this way on testimony: all testimony tells us not what happened but what its author wanted us to believe, or wanted to believe himself. In this way the uncertainty of history is contrasted with the certainty of perception and memory. But neither the criticism nor the contrast is well founded.
"Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not…"
— Hannah Arendt
"Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it."
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
