The Roots of Insurrection
A foreign anthropologist exposes our myths
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike: Chronicles of a Self-Serving Environmentalist)
To better understand how tribal myths led to the storming of the U.S. Congress, Welcome To Fakeville! sought the opinions of an anthropologist, Gurb. He’s from the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b, which orbits the closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri.
GURB: I was named after a character in a Philip K Dick novel, Ragle Gumm. But we have no M in our language. Gumm is a puzzle solver, like me.
WTF: Could you, as an interplanetary anthropologist, talk about our proclivity to believe in myths, which our dictionary defines as “widely held but false beliefs,” the most recent of which is that the 2020 presidential election was rigged?
GURB: Get one thing straight. You as an earthy should not be throwing the first stone. Unless you too are free from believing in myths. Have you never been on the verge of sect thinking?
WTF: I confess that I got caught up in the “correct line” thought process that divided the American antiwar movement.
GURB: As an anthropologist, allow me to ask you a question. Have you ever seen woke thinking on your side (before we talk about the insurrectionists)?
WTF: Yes. Often. Recently I asked an environmentalist leader to recommend some reading sources to defend her position favoring biomass energy. She answered, “You don’t need a source. It’s common sense. Wood is renewable.” She treated me as if I should be a sect follower, in that no thinking on my part was needed.
GURB: Yes, such pervasive one-dimensional thinking is problematic.
WTF: But what are your credentials that allow you to judge our situation?
GURB: For our culture to attain the ability to travel 4.25 light years, we had to first overcome a culture of myths and become a culture of facts and science. Not absolute science. Scientists always question each other, and refute when presenting evidence, then reconcile.
WTF: But you look like an earth person, a little weird with that bump in your butt that looks like you might be hiding a tail.
GURB: I look approximately human because I found someone dying of coronavirus without medical care in the California high desert, the territory of iconoclast Frank Zappa and Aldous Huxley, whose “Brave New World” our people must learn from. I tried to help the man, but it was too late. I administered our version of morphine to ease his pain. You would call this “humanitarian.” I call it Alpha Centaurian. At the moment he died, I occupied his body.
WTF: Okay, so where did we go wrong?
GURB: The question is, how could you NOT go wrong? Some 40% of Americans believe in creationism and 30% in astrology. Can a person who believes that humans walked the earth with dinosaurs 6,000 years ago resist the cult-inducing pronouncements of a demagogue?
WTF: Those folks are mainly Republicans. Are you saying the Dems are on the high road?
GURB: Well, yes, but only momentarily. The assault on the Capitol was racist terrorism, and the perpetrators were Trump Republicans. There is no excuse for the perpetrators and the cynical elected officials who acted as enablers.
However, in the larger picture, the answer is No. Dems have also concocted myths and used them as a cudgel (but of course not as terrorists). Despite the findings of the Mueller Report, more than 50% of Democrats still believe Trump colluded with the Russians. When you wrote a well-documented article proving that there was no collusion, long before the Mueller Report was issued, you were vilified by some Dems. Some 30% of Dems believe the Russians rigged the 2016 election, a myth hatched by Dem leaders in denial.
Like your environmentalist colleague who did not want you to consult any sources, those 30% of woke Dems never read the CIA election report. They WANTED to believe something, and that was enough.
[See Welcome To Fakeville’s myth-busting insights and predictions from 2020. Check out our year-in-review piece “Welcome to 2021. The Real One!”.]
WTF: Are you saying that Trump’s lie about the rigged 2020 election is in response to lies about the 2016 election?
GURB: No. Because Trump started it all with his racist 2011 Birther conspiracy. He spread the lie that Obama was not an American citizen. Today, 72% of registered Republican voters still doubt Obama’s citizenship.
WTF: So it began with Trump?
GURB: In part. But Americans were already predisposed to believe conspiracies. Nearly 50% of Americans believe World Trade Center Building 7 pancaked because of a controlled demolition. Proxima Centaurians know everything about controlled demolitions. The way the building collapsed was not a classic “pancake.” The faulty construction allowed inflamed debris from buildings 1 and 2 to provoke a fire. Steel does not have to reach melting temperature for a poorly built structure to collapse.
Your culture is prone to believe what it wants to or what it is conditioned to, because your education system is not based on critical thinking. I’ll wager that none of the people who attacked the Congress on January 6 had gone to a Montessori school. None of them had been taught nuanced thinking or learned the basics of quantum mechanics, which is possible to teach to an 11-year-old child. Thus they were vulnerable to the incessant lies of a demagogue, your defeated president, your own version of the Joseph Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
WTF: What about a loss of trust in our institutions, government, big pharma, etc.?
GURB: With a basic ordering of facts, trust would not consist of “all or nothing.” You could recognize that big pharma exploits you, but also recognize that those companies often produce great medications. You need a critical distrust, but not one-dimensional distrust. An anti-vaxxer who studied the history of the measles vaccine would recognize that it is possible for a self-serving institution like big pharma to nevertheless produce a great product.
WTF: And distrust for government? Isn’t that healthy?
GURB: Yes, when it is nuanced. Your writer Ayn Rand railed against government and, to this day, continues to inspire Republican libertarians. Yet she hypocritically collected Social Security. Libertarianism is just one of the poisonous myths that obliterate critical thinking. Your government produced Social Security, public libraries, and national parks, even with self-serving leaders.
WTF: So where should we go from here?
GURB: Copy South Africa: form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission about this big lie that the election was rigged. Without the truth, there can be no reconciliation. The enablers of the Big Liar, who themselves didn’t even believe his lie, need to initiate the process. As Ray Charles and the Raylettes sang, “Tell the Truth.”
But the USA is too self-laudingly nativist to look abroad for a successful model. American exceptionalism is another mythology. As an anthropologist, I went to the January 6 rally in front of your Congress, and asked people for their thoughts. Their answer was “USA, USA”. Then they went in and attacked the USA.
