We Must Come To Terms With the Lies We're Taught About America

Originally published on Medium in 2022.“You’ll understand when you’re older.”I used to hate it when adults told me that. I used to get it a lot because I’m naturally inclined to question things and I grew up in a backwards, rural Wisconsin town that was inclined to white supremacy.“Why can’t you explain it to me now?”When I asked that, authority figures would just smile at me condescendingly and refuse to acknowledge any more questions or recognize the blatant contradictions in their philosophy.I am older now, and what I’ve come to understand is that none of it can be understood. When adults in positions of authority said, “You’ll understand when you’re older” it was because they had given up. They’d stopped fighting. They had learned to do what they were told.Americans become very uncomfortable when you encroach upon their cognitive dissonance. Lies are normalized in our culture, and it’s considered “impolite” to call out liars to their face. The whole system is designed to perpetuate a toxic philosophy.The United States of America has never come to terms with its own crimes. Everyone is forced to repeat the happy lie. You have to stand for the anthem. You have to thank members of the military for their service. You have to express gratitude for the cosmic chance that allowed you to be born in a nation that values “freedom.”If you question any part of it, the masses rise up to denounce you. They’ll say you “hate” America or you’re “ungrateful” or that “you’re part of the problem!”We don’t have any freedom in the United States. Nothing gets you killed faster than telling the truth. You learn that when you’re expelled from a classroom for asking a reasonable question. The underlying deceit of this country is that when they do finally come to punish you for the crime of dedicating your life to reason, it won’t be the military pulling the trigger, it will be the otherwise passive members of your own community. It will be the people who have smiled at you at the grocery store, and waved at your car as you drove down Main Street.It will be your neighbors.It will be the parents of your children’s friends.We say that our government protects our freedom, but what does that matter when our fellow citizens have been effectively brainwashed to betray freedom whenever they see an opportunity? The authoritarian philosophy endures because passive people think it’s “impolite” to acknowledge the obvious contradictions of oppressive beliefs.Slavery has always defined the United StatesThe United States was conceived with a fractured psyche. To this day, every citizen carries two warring halves. Every American citizen is in conflict with themself.Innate cognitive dissonance is why Americans become so hostile when you discuss the facts about our country, its inequalities, and its shameful history. School children are conditioned that the “truth” is impolite because it makes people angry.The problem does not lie with the truth. The problem lies with our collective cognitive dissonance.Our nation has always aspired to noble concepts, even as it blatantly turned its back on them.From the day of its birth, the anomaly of slavery plagued a nation which asserted the equality of all men, and sought to derive powers of government from the consent of the governed. Within sound of the voices of those who said this lived more than half a million [B]lack slaves, forming nearly one-fifth of the population of a new nation — W.E.B. Du BoisAmerica betrayed its own definition of freedom on the very first day! All Americans are born with “unease and discomfort” because of it.The problem is that this has been going on so long we have learned a sequence of highly complex coping mechanisms. Unfortunately, those coping mechanisms prevent us from ever addressing the underlying problem. We put band-aids on top of band-aids and wonder why all our actions are doomed to fail.Naturally, we like to think of ourselves as “great” people. We like to think of ourselves as “humanitarians” and as “charitable.” But how can we be any of those things if, deep down in our fundamentally American psyche, we have rationalized instead of rejected the acts of evil perpetuated by our nation?To this day, people insist that the Civil War was not about slavery, because they can’t accept the reality that blatant evil was so widely embraced in our country that we had to murder approximately half of the population, and even then we couldn’t eradicate it.The lie of slavery as a “benevolent” institutionTo this day, some people insist that slaves were treated well because their cognitive dissonance refuses to let them recognize the horrors of the institution. The result is that dishonest arguments such as the following are introduced into social discourse:The ideas of corporate individualism, which [Jeffrey Robert] Young sees as having emerged from this development, therefore stressed the humanity of slaves and their capacity for moral and spiritual improvement. However, they also cast slaves as childlike dependents and masters as rational Christian stewards, and saw the master-slave relationship as reciprocal and mutually beneficial. Young argues that, by presenting slavery in a quasi-familial light slaveholders could justify the institution both to themselves and to the outside world. However, he also contends that the romanticization and domestication of slavery was rhetorical and a figment of the planters’ imagination — Petley on Young, ‘Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837’This argument comes from the same family of lies that always endeavors to reframe the true history of the United States as an inevitable march towards justice, freedom, and equality. It’s important for all Americans to recognize that those outcomes are not inevitable and they have not already been established. Also, once established (if ever) there is no guarantee that they will remain.This highlights the fundamental issue with American cognitive dissonance. Our country is not what we have been promised. It’s not the greatest country on Earth. It’s not a nation free of problems. But instead of taking on the commitment to work to achieve our stated goals, we settle for a crude psychological patch that comes in the form of a collective delusion. This patch is maintained by brainwashing the general public into lashing out at anyone who dares disturb the illusion by offering any productive criticism.“Why do you have to be so negative all the time? Why do you have to ruin everything?”“Because the house is on fire and the food is poisoned and the air is contaminated and you’re holding me here against my will!”“Ingrate!”The philosophy of America ruins people’s livesMy father used to beat up on my mother, but he gets mad if you bring that up. I haven’t talked to him in twenty years.In his mind, he was a benevolent patriarch. He’s twice divorced now and he lives alone like a hermit. He looks back on the shattered remnants of his life and he regrets that the women he married “always had to see themselves as victims.”To his way of thinking, he did everything “perfectly” and it’s “unfair” that he didn’t receive more based on the effort he put in. He refuses to even consider that his philosophy might be tragically flawed.That’s most Americans in a nutshell.All my father had to do at any point throughout the decades is acknowledge the part he played in ruining his own life. He has to recognize that he was an abusive husband and father. That’s the only way forward. He should recognize he made mistakes and dedicate his remaining years to making amends.Instead, his tactic is to pressure the people he abused to deny the reality of their own experience. That way lies madness. It’s the way of America.“The Civil War wasn’t about slavery.”“Slave owners were benevolent.”“Rich people earned all their money, it wasn’t gained through stolen labor.”“You’re poor because you’re lazy.”“Quit blaming everyone else because you don’t have what it takes to succeed.”All of these things are lies!Adherence to tradition perpetuates the American lieSo many Americans believe the lies of America and they live their lives in accordance with these lies. They waste all their years thinking that the payoff will inevitably come sometime down the road. Then, they die, broken and impoverished and angry, and they dedicate the last remnants of their failing strength to help perpetuate the system that betrayed them.“I had it bad, why should anyone else have it better?”It doesn’t have to be like this.We have to perceive how the seeds of conflict are sown with our potential allies. We’ve got to stop selling each other out. Laborers are tricked into policing each other in pursuit of some fictitious reward from the all-powerful master. That reward never comes.How many times have you been told, as a laborer, that you are making unreasonable demands?The recent false narrative about the “labor shortage” is a good example of how Americans are constantly pressured by entitled oppressors who would rather shut down their businesses completely than pay workers a fair wage:As the pandemic ends and America chugs back into something like normalcy, we’re seeing it everywhere: WORKER SHORTAGE! No one wants to work because unemployment’s too high! The Mr. Moneybags of the world assume that we proles are lazy good-for-nothings who’d rather sit home snarfing Doritos and watching the 2021 equivalent of Jerry Springer than pull up our bootstraps stick our noses to the grindstone — There’s A Wage Shortage, Not A Worker ShortageThe truth is, there is enough money sitting in dusty coffers to multiply the take-home pay of every laborer in our nation by a sizable whole number. We’re trained to be thankful when our pay is raised by 3% or 5%, when the truth is that it should be raised by 300% or 500% or maybe even 10,000%!The funds are there. The rich people have it! But instead of joining with each other to go and get it, we scramble for table scraps and sell our potential allies down the river. This has been going on since before the Civil War:Considering the economic rivalry of the [B]lack and white worker in the North, it would have seemed natural that the poor white would have refused to police the slaves. But two considerations led him in the opposite direction. First of all, it gave him work and some authority as overseer, slave driver, and member of the patrol system. But above and beyond this, it fed his vanity because it associated him with the masters.— W.E.B. Du BoisThis is another aspect of the fundamental lie of America. We’re trained to have more loyalty to the rich oppressors that hate us than the friends and neighbors who live beside us in our quiet communities.The hatred simmering beneath the surfacePeople won’t tell you their true beliefs because, deep down, they’re embarrassed by them. They’ve been conditioned to redirect their embarrassment into hostility against anyone who points out the contradictions of their self-perception.This is why discussing politics and religion is considered “impolite.” You’re trained not to even discover the psychotic things the people around you support.The result is that a woman can have a quiet conversation with a seemingly kind elderly gentlemen every day as she drops off her kids at school. He knows that she’s an immigrant. He smiles at her children. He acts like he’s happy to see her.Meanwhile, behind her back, he secretly thinks she’s a “murderer” because she had an abortion to save her life due to an ectopic pregnancy. Or he gives money to a candidate that incites violence against immigrants, which leads directly to violence against her children.He doesn’t want to know the pain caused by his actions because he feels entitled to think of himself as “good and decent.”This goes back to the inception of our country when a group of entitled, rich, plantation owners wrote down words like “equality” and “freedom” even as they held human beings as their own property.Talking about these things makes people very uncomfortable. Not sorry. Part of being an adult is recognizing and taking responsibility when you make a mistake. It’s time to torpedo this concept that calls for not having difficult conversations in public. Our country NEEDS to have these difficult conversations. Having these conversations is how we make a better world for our children!Pointing out contradictions is our only weaponAnother aspect of the fundamental lie of America is that we’re all trained to think that violence is the answer to everything. I’m just like anyone else. I like to watch a film like Taken or John Wick and see some furious hero dole out death in a self-righteous crusade.“The Russian mafia murdered my dog so I’m going to assassinate the entire Russian mafia!”I feel the same frustration and it’s cathartic to watch something like that.But it’s important to recognize that violence is a right-wing response. When the political right loses an election, they attack the Capitol. When the political right lost the Civil War, they assassinated President Lincoln. The political right also cheered the assassination of President Kennedy.The left doesn’t descend to this kind of violence.Our only weapon is to point out the blatant contradictions that reveal how a structure of traditional beliefs is nothing more than a mechanism of lies designed to control us. We can’t scream and yell or shoot or hit people. That works against us. All we can do is be steadfast in stating and restating the truth when the truth becomes clear.Ask the questions that make the oppressors squirmYesterday I was at the state fair. There was a booth for the local Republican organization. They had a huge banner hanging out front.I didn’t know how to respond so I walked away. But now I know what to do. You have to stay calm. You have to ask questions.“Do you believe all votes should be counted?”“Doesn’t banning drop boxes also inconvenience Republican voters?”“Do you think a ten year old girl should have to die because life-saving reproductive health care has been restricted?“Do you believe it’s an act of treason to attack the Capitol?”“Do you believe it’s acceptable to claim there was voter fraud without any evidence?”Focus on the blatant contradictions in their belief system. Don’t let them distract you. Don’t succumb to your frustration and anger. They are the ones who appeal to hysterical emotion. We appeal to reason, and it takes a long time to get reason to stick.Our tactic is the slow erosion of lies, their tactic is immediate violence. We can wear them down because we are right and they are wrong. There’s no need to get all worked up. They’re going to lose eventually because their thinking is flawed. They will have minor victories that only delay the inevitable.We have to speak out. We can’t allow ourselves to be silenced by this absurd notion of “polite conversation.” We have to declare the contradictions. If we emphasize the contradictions in our community and in the media we can make them part of our social dialogue. We have to bring the truths that are buried back into the light, even the uncomfortable truths, especially the uncomfortable truths!Lies in a family reflect the lies of a nationMy dad might want to sit down with me for dinner. He might say, “Aren’t we having a nice time?”“Not really,” I would answer.“Why not?”“Because you used to hit my mom.”“Now, why do you have to bring that up? Why can’t you focus on the good times? Why do you have to ruin everything?”“Because I want to make sure it will never happen again.”We can’t build a better future until we responsibly address the mistakes of the past.We have to stop believing the American lie. We have to address historical injustices because those injustices continue to have a debilitating effect on every citizen in our nation. We can’t ignore the problem. We have to fix the problem.The American lie isn’t good enough.We need to work to achieve the American truth.You all make this newsletter happen! Thanks for your sponsorship! I have payment tiers starting at as little as twenty dollars a year.Upgrade at 30% offUpgrade at 40% offUpgrade at 50% offUpgrade at 60% offI’m so happy you’re here, and I’m looking forward to sharing more thoughts with you tomorrow.My CoSchedule referral linkHere’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).I'd Rather Be Writing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to I'd Rather Be Writing at walterrhein.substack.com/subscribe