Welcome to the American House of Mirrors

In the House of Mirrors, it is impossible to know what is real and what is illusion. What seems real is fake and what seems fake is real. Nobody believes anything they don’t want to believe and only believe what is pleasing.

Reality is subjective and truth is based on opinion. It is a world of solipsism in which knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unsure; the reality of the external world is negotiable.

That’s not to say that you are free to believe what you want. There are pressures to believe certain things and to disbelieve others. These pressures are not based on metaphysical reality but on tribal loyalty.

Loyalty to your tribe requires certain beliefs and to profess beliefs not sanctioned by the tribe is heresy that is punished with ostracism. You must support the tribe no matter what.

This is post postmodernism. Enlightenment rationality was based on metaphysical truths and marked skepticism, distrust of grand narratives and ideologies and based on an understanding of human nature, a desire for progress and a belief in objective reality and morality.

The American House of Mirrors, instead, insists that knowledge and truth are the products of social, historical and political interpretations. Reality, in this world, is based on the politics of identity in every group from Black Lives Matter to the Alt-Right. Reality, we are being told, is defined by moral relativism, collective thought and group-referentiality.

In the American House of Mirrors rationality of the Enlightenment is being subverted and it its place is the political solipsism of identity politics in which reality is not metaphysical, but is defined by loyalty to ties of blood and race and sectarianism.