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Refurbished History

Excellent essay on times we live in. What the author describes as the infantalization of the American psyche seems like making the deliberate choice to live in a state of denial and alternate reality. 

 The only people that have no past and no experiences are children. Denial of the past means you have to think as a child thinks, act as a child acts, relegating one’s daily existence to the surprise of a child. The infantilization of the American psyche is essential to perpetuating grotesque institutional structures that require the suffering of many to pay the debt of power to very few. Yet, it is human nature to fantasize about the past. To live in history with judgment, whether it is reverie or regret, is dangerous.

Refurbishing history is not unique to America. The difference is that in older cultures, re-inventing the past that occurred thousands of years ago, somewhat  dampens the effect of such action on the lives of people today. The systematic lies, alterations and embellishments of the past do produce an array of negative consequences for present day India for example but we may not see it manifested in the way it does America. The time scale of events does matter. 
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