#Quest for infamy journal full#

The concept of the underclass was first proposed by economist Gunnar Myrdal in his 1962 book, Challenge to Affluence. Together they form something like the cognitive equivalent of the economic underclass. Their actions are driven, in large part, by the blind urge to escape.

#Quest for infamy journal full#

These lost souls inhabit a desperately impoverished information landscape, a place full of sound and fury but parched of conviction and meaning. Others retreat to the ragged edges of the cognitive system that frames modern life-and many seem to have tumbled out of that system entirely. Some wish for nothing higher than glory in viral attention. The public, however, is a fractured body. Much of the public, gathered in digital gangs of varying political persuasions, now rushes into the information sphere as into a battleground in which to smash at accepted wisdom. The events surrounding the health crisis, which included repeated instances of elite hypocrisy and a presidential election contested under opaque new rules, proved for many to be a tipping point in the disintegration of reality. Trust in the institutions and their organs of information stood at a low point before the pandemic. Today, the skeptics tend to be conservatives and Republicans. While Trump was president, his opponents refused to accept anything he had to say on the subject of Covid-19.

According to one poll, 80 percent of the public thinks that the vaccine-development process was driven by politics: a supermajority of opinion united in repudiation. They see partisan propaganda where others might perceive scientific truth. The reason many Americans disbelieve official descriptions of reality-for example, on vaccine effectiveness-is not a mystery. So what’s going on? The answer, I think, points in two directions at once: specifically, to the relationship between the top and the rest of our society. An indeterminate mass of our friends and neighbors maintains, with some fervor, that the federal government is run by a pedophile ring. Millions more refuse to receive the Covid-19 vaccines for reasons often rooted in fear of conspiracy, despite the evident decline of infection rates for the disease in intensively vaccinated areas. Millions are certain that Donald Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide, though he was certified as the loser by more than 7 million votes. Americans today believe a remarkable number of unlikely, even impossible things.