Today I want to look at what’s happening with America and our growing tendency to believe crazy stuff.

Let’s start with this discussion I had with Anderson Cooper last week about the latest government UFO document dump. My main point was just that - once you get past the hype - there’s nothing there. The documents were supposed to finally reveal for certain that we’re being visited by alien civilizations. Instead, they’re just more fuzzy blob videos and unverifiable personal testimony. It’s basically the same kind of “evidence” we’ve had about UFOs for 70 years.

So now let’s move on to the next point. Here are a couple of headlines worth noting. The first come from the NYTimes

And the second comes from People Magazine

So now we’ve gone from people thinking Earth is being routinely visited by alien spaceships to some people thinking they’re not spaceships but actual hellspawn.

Before I go any further I need to state two disclaimers. The first is I am totally sympathetic to people who really, really, really want to know what’s going on with UFOs and apply reason and evidence-based methods to answer their questions. I consider myself one of their number. Second, as someone doing contemplative practice in the Buddhist tradition, I am not one of these scientists who think that interest in a spiritual life means you’ve given up on thinking clearly.

With that out of the way, let me state the point worth thinking about. So many people these days are jumping head first into rabbit holes of crazy. UFOs = demons is just one example.

The question is why? Why now? What’s happened?

One answer may be the loss of community. I just finished listening to an episode of the Grey Area podcast with writer Tom Nichols as guest. Nichols is an expert in foreign policy, but also wrote the book the Death of Expertise. The whole conversation was about how we got to this point. Why do so many people happily parade around their ignorance about things which actually require a fair amount of expertise. Why do so many people happily embrace insane ideas that have no basis in reality.

At one point, Nichols recounts his experience in the bar his brother owned in the working class New England town they grew up in. According to Nichols, it was the community of guys at the bar that kept each other in check. Say one of them started going off, saying crazy stuff about not getting kids the measles vaccine. It would be the other guys at the bar that would stop the guy short. They’d look at their friend and say "You're an idiot. Get your kids vaccinated.”

This story serves as a benchmark. In the kind of healthy community needed for a functioning democracy, we’d see and interact with all kinds of people every day. Some would share our political values. Others wouldn’t. There would, however, be lots of values we did share because we lived in the same place and talked to each other in person (as opposed to online) Now a few people in the community may have genuinely crazy ideas as in “The Government is run by Lizard People!”. But we’d know who they were and, hopefully, treat them with respect and deference.

What we didn’t do is engage seriously with their crazy ideas. Why? Becuase the rest of us lived in a shared reality that required our mutual support or else the basic functions of community would fall apart. Fall apart how? Well, we would not be able to agree on how to keep measles from spreading. Or we would not be able to agree on who won an election.

Keeping this whole “complex civilization” thing up and running is what I think about when I see headlines about people (sometimes powerful people) believing that UFOs are actually demons.

Clearly we have our work cut out for us.

Finally… why do you think we’ve ended up here and what do you think we need to do to extricate ourselves from this pickle? Leave a comment on the website version of this post. Maybe we can get a conversation going.

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PS If you have other specific questions or issues you want me to address leave a comment on the website or email me at [email protected]

— Adam Frank 🚀