After the truck is gone, the dashboard camera continues to record everything, except now the painting is a landscape—Portrait of a Cloudy Florida Day in February, or Still Life with Corpses. The only evidence of the massacre that has just occurred is a single boot visible in the road on the left-hand side of the screen.
And so the viewer is left to ponder how one fact about the shooter stands out over all the others.
He appeared to be a child.
Now
It started with cigarettes, or how to sell people a product that men in Virginia seersucker knew would kill them.
Lucky Strikes. Virginia Slims.
A promise of magic in every puff.
To sell people cancer and lung disease, you have to do more than bury the truth. You have to undermine the idea of truth itself. What is smoking really? Who says it’s bad for you? Some Harvard elites who don’t understand your suffering? Who would keep from you this sweet relief?
To undermine facts, you can’t just question the science. You have to question the expertise of science itself. To create confusion and uncertainty. To reject the notion of consensus.
Or maybe it started with Freud and the discovery of the unconscious. The idea that people are driven by urges and emotions they don’t even realize they have. Sexual impulses, violent desires. Desires that have been forced out of the conscious mind, repressed to the unconscious level. Taboo thoughts and feelings we know we’re not supposed to voice. Secret drives pushing for satisfaction. To marry our mothers and kill our fathers. Base impulses that lurk in our dreams. The human mind, Freud understood, is a denial engine—wanting things it cannot admit to, all the while pretending that it does not.
Or maybe it started with Freud’s nephew, an American named Ed Bernays who figured out that Freud’s theory of the unconscious could be used to sell people products. The key was to appeal to those unconscious impulses all humans felt but hid, their latent fears and desires. Manipulate consumers’ unconscious minds, and their rational minds will follow. He developed an approach he called the engineering of consent, which gave leaders the means to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it. And so was born the devious art of advertising and a new style of politics.
In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, sought out Mr. Bernays, hoping for guidance in building a führer cult around Adolf Hitler. He envisioned a language of symbols, a system of manipulation the Nazi party could use to push the German people toward bigotry and war. At the heart of his challenge was a question: How do you make people behave in ways they know are immoral?
The answer he got was this: You undermine the idea of morality itself. You redefine it. What was wrong once becomes right. Imperatively so. Murder becomes self-defense. A moral act, necessary. The Jew isn’t human and can therefore be eliminated without guilt or shame. Those who seek to defend the old morality are relabeled as fiends and liars. They are painted as evil, because once your enemy is evil, then the moral thing to do is destroy them.
The way you sell people cigarettes, it turns out, is the same way you sell them genocide. By undermining the idea of certainty, by rejecting objective reality and traditional morality. By demonizing “experts” who would dare to tell you what is right and what is wrong. Don’t you get it? they tell us. There is no right. There is only what’s right for you, and that is for you alone to decide.
Or maybe—yes, of course—it starts with death itself. Or, more precisely, with the denial of death. That human ability to deny death, to live as if the end isn’t coming for us all. Our mortality is a locked room we never visit, feeling a shudder and a chill every time we pass by the door—boarded up, walled over—and yet there it remains, waiting, like the devil to whom you sold your soul. We hold our breath when we see it. Our parents die, our friends and colleagues. We attend their funerals, see them lowered into the ground, never once accepting that we will be next.
In the beginning there was denial. And then, thanks to Sigmund Freud and big tobacco and all-politics-is-personal, came denialism. The organized rejection of reality in favor of fantasy. That all-consuming industry of denying science, denying experts, denying truth itself. The world is flat. The holocaust never happened. 911 was an inside job. Vaccines cause autism. COVID-19 is a hoax. The election was stolen. We don’t want to die, so we pretend we won’t. And when you get right down to it, if we can deny our own deaths, we can deny anything.
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Felix Moor, born Samson DeWitt, knows denial intimately. He grew up with a father who rejected the American government’s legitimacy. A sovereign citizen, who believed the Fourteenth Amendment had enslaved a formerly free people. A father who manufactured his own license plates, who renounced currency, who filed a Declaration of Non-Consent with the US government, declaring himself exempt from all federal laws and regulations. Who taught his son to shoot using targets labeled ATF and FBI.