Part Two  (See Part One Below)

 

Almost as fascinating as the stones and theories of Doctor Cabrera is the fact that people believe in them.  A quick google of Doctor Cabrera and Ica will reveal a number of web-based shrines to the man, sincere people who are ready to cast aside modern science and grasp onto Doctor Cabrera’s new world.  It doesn’t take a great command of science to quickly arrive at a healthy sense of doubt about his theories.  And yet, many people with no particular stake in the outcome seem to accept it at face value, because the Doctor said so.

 

I had originally included Dr. Cabrera in The Army of the Republic, (and it wasn’t easy to shoehorn an eccentric doctor from the Peruvian desert into a book about Seattle urban guerrillas) because I felt that there was something essential about the his theories and people’s belief in them.  I was fascinate by the way Americans, in the face of easily recognized facts, were fleeing deeper and deeper into fantasy.  The Republican Party, which since 1980 has never shrunk government, never balanced a budget, never helped the working class and never reformed anything without immediately squandering the savings on war or corporate welfare, is nonetheless regarded by tens of millions of people as the small government, fiscally conservative working-class-hero reformer of big bad Washington.  It’s absurd on the face of it, as absurd as being a neo-Nazi sixty years after Hitler reduced Germany to rubble, or believing that men hunted dinosaurs 400 million years ago.  Yet every day respectable-looking men in suits and ties espouse these same ridiculous claims in the Wall Street Journal or on television,  and people pay them to go on saying it.

 

Belief in an alternate truth, no matter how ridiculous, is always seductive.  There’s a certain exhilaration that comes from breaking free.  It’s an escape into a world where facts lose their objective power and become a sort of clay that can be molded any way one sees fit.  That abandonment of reason and its leap of faith is tremendously empowering.  Think of it: you don’t have to believe the facts that some Ivy League egghead or career bureaucrat is telling you!  You’ve got your own set of facts, and by God, they’re just as good as his!  As Roger, the yoga-teaching “pretty boy” of  The Army of the Republic points out, that mass flight into fantasy is always present in countries that go insane, such as Nazi Germany or Mao’s China.

 

There’s another reason people believe in crackpot theories: because they can.  If you’re Joe the Plumber and you have fanciful beliefs about how to fix someone’s plumbing, it won’t be long until water is coming through the ceiling.  But the same man can believe whatever ridiculous ideas he wants to about politics or economics, and things will more or less keep rolling along.  It’s only later, when the economy is in ruins, or his child gets his leg blown off in a war, that Joe the Plumber’s fanciful beliefs come home to roost.  And then, the chances are, he’ll still think it’s someone else’s fault.