He was, looking back on it, a close friend, although we didn’t debate the state of our souls, something dorm room freshmen of all ages typically discuss. The subjects we chewed over were almost exclusively technical topics, or history, or the sprawling, self-serving institution that Dwight Eisenhower christened the military-industrial complex. He worked at the Pentagon and I was a military analyst on Capitol Hill, and we both took a skeptical stance towards government bureaucracies, having seen them from the inside.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when everyone was disoriented and either fearing devastating new attacks or hysterically screaming for vengeance, he kept his head. He also correctly predicted that the war on terror would degenerate into folly, tragedy and war crimes, with a side order of corrupt contracting and bureaucratic empire-building.
I was a bit disappointed, but not particularly shocked, when a few years later, he began going on quasi-obsessively about how the scientific data suggesting that global warming existed was either badly flawed or deliberately rigged. Even then, these debunking claims, already quite common, seemed a bit far-fetched, but I shrugged and wrote it off: Everyone is entitled to one eccentricity.
Only later did I conclude that climate-change denial, like the Kennedy assassination decades before, had become the gateway drug to a paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, and the first behavioral sign that should warn us all to back away slowly from association with its adherents.
In 2016, political opponents attempted to stage a coup against the president and would-be dictator of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The coup failed as 300 people were killed and 77,000 arrested. My friend immediately surmised that the U.S. was somehow behind the coup attempt: Did I also believe it? My response was that I’d certainly be willing to if I saw compelling evidence. None was forthcoming.
And down the primrose path it went. That same year, as presidential candidate Donald Trump loudly asked, “Russia, if you’re listening ...” and Trump’s operative Roger Stone was receiving the Clinton campaign’s stolen emails from the Russian GRU via WikiLeaks, my friend emphatically denied that Russia was interfering in a U.S. election — or, at least, if there was interference, not that there was, it made no difference in the outcome. So no harm, no foul, right?
At the point when he wrote a screed denouncing Democrats for facilitating the Trump tax cuts (even though every single Democrat in Congress had voted against them), I had had just about enough. I pointed out the defective logic of blaming the minority party when Republicans controlled both house of Congress and the executive branch, and observed that Democrats were unanimously opposed. “Well, they should have tried harder.” So much for that relationship.
Then there was Pete. An Ivy League-trained engineer (and also a polymath), he had a career in the Pentagon that was creative and fruitful, being in on the design of simpler weapon systems that would actually be effective in combat and not bankrupt the Treasury. Some of them are still operating today.
A creative eccentric in a bureaucratic institution is always a round peg in a square hole, and Pete was no exception. When he left the Pentagon, he dedicated himself to pontificating on the abundant sins of the Defense Department — and he was mostly right. But over time, his pronouncements became increasingly absolute, strident and off-kilter. Then (by coincidence?), when Trump became president, off the rails he went.
The climax came in the early stages of the COVID pandemic. Pete issued an edict that, according to his careful calculations, there would be 18,256 deaths from the disease in the United States. He later amended that figure to exactly double the number (no rounding of his estimate and no margin-of-error range of outcomes; everything was precise, which isn’t quite how reality works, particularly in predictions). In the event, approximately 1.2 million Americans died of the disease.
At the same time, Pete scoured the lunatic margins of the internet, seeking (and finding) claims that COVID vaccines were more dangerous than the virus itself. It was all part of a learning process whereby I eventually concluded that people who truculently parade their skepticism are actually the most gullible people on earth.
Then there were a couple of earnest government reformers. God knows, having worked a whole career in government, I understood their critique of its baroque and sclerotic routines. But after a while, meaning after the advent of Trump, their humorless, groping sincerity, which I indulged because of course they “meant well,” curdled into flat-out fascist goose-stepping. There were a handful of others, but all followed the same pattern of being erstwhile intelligent, well-read people, successful in their professional spheres, who went down the rabbit hole. It’s as if they were taken over by a simulacrum, as in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Do you know people like these? I’m not talking about crazy uncles who ruin your Thanksgiving dinner; they’ve been crude and witless since the time you were a little kid who avoided them. I’m referring to intelligent, well-read acquaintances who’ve strangely changed in the last decade; they might not say they’ve become Trump supporters or reactionaries in general, but the sole thrust of their argument is “something-something woke.” Or “Democrats are the real problem.” All too often, this mindset devolves into rants about weather modification or COVID vaccines as a mind-control project.
As I reach the twilight years of a halfway decent run, I have to wonder: Were that many Americans always as crazy as they appear to be now? It didn’t seem so, or perhaps I wasn’t paying attention. The internet might have had something to do with it; now everybody’s an expert. Changes in social conduct might have a role: Folks in years past might have harbored crazy thoughts, but were reluctant to let their freak flags fly. Or it could be the Trump effect: a demonstrably sociopathic leader braying like a demented jackass and beamed into every household might have given Americans permission to express their own previously hidden darkness.
All of these factors doubtless played a role in causing a significant slice of the American people to lose their minds, but they emerged in a complex interplay with the historical events of the last quarter-century. The 9/11 terrorist attacks and the inevitably ensuing debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq stoked a strange mental syndrome made up of fear and grandiosity. The greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression fed personal insecurity of a different sort. The COVID pandemic sent already destabilized psyches into free fall.
Americans have traditionally been famous for being open and friendly, although this quality, often enough, is a superficial gloss. Now we approach our fellow Americans with a certain wariness, and steer clear of a growing list of subjects, lest we inadvertently trigger an embarrassing scene. Perhaps later historians will conclude that the single most significant development in the United States in the new millennium was not AI, but the rise of the paranoid mind and the resultant loss of social trust.
