The Trouble With Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

by Brooke Gladstone

Every week on the public radio show On the Media , the award-winning journalist Brooke Gladstone analyzes the media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. Now, from her front-row perch on the day’s events, Gladstone brings her genius for making insightful, unexpected connections to help us understand what she calls—and what so many of us can acknowledge having—“trouble with reality.”

Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was—there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point . The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not.

And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it.

Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.

 

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Essays, Philosophy, Sociology, Journalism, History

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 16, 2017

About the author

Brooke Gladstone is an American journalist and media analyst. She is cohost of NPR's On the Media and a former senior editor at Weekend Edition and All Things Considered. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reviews

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 A few weeks back I read Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, which traced our history of gullibility far into the past. I receive The Strand non fiction book box, and this was one of the books in that box. Proved to be a complimentary read to Fantasyland, coming from a slightly different direction. Why do so many of us have trouble with reality?

A small book, with alot of big thoughts, and some relatable information. Explains how we are reluctant to let anything nor anyone interfere with our opinions or thoughts, when we are positive we are right. Explains how lies told by politicians, and he who shall remain unnamed, become our new reality. Who can we believe? Is it fake news or fact? I know I'm not the only one who wonders why this person is still allowed to tweet, when his tweets are often devastating and often cause a huge backlash. It appears his tweets may serve another diversion, this too is gone over in this book. As I said, much information is gone over in this little book. There is much more, but you should try to read this, it does provide much food for thought.

[Kamila · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author herself calls this a "tract," so to criticize it for being shorter than a book, as some reviewers have done, isn't fair—it's like criticizing a poem for not being a novel. It's like a long essay in The New Yorker (or whatever your longform reading of choice is), and takes no more than 2 hours to read. Brooke Gladstone is an excellent journalist, as evidenced by her podcast On the Media, and her political pamphlet, let's call it, covers a number of thought-provoking ideas important to understand in our current political climate—the main one being the idea that there's a difference between facts and truth, and that the latter differs for everyone because we each construct our own realities. I won't say more, because I don't want to unfairly paraphrase; she is an excellent writer, great with words, so you deserve to read it directly from her. Go for it.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live in a bubble in Northern California. Admittedly, it's a nice bubble: the people around me are well-educated, well-informed, and from diverse backgrounds. The liberal values that built the San Francisco Bay Area have resulted in economic prosperity and high quality of life. This is a region where people strive to make the world a better place for future generations, where the best public university system in the world produces a qualified electorate, where it's emphatically not okay to express Nazi viewpoints.

Naturally, I've spent much of the last year asking myself "What the actual fuck is happening?" And, regardless of how much I read on the topic, I'm still not sure how the United States has devolved into a shit show of factory-produced panem and lowest-common-denominator circuses.

The Trouble With Reality doesn't necessarily explain what's going on (it's hard to explain Trump and his supports from a logical perspective, as his positions don't depend on logic). However, writer (and NPR journalist) Brooke Gladstone aptly describes the problem. Part of the difficulty of Trump's administration is that he manages to do ridiculous, unprecedented stuff on a daily basis. It's sometimes hard to remember what he did just a month back, and that makes it important for journalists like Gladstone to detail his actions in longer-format work. She also makes connections to other abusers of propaganda, which I found fascinating.

Unfortunately, books like these tend not be read by the uninformed masses that need them the most. Still, I think The Trouble With Reality is a powerful piece of short nonfiction, and is worth a read if you are as troubled as I am.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This essay has some interesting things to say (and quote) about personal worldviews, and what we will do not to disturb our own. I liked Gladstone’s comparison of Orwell and Huxley’s dystopias, in terms of where the dystopia lies. After less interesting talk about the Donald, Gladstone does acknowledge that, although we tend to conquer ourselves, we are capable of surpassing ourselves. But otherwise there is little here to give one hope. And I found her writing style far too breezy for the topic.

[Neil Purcell · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brooke Gladstone can communicate in a logical, straight-forward and coherent way. She is an articulate, thoughtful, and wise person. I enjoy hearing her on public radio. She does great work in that medium. Despite all of this, I must say that her "rumination on moral panic" is disappointing.

In 87 smallish page, she quotes eminent Americans of political and literary fame, to help bring clarity to our predicament. We have a president who lies to us, whose administration lies to us, and whose party lies to us too. The climate isn't changing, or if it is, it isn't due to human activity, and if it is, then the rest of the world should cut us a break on our commitment to help fix the problem. AHCA will cover everyone, with better outcomes, at less cost that Obamacare. Any negative news is fake news, and the media are the enemies of the American people. His crowds are always bigger than ever before, than anyone else's, and it never rains on his inauguration. We knew all that.

So what is to be done? Write your Congressman. Make sure you participate in well organized protests. Great.

She tells us we are all Yahoos - not only the miserable racists - or if you prefer, white nationalists. Not only the uneducated and misinformed. Not only the homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, etc etc etc. But also the college professors, lawyers, and scientists. The doctors and newspaper editors. The priest and the nun on the bus. You and your nice liberal wife sipping your cappuccinos - all of us. We are all Yahoos, and so we should try to see the world through the larger perspective of the whole - because your reality is different from mine and from the guy with the Trump bumper sticker, and we'll never heal from our current predicament by only appealing to people who think like us.

That's what Brooke wrote this book to tell us - that we need to accept that these people who voted for Trump have a different reality to us.

She almost seems to be arguing that we can save ourselves from this polarized view of the world by understanding the other guy. But that's not actually it - she actually says very clearly that the facts will win out in the end. She encourages us to focus on facts, and to keep pressing their importance in our part in an active public discourse and in letters to Congressmen and in well-organized protest.

I think 87 pages is probably 86 more pages than she needed to say all of this. She could have been a lot clearer, She might have offered something more useful. I am not sure what she thought a reader would take away from her book.

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Part of the problem stems from the fact that facts, even a lot of facts, do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange, and prioritize those facts and marinade them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal."

I found a lot of comfort in this little book. Not because it provides easy answers, or any answers really, to the increasingly unsettling state of our nation (at least the nation in my reality), but because Brooke Gladstone synthesizes and provides reference points to the scattered thoughts, opinions, concerns, and feelings that we apparently both share. It felt good to soak in some exceptionally well written sanity.

Ever since reading both books in high school, I've felt America was always more at risk of devolving into something more Brave New World than 1984 and Brooke's choice to bring Neil Postman's Orwell/Huxley contrast into the analysis of Trump's ascension feels spot on and worthy of a whole lot of reflection.

"Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance."

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It will be easy for Trumpists and conservatives to ignore Brooke Gladstone’s new book. Not only is she a member of the mainstream media, she's spent the last 30 years working for two bastions of biased liberal media, WNYC and NPR. They’ll justify their dismissal of the book with fleeting perusals, its reviews or perhaps the subtitle. And even if they took the time to read it, they'll dislike it because it invokes writers such as Hannah Arendt and discussions of demagogues, totalitarianism and authoritarianism. Yet such a lapse is indicative of what she believes is happening today.

The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time is a succinct consideration of an era in which reality is the core of an “epic existential battle.” In assessing why this battle exists, Gladstone doesn’t lay blame entirely at the feet of Trump and his supporters (although they are assigned plenty). She builds her analysis using diverse sources, including Arendt, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, journalist Walter Lippmann, Thomas Jefferson, Philip K. Dick, Oliver Swift and 17th century poet John Milton. She believes human nature helped create our confused reality.

We mistakenly believe facts are reality, she says. Even when two people are presented with the same facts, though, they filter, arrange, prioritize and view them through their own values and traditions. Ultimately, reality “is not necessarily the world we would like it to be, … it is simply the kind of world we expect it to be.” Yet another part of the problem is that just as we sift facts, other elements of our political system affect what we sift.

As part of career spent covering the media, Gladstone has spent nearly 20 years co-hosting On The Media for years, a weekly radio program billed as examining how the "shapes our world view." In the last election, the media fell victim to what she calls Trump's "canny use of the demagogue's playbook." Using a number of Trump's campaign statements and an analyzing his use of Twitter to "embed his realities," The Trouble with Reality suggests the media's approach to an unprecedented campaign style made things worse. Gladstone argues that the Trump campaign's methods left the media "darting this way and that after shiny objects, too frantic to cull the crucial from the trivial, never pausing for the big picture that, in any case, they would not have recognized."

Yet The Trouble with Reality may reinforce the growing lack of trust in the mainstream media. Gladstone correctly notes, for example, that "reporters should have laughed less and reported more" during the campaign. Perhaps more concerning is the suggestion that Trump's hostility toward the press has created an animus that will create a new golden age of journalism. Trump's election, Gladstone says, has "blocked the appearance of objectivity at all costs" and turned Washington reporters into war reporters. Yet one of Trump's core arguments against the press is that it lacks objectivity. (Actually canceling press briefings would be a miscalculation as it would not only heighten the animus, but give “war reporters” more time to work on their marksmanship.) Perhaps it is just her phrasing that causes concern. It's crucial the media change its conspicuous tendency to accept statements at face value and fail to fact check. Yet any hint that the press is discarding objectivity has significant ramifications for media credibility.

Of course, Gladstone also sees Trump as a significant source of "our reality trouble." She seeks to explain what allowed Trump to so resonate with voters during the campaign. At the same time, the book regularly quotes and applies guidelines used to assess totalitarianism and demagoguery, suggesting Trump is both. As for what helps create reality for Trump supporters, she says he struck a "classic authoritarian deal" with them.

You can bask in my favor and recognition, in the promises I make and the license I bestow, and all I ask in return is that you believe whatever I say, whenever I say it. Even if it is false.

This certainly evinces a basis for people accepting the "fake news" and "alternative facts" motifs apparent since Trump's inauguration. It also helps explain why she suggests that the path toward repairing reality isn't agreeing on what it is.

Given that we each view identical facts from different perspectives, it is difficult, if not impossible, to agree on the truth, on reality. While Gladstone suggests that activism is a route for those so inclined, she believes gathering more facts from people and places with which we are unfamiliar is important. Even if those facts don't change our minds, it may allow us to comprehend how or what another person accepts as reality. Whether she's right or not, the suggestion is certainly better than viciously berating and maligning each other, whether publicly or online.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it in an hour, and I suspect she wrote it in a couple of days. A liberal journalist tries to come to terms with the Trump presidency and the state of America today in 85 very small pages. She has interesting things to say about how we create our realities, slinging out (and defining) terms like umwelt and umgebung. She quotes neuroscientists on how we adjust our stereotypes only reluctantly and as little as possible when confronted with facts that counter them, pretty much dovetailing with what Jonathan Haidt says more thoroughly in The Righteous Mind. She is very interesting in comparing the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley. And she has some hopeful things to say about how journalism may be beginning a new golden age as reporters no longer trade access for soft-pedaling but instead take advantage of an administration and an entire federal bureaucracy that is "leaking like a lobster pot." I'd say three stars, except for that great metaphor.

[Steve · Rating 2 out of 5]

A long essay, that you can read in 2 hours. Get a copy from your public library.

Some excellent quotes used, and nice to see Lippman revived. But she really does come off as a Neo-Liberal. She dismisses Putin/Russia's influence on the last Presidential election as left wing conspiracy theory, with time better spent on other political matters - ????

I had to reread the last few pages a second time to make sure I had not misread her. Public protests are not important, because it is a gathering of like-minded people, and Trump does not believe the polls anyways? Unh, mass protests and polls are two very different things. And mass protests ended our involvement in Vietnam - so don't go telling me there are better things to do!

And she appears to have bought into the falsehood of the inevitability of Progressive thought and action. I mean, did I read it right, or did she essentially say, "Just wait it out, Truth will out - Lies will lose"? Ya know Hitler and Stalin had pretty good, long, runs there. And it is thinking like this that got us from "Hillary/Michelle/etc etc - end of the Republican Party, hurrah!" to Trump and both the House and the Senate - allowing him to slowly take over the Judicial as well.

And in the end she does not really offer any suggestions on how to promote Facts/Truth over Falsehoods/Lies/real "Fake News". Nice polemic against Trump and his lies, but no action plan to follow which would allow us to combat, and defeat, these authoritarian forces sooner, rather than later.

Time better spent out in the streets, or even contacting your Congresspeople.

[Frieda Vizel]

I was so happy that this was such a pocketbook-friendly chacke of a li'l book'ele, with its Twitter-age sized bits of insights that make books possible for the modern Adhd mind. For once, I bragged to myself, I could read a real book on the subway or in the checkout line or in the park, like in the good olden days. Then I lost the book. I think in the gym, maybe it's in someone else's groceries, no idea. Remember that from the olden days, the losing stuff?

[Tom Pepper · Rating 1 out of 5]

An interesting example of exactly the kind of poor thinking that has led to very problem Gladstone proposes to address. Like most journalists, her thinking is muddled and superficial, and she offers cliches and vague or empty metaphors in place of serious thought. A very bad essay, that isn’t worth posting on a blog much less publishing as a book.

To illustrate, briefly, the problem with this book, I’ll point out just the worst of the conceptual errors. Gladstone’s apparently unintentional sophistry, right from the opening of the essay, is exactly the kind of conceptual incapacity that so exasperates her when Trump does it. The first, and biggest, problem is what is sometimes called equivocation in informal logic. Glasdstone uses the word “reality” (and also terms like fact and truth) to refer to two very different things, and then asserts that what is true of one of the things she calls reality is also true of the other. In particular, she uses the term reality to refer to the actual world as it exists independently of us, and also to refer to the “values and traditions” which we impose on that world. Both are, in different senses of the world, “real,” but the first is not up to us, and the second is. The failure to make this distinction is a common error these days, and Gladstone makes it for almost ninety pages. It is true, as she says, that a tick has a very different umwelt from a human, perceives very different things and is motivated by different intentions. To say that therefore they inhabit different “realities” is true only figuratively—the butyric acid the tick detects is “real” in our world as well, even if we can’t detect with our naked senses. It is not true that we “take the limit of our field of vision for the limit of the world.” Almost nobody makes this error, ever. This is why we have invented things like microscopes and CO detectors. The assertion that we do this only seems plausible if we have first failed to notice the sophistry that this whole essay is founded on: the mind-independent world is not identical to the world of values and desires, even if both are in some sense of the word “real.” Any second year philosophy student should be able to correct this error. Most journalists, who write to appeal at a superficial level to the broadest possible audience, focus more on seductive rhetoric than clear thought—and so cannot see this obvious error. If they did, they’d likely not get into print. And in this way, this essay does help clarify the root of the problem we are in. It just does it as an example of the problem, not by correctly explaining the problem.

The book ends with a nauseating pile of mixed metaphors pretending to be a solution. We must conquer, transcend, follow an endless path, tweak and repair…exactly the kinds of metaphors that almost sound like they are really saying something, until you stop and think about them. When she ends by telling us we are not doomed because we can “see the other reality reflected in that person’s eye,” readers of self-help books might think she’s actually said something with this familiar cliche. But she hasn’t. And that is the problem.

Learning to separate the concrete actual world of facts from the realm of values and intentions is the only way we will ever get out of the dilemma we are facing. Whether global warming is real or not does not depend on which set of values and intentions we find most appealing. As Hannah Arendt said (and Gladstone quotes her, but seems to miss her point), failing to make this important distinction may prevent us from seeing the actual world, but it won’t prevent the very real effects of that actual world from impacting us.

[Kiki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoy listening to Brooke Gladstone and her show On The media on NPR on the weekends. I could hear her clever voice the entire time I was reading this pamphlet (I like that word for these little words because it feels revolutionary). Illuminating and concise and definitely honest, this book is a must read for anyone interested in the Resistance against the takeover of our country but the extremists holding office in 2017. Freedom of the press is essential for a healthy republic and we must support our journalists and stop those who are hell bent on taking those freedoms away. Brooke totally hits the nail on the head in this essay.

[Kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slim volume was thought-provoking and interesting, but ultimately left me disappointed. Brooke Gladstone, the longtime host of *On The Media* from WNYC, has a unique perspective on news, history, and media organizations. She leverages her expertise in this short tract, putting into words the way many people have felt since Election Day 2016 and trying to suggest a path forward.

The book is divided into five sections:
1. In Here
2. Out There
3. Lying is the Point
4. Recovering Reality
5. The Reckoning

While sections 1-4 are quite strong and build a coherent picture, things really start to fall apart in section 5 - especially disappointing since that's the section that is "the path forward." There's an extended use of metaphor from Swift's *Gulliver's Travels* that just didn't work for me, despite Gladstone's best efforts. In the end, I was left wondering, where do I go from here? What can I actually DO? Gladstone gets halfway there but this just didn't connect in the way I think she intended it to.

That said, I think this brief book is well worth a read for sections 1-4. It helped to know that I'm not the only one feeling confused and lost about what has happened and what is going on today. Not that I really felt alone, but this put the feelings into words and concepts that are useful.

[Antoinette Perez]

The trouble with this book is that it is so vague -- from the title to the opening pages. To the last page, actually. It's sort of about media and the presently fluid concept of reality, and what happens in society when people refuse to agree on the same reality. The author makes some good points and quotes experts with helpful perspectives, like Masha Gessen. But the book never promises anything, so what you get is exactly what the subtitle tells you: rumination. I was left wanting more, and I don't say that in an entirely positive way. The good news is that the rumination is short.

[Mommalibrarian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard the best parts of this very short book in online interviews. One chapter is a great comparison of the alternate dystopias in Animal Farm and 1984. I don't think this is Ms. Gladstone's original idea but she knew about it, adds insight and made it available to a newer audience. The whole book is a reaction to recent political events (I leave those to your imagination) so it will be of transitory interest. Worth a quick read anyway.

[Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slender volume that packs a powerful punch. Gladstone, the co-host of the popular podcast On the Media takes on the troublesome times in which we find ourselves and the challenges of finding our way in a maze of facts and counterfacts, thoughts, biases, assumptions and prejudices that shape our perception of the world in which we live.

Taking as her jumping off point the election of Donald Trump as president, she builds a compelling case for the idea (self-evident and yet difficult to accept) that each of us carries certain assumptions about reality we consider obvious and patently provable that nonetheless do not accord with the reality of others. Gladstone makes no apologies for the fact that she considers her mostly liberal worldview the correct one, even in the face of all this. The facts back up her version of things, at least the facts she can marshal to her defense.

But what if one dismisses the legitimacy of those who purvey the facts we use to bolster our way of seeing the world? What then? As one of her sources, Ned Resnikoff said, "When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision, there is no common ground to be reached, and no incentive to look for it". This is the age in which we find ourselves.

The author makes no pretense of having all the answers. What she is encouraging here is an investigation into our own motives and reasoning underlying how we see the world. It is not helpful, she asserts, to simply dismiss all those who disagree with one as misguided cretins. These are the people who elected a president, have a stranglehold on Congress, and control 32 state legislatures. While it might not yield the outcomes we have in mind, escaping our own little boxes of assumption might free us up to understand the boxes in which those others have trapped themselves. As Gladstone quotes Schopenhauer, "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." The least we can do is expand our vision to incorporate as much of the world as we can. Minds do change, but bombarding them with facts is perhaps the least effective way to help that process along (you might want to do a search for the backfire effect and see what you find). Perhaps compassion and an attempt at understanding might help. God knows, we can use all the help we can get.

[Brad Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole, I found the book compelling and convincing. Gladstone weaves luminaries and recent interviews with media mavens, linguists, and neuro-scientists into a pleasing and powerful argument about the nature of contested reality in modern day politics. I'm a fan of everything by Gladstone, Garfield and team at the On The Media Podcast, and recommend it highly. This book grows out of and expands on new and old podcast material.

Gladstone neatly presents a simplified epistemological-psychological framework for understanding reality. She uses Henry James, Schopenhauer, Philip K. Dick, and others to describe a reality is personal, based on our limited vantage on the world, and inherently conservative. She leaps to the present American political moment, finding more in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than Orwell's 1984 to argue that we've become enthralled with what we love, rather than oppressed by what we fear. She does not pull any punches, characterizing (and typologizing) Trump's maelstrom of lies and distortions; how he pulls the rug out from under reality; wages war on the stabilizing elements in the political system; and plays out a demagogic and authoritarian playbook. In her view, Trump poses a fundamental threat to American democracy.

The media might help us, if only we were to pay it, but ultimately we will have to pull ourselves out of this mess. Gladstone calls all of us to the action of challenging our own provincial and conservative world view and finding true access to others' realities. To do so, she asks us to consider a few tribes from Gulliver's Travels: the Laputans, Houyhnhnms, and the Yahoos; the latter most resemble us humans. I liked this circling back to the eminent worlds of science fiction, and closing that loop, but it felt rushed. The gesture is kind of like, "Okay, humans, you're imperfect, now deal with it," which is probably real and true, but a tad unsatisfying. In any case, I think she's wise to avoid prognosticating.

The writing is fresh and funny, with little epigrams like "We cannot know the world, but we have to live somewhere," and "Who would choose violation over validation?" Who, indeed?

[Ron Christiansen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though some smart academics and liberals found nothing very new in Gladstone’s book, I think it importantly and efficiently grafts together a number of thinkers from various fields and genres. It's not a book, it's tract. I do wish it could be distributed as such.

In particular, I appreciated her recounting of Postman’s analysis of Huxley/Orwell to illustrate how Huxley nailed our current trumpian era. I knew this in general but to read those passages again, now—wow. And she quotes Phillip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin. Got to love that. Not to mention the juxtaposition of all this against some key passages from Trump’s The art of the deal. I didn’t realize he had been quite that explicit in articulating his strategies.

Gave me some hope that possibly these times will bring about another golden age of journalism as seen with Nixon. Yet I’m afraid that cause and effect will be much more complex and fraught in the age of the internet. Still, some good push back on liberals (read me): many actions to take “but all such efforts are hobbled, inexorably, by rage, bafflement, and despair,” what Gladstone calls “emotional interference.”

Liberals who think they already get all this, I think miss the point. Yeah, yeah we know Lakoff’s work; yeah, we know about framing…well, how did liberals respond to this framing and how are we now? Something ain’t working and we might want to go back to the rhetorical basics.

[Alianor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this essay for its ability to balance levity with seriousness. Reading this on a Saturday morning fresh off the most recent healthcare debate was rejuvenating. It's not a book full of resistance actions. It's worth reading for some simple insights, suggestions, and to power up after long policy battles.

The chapter "Out There" is worth reading even if you decide this book isn't for you. Gladstone compares Orwell and Huxley's visions of dystopia to how we live today. This chapter offers a necessary scolding to those who feel they misread the tea leaves of the 2016 election.

Recovering Reality gives a blow by blow breakdown of the media, 45's tweets, and gives the most safe advice on how to weather this cultural storm. It ended up being my favorite chapter. Skip to this in the book store if you are looking for action. This section provides the most action items while being honest about expectations for different types of actions.

The Reckoning was my secon favorite chapter and is the conclusion of the book. Readers are asked not to shy from difficult actions that push against their comfort zone. I appreciate that the book doesn't have a utopian view if what will come from engaging with other realities but it does offer a solid assurance that starting the journey is worthwhile.

The Guliver metaphor lost me for a bit. I got it but it wasn't as powerful as Gladstone's other analysis in the book.

[Francisca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a kind of 5-for-me and, more objectively, 4-for-thee if you as the reader are less familiar with the various texts from which Gladstone quotes (including well-selected passages from Arendt, Dick, and Postman, to give an idea of range). For me, however, this is "the right book at the right time" and articulates what my own mentation on our political present has been able to spew grunts and expletives. Since I read Arendt regularly and frequently, haven't visited upon Postman in donkey's years, and found the little barbs of interest that must coat my brain catching on many other substantiations Gladstone uses in her press here, I have gone back to retire Schopenhauer, something I never considered doing since grad school. May not solve the tyrannical government but it keeps me away from high windows.

[Mack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stumbled across this one because it was so cheap on Kindle. It's not really the most original take on our current situation, but it's put in a really engaging, concise way. It made me realize I should really take some time out of my week to listen to her NPR podcast, On the Media, considering the main selling point of this little tract is her own narrative voice. Gladstone's well-read, funny, and no BS. We could use more people like her in times like this. In a world of competing realities, I'm glad to know of a nice little book to recommend to people who want some good, wind-angle analysis of the reasons for Trump's ascendancy and presidency but not a whole lot of time on their hands.

[Rob Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes a short, eloquent book says a lot more than one that's longer and more 'comprehensive.' This is a lucid, well-argued summary of our current state of affairs. She chooses just the right quotes to advance her hypothesis, and she gives them out at just the right moments for maximum impact. If you're looking to dive deeper into the 'why' of how we got here, follow this up with George Packer's "The Unwinding."

[vanessa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gladstone makes some thoughtful comparisons to explain our current state; she also inserts some interviews and conversations she's had on On The Media with media and government experts. There were a few things that I've heard before on the podcast, but she synthesizes them here to make new points and new connections post-the election, which I appreciated.

[Stacie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Best paragraph: “But we cannot see the real world, whatever that may be. We live in the world that we made from what we see and what we know, and also in the world that we didn’t make and do not see and do not know. … We struggle in them both.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read! Just wish it were longer. For all those apart of the resistance it's worth a read. Just trying to make sense of the insanity...

[Blue Cypress Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfortunately so relevant and timely.

[Margaret Dee · Rating 3 out of 5]

As someone who has been terrified for our country since Sarah Palin, I was probably not the audience this book was written for. I did like the specific ideas at the end.

[Artemisa Perucho-Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhere between 2 & 3 stars. One of those “meh” reads...

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is trying to make sense of the present political mess with the election of Donald J. Trump last November. This is actually a heartening book that a reader can get through in a couple of hours - it's concise, and at least you get the sense that someone has thought through what exactly happened and what can be done, or at least how one can cope.

The first point she makes is that our versions of reality are all self-contained, and that we use stereotypes to make sense of the flood of impressions we receive daily. Reality for each of us is like a well-worn shoe - we're comfortable in our own world, and process new information or sense impressions through the refraction of the world we've already constructed.

Many of us feel that reality has crashed with the election of a liar like Donald Trump. Lying however is central to Trump's accession to power. What's inconceivable says the author is that anybody voted for Trump, given that he was incessantly lying. Trump played on peoples' emotions, and got them to suspend disbelief or only believe what he says. If he's later proven wrong, his followers say they always thought it was wrong too but just went along with it.

Donald J. Trump using a playbook described over a hundred years by James Fenimore Cooper - with respect to how a demagogue achieves power. He follows the playbook exactly to the letter, even though Cooper was writing so long ago. The demagogue is a deadly danger to our democracy, since he climbs to power by not only breaking norms, but explicitly explaining how he will continue to break norms and laws.

The election of Donald J. Trump shattered reality, and is a danger to our way of life. Ms. Gladstone suggests action, such as phoning elected officials, showing up at town halls, peacefully demonstrating. Mostly, she says that getting out of our ordinary routine lives helps - activism in general helps. The satiric approach probably will not make a difference, but eventually demagogues do collapse and fall in on themselves. We need to continually call out the contradictions, the lies, perhaps like never before. Simply pointing out when Trump is lying and the consequences of what he proposes, opposing his lies with the truth, eventually breaks his hold over reality, his ability to shape reality in accordance with his lies.

I'm sorry if the above review is rather confused. I had thought about this review, and the book and perhaps should have jotted down an outline before starting to write this. Basically, the book says we are all comfortable in our reality, then Trump overturns reality -- we expected the opposite result. Trump continually overturns reality by lying and manipulating the media landscape, especially with his tweets. This is what happened - why we feel we can't handle what happened because it is so alien to the way political leadership has usually operated. Trump proudly lies, and doesn't care about facts. He tries to create his own truth, but it isn't true. In usual times, his lying would have disqualified him from the beginning, but media played along with his game since it boosted ratings, and drove ad sales etc. The novelty of the goofball - novelty drove viewership. He was and is a skillful demagogue however - and gained traction throughout the country, by lying to people. They either believed his lies or they simply didn't care ,since they were disaffected with mainstream politicians. Trump didn't win the popular vote but he won enough electoral votes to win. Ironically, now that he is POTUS, he is not going to dismantle NAFTA, which was once the centerpiece of his campaign. Of course not - since he's obviously allied with the multinationals, and big business. That NAFTA hurt labor - what does he care? He was feigning concern for the unemployed factory worker all along lying lying lying just to get their votes.

She quotes from an interview she conducted with Michael Signer, author of the 2009 book "Demagogue: The Fight to Save America from Its Worst Enemies:" "Demagogues thrive when we're cynical about truth." In other words, people had already lost faith in the platitudes of politicians - consider that politicians of both parties extolled NAFTA for the past 20 years, yet the only thing that NAFTA really did was streamline or improve things for business, make it much easier for businesses to move overseas, probably drive down wages in the US, in addition to cratering the manufacturing sector. How exactly was NAFTA good for the working class? None of the politicians could explain it -- so no-body believed them. Nobody believed the platitudes anymore so they may have voted for Trump to send a message, even if they did think he was a clown, and an incompetent. The message being, hey, we think an incompetent clown is better than the professional politicians, because look at the mess they've made of the Rust Belt etc. Maybe the professional politicians are more incompetent than Trump. Or maybe not. Either way, it hardly matters since the region is going nowhere fast. Continuing with the Signer quote: "They [the demagogues] start to deflate when we put faith back again in public reason..." So, as long as we continue to be skeptical about the politicians, and continue to think they're not telling the truth either, or maybe they're not aware of what is happening, Trump may seem the "alternative" - whether anyone really believes him or not. The chaos of the hollowed out former industrial areas thus spreads throughout the nation. Facts aren't truthful, and lies are piled upon lies. Since the entire political class seems to be lying, people may either naively cling to the master liar Trump, or simply think he's the most entertaining liar of them all, and support him purely for his entertainment value.

Another quote from the book: "...activism alone does not address the bigger issue, the focus of this tract. You cannot march to a long-term solution to your reality problem with a cadre of like-minded allies. That is a solitary journey, and it never ends. You have to travel out of your universe into the universe of others, and leave your old map at home." Ms. Gladstone is certainly correct about that observation. Activism may reinforce the sense that reality has crashed - we don't get out of our comfort zone being with like-minded people, we don't find out what others think if we remain with people who think like us. We do need to get into "the universe of others" as she puts it. We might gain some insight as to how the Trump win was possible and so forth. We might get a handle on the reality of the inconceivable electoral win.

Another quote:

"My facts reflect the world as it is. Donald Trump's facts, as a rule, do not. I do not know the facts of his supporters; not really. I only know they voted for Trump, which is inconceivable to me. Which is to say, I cannot conceive of it. And maybe that is a place to begin the reckoning. "
"Our facts are incomplete, our truth limited. I concede that, while fully expecting that new information poses no fundamental threat to my reality."
" Indeed, I am so certain of that, I can safely venture out to take in a few new sights, a few new facts, to start to figure out what's going on out here. Because not knowing is much scarier than knowing."

And:

"...I believe there is a path, probably not to agreement, but to comprehension."
"But the price is very high. It's rational to conclude that it is not worth the considerable trouble an time required to venture forth, to protest, to doubt, to listen , to change others, or to be changed."
"It is possible that, after just a few bad yeas, all this horror... will slowly sink beneath our carefully curated horizons from whence it came."
"But we can't simply retreat back into our own realities after what we've seen. Though we are quite adept at not seeing ,unseeing is an altogether different matter. We experienced reality crash. Now our reality is going to need some tweaking."

Actually, there is no good way to talk about Donald J. Trump. And I think most people -- those who aren't abject or blind followers -- feel the same way, even conservatives. His technique of gaining power and holding onto it is repulsive. His utter disdain for the facts, of calling anything or any institution that disagrees with him, lying, or corrupt, or fraudulent - fake news, criticizing the judiciary, and then suing universities over their affirmative action policies. He's out to shake everyone's faith in institutions, including the vote, so that they'll only believe his version of reality in the end. Nobody wants this - even conservatives don't. His revolution is destruction - to be replaced by what? Trumpism? And what exactly is Trumpism? Racism? Neo-Nazism? Fascism?

At least Trump's agenda seems to be going nowhere fast - even if it had anything good in it, and it mostly didn't, members of Congress basically don't want to act on Trump's suggestions. He cannot push them around. Notice how Trump never really gave a speech on the "merits" of ripping away medical care from 32,000,000 Americans. He's a cruel man, yet manages to cloak his cruelty in racism - saying Obamacare must be canceled, rather than saying canceling Obamacare will result in catastrophe for millions of Americans that will then be uninsured. Congress could not pull the trigger on harming 32,000,000 Americans - understandably so, although many Republicans actually voted to do just that. This is just one example of Trump's follies. His anti-environment policies are another example of Trump harming the citizenry, just as he would like to harm Americans by removing health care from them. He removes environmental regulations because 1%-er owners of certain polluting businesses who probably also are RNC donors - appreciate it, to heck with the workers or nearby residents. What does Trump care about environmental health and safety, if donor $ is at stake? He extols these laws as "helping business" but never discusses the health and safety impact of removing environmental regulations. Nobody would applaud how removing the regulations will ruin the environment and peoples' health so avoids saying it. The destructive things are always presented in a positive light - not: Less environmental regulation means a worse environment, but: Less environmental regulation means business thrives and maybe there's even more hiring. Of course, in order to be an employee you have to be alive and removing environmental regulation eventually makes that less likely, which means the "thriving business" part is a moot point.

You can count on Trump lying every day - the new "reality" is one of Trump's lies. Thus, it's a fact that we can't believe what we're hearing when Trump or his spokespeople talk. The effect of reality having shattered is extreme whenever Trump brags about how much he's accomplished, but the truth is, Trump lies constantly. As Ms. Gladstone says, it is possible to deflate a demagogue by consistently insisting on the truth. Satire won't work, but the truth will eventually win out. Let's hope so!

[Chiara Coletti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully funny and sobering.