Experience, that unvarying and rational order of the World which has been the appointed instrument of man’s training since life and thought began. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. We are programmed by evolution to unreality’s special fondness for hyperactiveness. However, the brain’s receptiveness to fast moving stimuli is not sufficient in itself to account for America’s special preoccupation with unreality. More than the workings of the brain alone are required to account for the intensity with which Americans pursue unreality with a fever that approaches a national crusade. And indeed, to inveigh the phrase “national crusade” already implies that another part of the answer is to be found in American culture. Hyperactivity is not only a deeply ingrained feature of American culture by virtue of the special fortitude of those who journeyed to the new land in order to settle it—it was a dire necessity for survival—but, as a result, it has become linked with other fundamental American values and beliefs. Americans have always believed deeply in material progress. The two words “material” and “progress” are virtually inseparable. Each implies the other in the context of the American experience. The antiquated nations of the Earth creep on sluggishly; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. Nations like individuals can never stand still. They must always be going and changing, improving their material lot; life is a race, not a game, to be won by the swiftest and most accurate. Yet its impact has been incalculable.  

Life accounts for the relentless dynamism at the heart of capitalist development, spreading an obsessive requirement for change throughout modern culture. And for most educated and affluent Americans in the late 19^th century, “change” meant “progress.” Progress means growing, it is more than “Hope” it is more than creating massive debt and claiming, “I got this,” progress means the mortgage is paid, there is money in the bank, the light bill is paid, the car runs well and has gas, the wife and kids are happy, safe, and well dressed. Progress means we have peace and like a machine, what we put in it we get back in return. Progress is the law of human existence only because there are more poor than rich, more weak than strong, more who suffer by wrong than enjoy by injustice.  Such progress we have learned was bought at a considerable price. To the uprooting and mass migration from farms and small country hamlets into cities with their teeming slums and social problems on scales not experienced before, Americans reacted against what they experienced as the “unreality of the new social order.” Removed from nature with its natural sounds, sights, and rhythms, Americans felt a great sense of uneasiness. They found the new factories with their vast management hierarchies and impersonal rules the very epitome of everything that was unnatural, unreal, stultifying, and suffocating, like a latex balloon stuck in your esophagus. Men felt they that they were in danger of becoming the very machines with which they worked and were charged with controlling.  

This sense of unreality has become part of the hidden agenda of modernization. Throughout the 21^st century, recoil from the artificial, overcivilized qualities of modern existence has sparked a wide variety of quests for more intense experiences, ranging from the fascist fascinations with violence and death, to the cults of emotional spontaneity of Avant grade artists to popular therapies stressing instinctual liberation. Antimodern impulses, too, were rooted in longings to recapture an elusive “real life” in culture evaporating into unreality. There is a principle in the human mind destined to be eternally at war with improvement and science. In reaction to the growing sense of unreality brought on by the difficult adjustment to the new realities of modern life, Americans of all social classes retreated to and engaged in a frenzy-like search for authentic experience. To accomplish this, they extolled the virtues of manual labor and, much as busy, tired executive do in our time, they develop home workshops where handicraft projects were pursued with a vengeance. As these projects petered out, as they must eventually, Americans pursued other strains of Antimodernism. The most fascinating were a precursor to the cults of Eastern mysticism that were to capture the attention of the nation’s youth and disaffected during the Vietnam era.  Turned off by the excessive rationalization of the thoughts and habits that Eastern philosophy used to ruin lives, many bourgeois of society and the modern industrial factory system demanded, Americans, especially the educated and well-to-do—including many businessmen themselves—turned to earlier periods of world history where men were not suffocated and hemmed in by rational modes of thought. A special fascination for the medieval ages developed. The medieval mind was regarded as primitive and unspoiled. Americans saw in the primitization of the medieval intellect, if not indeed its total personality, the deep sense for passionate experience, the direct contact with intense human emotions that they had long ago abandoned for modern life with all its promises of security, progress, comforts, et cetera.