Arnold Toynbee’s “A Study of History,” published in 1947 and considered one of the greatest achievements in modern scholarship, predicted that societies fail when their leaders worship their pasts instead of planning for the future.

In 1979 with his work “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” Douglas Hofstadter explored self-reference across multiple disciplines, settling on his metaphor of a “strange loop” as his explanation for the human experience of consciousness. And then Michael Pollan in 2018 described “How to Chang Your Mind” through experimentation with “entheogens,” plants which can alter one’s consciousness.

Michael related his experiences to spirituality while Douglas warned of the paradox of self-awareness and Arnold of the terminality of dogmatism. Americanism is this dogmatism functioning as a self-referential state religion shortly approaching the cultishness of a suicide pact. Indeed no other modern culture is currently killing itself with more alacrity, through violence or internment.