If we were to catalog the attributes of our Founders vital to the creation of our nation, love of liberty and courage would likely top that list. Close behind would be a more subtle quality empowered by liberty, that of imagination. It is imagination and its implicit sense of wonder that drives our quest for knowledge and ultimately human progress. Our Founding Fathers had no template for creating our government; they had to imagine it based on the imperfect experiences of prior republics. Imagination is the seed of discovery, the spark that ignites our hunger for the knowledge that was once a common American cause.

But where is that lofty hunger among the most vocal segments of America? Wring the essence out of the Left’s pronouncements and you’ll not find knowledge or wisdom, only snippets of hate and tribal emotion. We may laugh at the inability of the Left to maintain substantive dialogue, but it is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in our shared society. Our culture is exhausted, adrift because it is losing its anchors of truth and knowledge. Substantive knowledge can indeed be elusive, or just unimportant, if you believe truth to be a relative concept and imagination just something that feeds teleprompters. If you don’t recognize the need to moor yourself to the bedrock of truth, then where is the need to seek common knowledge? In that worldview there is no factual knowledge, only political scripts. Two plus two don’t equal four, that is just a construct of supremacists. There won’t be many rocket scientists coming out of that mob -- but we need rocket scientists for human progress. Young minds that should be candidates for the role are being suffocated by the Left. Simply dismissing them as “dumb” ignores the deeper crisis they represent. Their imagination, and the vital self-discovery it inspires, have been cancelled.

How did we reach this point where so many voters, so many Americans, don’t simply reflect this hollow mindset but actually seem to wallow in it? The seeds of knowledge have failed to germinate in millions. Many deliberately avoid embracing knowledge, programmed to treat any substantive question as a microaggression. Pro-Hamas protesters roar “River to the Sea” and just shout louder if asked what river or what sea. Law students scream for “social justice” without troubling to learn what our hallowed blind justice means. They aren’t validated by being right, they are validated by more strident chants from their tribes. We are painfully aware of how formal education, crucible of knowledge, is failing. Our nation’s academic report card is shameful.

But it is too easy to ascribe this shallow mindset solely to the schools that replaced civic studies with indoctrination in tribalism and victimhood. Certainly professors and teachers became the force multipliers for the American-hating leftists who infiltrated the educational establishment. But this cauterization of cerebrums was not begun on campuses. Those minds targeted by woke professors were ripened for the new way of thinking, or rather nonthinking, by forces at work in local communities, homes, and broad swaths of society.

You can find the syndrome in the formulaic, intolerant shallowness of the legacy media and many book publishers, who can’t understand why interest in their products is lagging. You can see it in the scores of scientific journals that have ceased publication because of rampant fabrication of data and authorship. Ironically the poster child for this failure of imagination is Hollywood, which cobbles together worn-out cyber effects then gaslights us by selling their works as creative masterpieces. It is painfully obvious among climate proselytes, who would have us upend our entire world because they say so, not because of scientific proof. It has permeated government, where many candidates and officeholders live in a catch phrase, bumper sticker, teleprompter world where knowledge and truth are irrelevant. Many fancy themselves as pioneers of a postmodern, post-truth world, where arrogance substitutes for the imagination that once drove our nation to new heights. The decay can be found in medicine, Silicon Valley tech giants, and every institution that embraces DEI, which at its core is an attack of form over substance, with imagination an early casualty.

The forces attacking imagination come from many directions but we know where they are incubated. Synapses that fire repeatedly in young minds become hard-wired, meaning the hours that teens spend daily on social media has programmed them to compulsively seek the instant gratification of gossip, cynical innuendo, and accusation. They become uninterested in the deeper earned satisfaction that comes from intellectual engagement and self-discovery. Why do the hard work to nourish their brain cells when the cells in their hands can do the work for them? Many are so joined to their devices that nothing is genuine unless they find it on their screens. Sadly, many also seem incapable of interacting with the natural world, the source of so much wonder and imagination.

For all of history technology advanced human progress. Now it dumbs us down, not because it is intrinsically evil but because not enough responsible adults are filtering its use. Have we reached a turning point in social evolution? Are we simply going to emulate bees, our only care the buzzing in the hive?

These failures have created deep fault lines in our society. They are not progressive fault lines or conservative fault lines, they are our fault lines. Our collective imagination is gasping. Far too many can’t imagine what it is to be American. Perhaps even more alarming are those who can’t imagine how these cracks may destroy our democracy. Ignorance morphs voters into pawns of tyrants. Knowledge is vital to a healthy democracy.

Each of us is implicated in this crisis, each of us bears some guilt. Responding to the nontruths of the Left with anger is not enough. Turning campaigns into celebrity love fests is a drift toward the same toxic shallowness. Fighting name calling with name calling only validates the chanting tribes. Don’t just allege and assert, demonstrate and convince. The roots of our culture, our rights, our democracy are nourished by knowledge, by virtuous acts, by substantive policy, not personality and shouted slogans. Fight accusation and cancellation with fortitude and fact. Embrace liberty like it is 1776.

The imagination of our nation’s potent silent majority is intact but it is a pale shadow of that which inspired our Founders. We have been surrendering it, yielding it to the narcissists, not because they are right but because they are louder and in our faces. But there can be no surrender, and no bystanders, in this struggle. The silent majority is no longer an antidote for the problems of our democracy. Unleashing your imagination to discover the American within you is the antidote. Your most important act as a citizen of democracy is thinking for yourself.

Eliot Pattison’s nineteen novels include the award-winning Skull Mantra series, casting a poignant spotlight on China’s human rights abuses, and the Bone Rattler series, examining the complex people and issues leading to the founding of the United States.

Image: Pexels/Joshua Roberts