The Rise of Renewable Energy by Paul Krugman

Anatomy of a technological miracle

Read on Substack

Consider the blind spot: each eye has a small region in the center of vision where no photoreceptors exist. Anyone can discover this hole in their sight with any of the YouTube videos demonstrating how it works. But we don’t perceive the world full of gaps because the brain fills in what it cannot see, borrowing from surrounding details to construct continuity. This work is so seamless that we rarely notice it. But it takes a lot of brain power. More than half of the cerebral cortex is devoted to processing visual information.

Our brains can also generate images entirely by themselves. Dreams and hallucinations demonstrate the mind’s power to create vivid pictures entirely from within. We occasionally wake from a dream convinced that we saw places and people, even though our eyes were closed. The same machinery that interprets photons can, under other conditions, create visions from memory or imagination. Seeing, therefore, does not always depend on the external world—it depends on the faith we place in our inner one.

The Mirror of Reality

Our perception of the world works in much the same way. Socially and politically, we rely on fragments of experience, memory, mythology and story to build our sense of reality. Like the brain filling in the blind spot, we use personal encounters to bridge gaps in knowledge. A friend’s illness makes health care reform feel real and urgent. A lost job makes economic policy come to life. A flooded street after a hurricane tells us more about climate change than a thousand charts. We interpret and trust reality through these lived experiences constructing a worldview that feels coherent enough to act on.

But imagine if someone were to scramble the signals, erasing inconvenient truths, filling the blind spot not with seamless continuity but with purposeful distortions. That is what lies and intentionally distorting propaganda do. They don’t just argue; they tell us to disbelieve our eyes, to distrust our experiences.

The Assault on Reality

This is exactly what we are witnessing in the current administration’s relentless assault on science, journalism, and facts themselves. Climate change is denied as floods rise around us and communities burn. Economic inequality is hand-waved away as we struggle paycheck to paycheck and billionaires vacation in space. To maintain such absurdities requires constant lies—an endless churning of denial and distraction—because reality refutes the message. The grotesque part is not that leaders lie, but that they demand we surrender the evidence of our own senses in favor of their narrative. They ask us to believe that the blind spot is the whole field of vision. They try to persuade us that darkness is light, that noise is truth, that suffering is prosperity. To live under such a regime is to be gaslit at the level of perception itself.

But reality insists on being seen. People know when their wages no longer cover the rent. They know when smoke clouds the sky, or when their children’s schools lack the necessary resources. No amount of propaganda can erase these lived truths.

Faith and Resistance

Seeing will always be an act of faith. But it matters where we place that faith. Do we trust the fragile but honest partnership between eye, brain, and lived experience? Or do we hand our faith over to the machinery of manipulation that tells us not to believe the testimony of our own lives? Today, to insist on our own sight—to insist on the reality of what we see, touch, and live—is not just an act of perception. It is an act of resistance. And it can also be an act of hope.

AmericanRealityToday.us

What is needed today is a place where truth can be named, shared, debated and defended. That is what AmericanRealityToday.com aspires to be—a platform to gather what people actually see and live, and hold it up against the distortions being forced upon them.

Here you can see what others are saying and seeing and join the conversation by submitting your letters, photos or other observations about life in America today. By gathering stories, evidence, and lived experiences, AmericanRealityToday.us offers a way forward: access to a conversation rooted in fact, clarity, and trust in our own senses. In a time when lies often seem louder than truth, we have a responsibility to reclaim reality—not just as individuals, but together. In doing so, we will build a brighter, more honest future grounded in what we actually see.

The founders also knew that the press had never been perfect, and that manipulating information is as old as history—from Caesar’s embellished battlefield reports to the excesses and missteps of their own time. What we face today is no different: verdicts for slander and libel are sometimes ignored or unenforced, while Russian troll farms and algorithm-driven social media stand as vivid reminders of how fragile the truth can be.

Part of the strength of a free press lies in its willingness to admit and correct mistakes—something propaganda never does. In fact, refusing to acknowledge errors is a classic sign of dishonesty. Most journalists strive for accuracy because they live in the same communities as their readers, and they understand that their reputation for honesty is their most valuable asset.

Labeling the press as “fake news” or “the enemy of the people” is both false and dangerous. It’s false because, throughout history, the press has served as a vital safeguard for ordinary citizens—Ida B. Wells exposed the horrors of lynching, and the Washington Post uncovered the Watergate scandal and there are many other examples of the free press serving our citizens and democracy. It’s dangerous because such rhetoric undermines the public’s best defense against deception. Calling journalists “the enemy of the people” turns watchdogs into scapegoats and erodes the distinction between honest mistakes and deliberate misinformation. When trust in journalism collapses, propaganda rushes in to fill the void, leaving
citizens vulnerable to manipulation.

History warns about what happens when shared reality is lost. Plato and Hannah Arendt, who lived in vastly different circumstances 2000 years apart, both showed how politics built on lies devolves into manipulation. MAGA rhetoric demonstrates this vividly: when citizens are told to dismantle every institution and believe only one leader, democracy gives way to authoritarian rule.

Our own direct personal experiences also help guard against lies. Leaders may dismiss climate change, but when the sky turns orange from wildfire smoke, your senses tell you otherwise. When officials said COVID-19 was “just the flu,” the millions of families who lost loved ones knew it was not. Personal experience is the ultimate fact-check, reminding us that no amount of spin can erase what people live, feel, and see. But these insights are limited. No individual will ever be able to accumulate enough direct experiences to navigate today’s complex world by themselves.

We all depend on the experience and expertise of mechanics, doctors, engineers, farmers, and many others to survive. Rejecting this expertise is not independence—it is surrendering to manipulation. The issue is not whether to trust, but how to verify. Clearly, transparency, fact-checking, and open discussion matter.

In the end, we live between two poles: the limited but undeniable truth of our own personal experiences, and the broader yet imperfect truths revealed by reporters and others, about other peoples’ experiences and insights into dozens of fields including science, economics and the arts. A healthy democracy requires us to engage with both poles. To dismiss either one because it sometimes makes mistakes, or contradicts a preferred narrative is to abandon the search for truth.

Democracy (and possibly all human relationships) depends on trust because citizens must trust and believe in each other and in their shared institutions. Without trust, elections, laws, and even public debate lose legitimacy. But trust cannot exist without truth: if politics is built on lies, people no longer share a common reality, and cooperation becomes impossible. In this way, truth is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of democracy.

American Reality Today
americanrealitytoday.us