Duped! Delusion, denial, and the end of the American dream

Duped! Delusion, denial, and the end of the American dream is a penetrating look at contemporary collective delusions slithering across the American landscape. A delusion is a false idea about the world, a kind of intellectual “trance.” When an individual suffers one, the diagnosis of mental illness is not far behind. When a nation labors under them, we have a state of collective mental instability. This odyssey explores six gargantuan delusions infecting the American psyche: our understanding of our democratic political system, the Iraq war, our perception of ourselves as an empire, issues related to global warming, the musical genre of hip-hop, and our extremely precarious financial condition. In the final chapter, “Slip-slidin to dystopia,” Dr. Kroth reviews the seven major signs of societal collapse. These factors are combined to form “the American Dystopia Index.” When one looks at this metric, the transformation of the American dream to an American nightmare seems all but assured should we not awaken from our myriad trance states in time.