Yogi Berra is supposed to have cautioned us that it's not what we don't know that will kill us; it's what we do know that ain't right!

The point is very well taken. Public culture encourages us to be certain of things that are not correct and this sort of false certainty can kill us all when it distorts our understanding of significant threats.

We have seen in the previous chapter that American public culture offers us two great illusions – harmonism and convergence. Both are potentially dangerous on a large scale to our country. We will discuss in this chapter how they come to exist, are continually reinforced, and become so rigidly a part of our thinking. But this will be a difficult discussion for many of our readers. Trying to question what we believe to be true is always very challenging and often unpleasant, and so it is when we address the strongly held convictions of our public culture

In private life people are often inconsistent, emotional, passionate, self-indulgent, involved in denial, fantasies, and delusions, and are hypocritical and moralizing about others. It's not surprising that all this is projected into public life as well, and is largely tolerated by an electorate that behaves in the same way. These dysfunctional behaviors can be traced to the false set of choices and ideas provided by our political culture – choices that stifle new ideas and stymie those who want to articulate new ideas to form a more relevant political consensus.