Andrew Singer Talks About China and America

Vol. 3, Issue 22

Bigfoot and the Culture Wars

Thinking about China. And America. Even when I am not. In today’s issue, a study of North America’s Bigfoot provides cautionary insight into the psychology underpinning both China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and twenty-first century America’s Great Culture War.

The idea of unspoiled nature and the monsters [Bigfoots] it contains is so far-fetched that it’s intoxicating to those who choose to believe in it. And there’s the nut. We want to believe. So badly do we want to believe in something that we’re willing to believe in almost anything, against much evidence to the contrary.¹

I thought I was taking a short break from the China and America relationship, reading a book I picked up at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Maine. But then sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages in John O’Connor’s Covid-project, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, diverted me down an unexpected path. Into Belief. Desire. Belonging. The Nature of Reality.

‘…Bigfoot is a success of independence and freedom.’ In our modern context, when truth is often ordained by institutional consensus…, people can feel disempowered. Bigfoot is a means of staking a claim,….

O’Connor is a Bigfoot skeptic, or rather, an agnostic with an open mind who is interested in the broader implications of the subject matter. His book delves deep into psychology, including that of Bigfoots, those who track them, MAGA, and the plight of the white working class in America. It made me think.

And because I am who I am, China and America came top of mind. About our two countries’ most recent experiences of cultural wars. About parallels and differences. I couldn’t help myself. It is remarkable how ideas and insights so often come unbidden (or are they really?) from the most unexpected of prompts.

My [O’Connor] own thinking…attempted to reconcile some oppositions about human rationality and the madness of crowds. Sometimes I thought of Bigfoot obsession as not unlike the messianic exaltation that struck supporters at a Trump rally; that is, an expression of white anxiety and fear mixed with nostalgia for an imagined American past. ‘Here was a creature that…could live without civilization, that was self-reliant and strong,’…and that, to Bigfoot’s demographic…‘was authentic and genuine, a repudiation of the society around them, a society that very often did not value them or their opinions.’

The Chinese state and the Chinese people were on the threshold of ruin and collapse after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ran its decade-long course. Violence and chaos were the defining features of politics and society. Deprivation was the unwelcome national mantra as the battered economy teetered on irrelevance. People died by the several hundreds of thousands (and likely many more), families disintegrated, education retrograded, and cultural and historical connections were deliberately severed. China was a sinking ship adrift.

China’s Cultural Revolution was a movement organized and led by top leadership for political purposes. It was a whole-of-country campaign (persecutors and victims). Mao Zedong let the Red Guards loose and then lost control. The people believed. They were empowered. They belonged to something greater than themselves at a time when hope was missing. The Chinese “messianically” and obediently submitted their lives to Mao’s commands, until they were told to stop.

Xi Jinping is haunted by memories of that chaos. He understands well that Chinese dynasties fall when they lose moral sway and domineering control.

“[Humans are] “primed to have certain kinds of experiences, that each of us…is not only ‘blind to the obvious’ but ‘blind to our blindness,’ our judgments springing not so much from mental clarity and reason as a stew of deceptive emotions, dingy memories, and the biases and forecasting of our unique cognitive loads. We are, in other words, apt to get carried away.”

Broad, new fronts in America’s ongoing Great Culture War have been launched since last week when President Trump began his Administration issuing a record-setting 26 executive orders on Day 1. These actions, and the ones that have and will follow, are expansive, vindicative, and petulant, taking delight in sticking it to “the other side.” Longstanding societal and governance norms and guardrails are being swept away.

America’s culture war echoes China’s cultural revolution (and is reflective in the Bigfoot community) in that its supporters believe, they feel empowered, and they feel heard and recognized at a time when hope is in short supply.

However, as O’Connor also writes,

“A key characteristic of both [Bigfooters and Trumpers] is that they trust themselves and themselves alone to parse fact from fiction, while at the same time, the language they share often doesn’t register a difference between the two.”

The Chinese were all rowing or being sucked in the same destructive direction during their top-led Cultural Revolution. In contrast, Americans are splintered into two virulently opposed factions vowing destruction of the other. We are cultural war arguably headed for civil war.

As I see it, the main difference from China’s experience is that America’s cultural war began as a social movement from the bottom up and was only subsequently co-opted at the top. As such, it cannot and will not simply be able to be summarily switched off if leadership decides things have gone too far.

Chaos is an intrinsic part of the cultural war program. There is a feral animosity raging through American society. Not a few of those January 6^th participants newly pardoned and exonerated are eager for perceived revenge and retribution and are freshly empowered to take their belief (and actions) to the next level.

Will history look back at this time as the moment President Trump released the vanguard of American Red Guards and then lost control over them? It is entirely conceivable.

"I [O’Connor] tried to push the thought away, but the truth is, I couldn't shake the idea of Bigfoot as a symptom of mass cultural delusion,....Not by a long shot is epistemological failure uniquely American. We're just proud overachievers in it, uncontested heavyweights of hooey. But I'd wanted to give Bigfoot a pass. Born of necessity and heartache at the savagery visited upon America's wilds, of desire to brook our inner chair and loneliness, I understood its appeal. For the better part of a year, I'd thought of Bigfooting as mostly harmless fun…But wanting something to be true doesn't make it so. Entertaining possibilities is one thing; staunch infidelity to reason is another."

Elements of Bigfoot psychology exist on both sides of America’s great political, social, and cultural divide. With equal passion.

Interpretation, confirmation bias, yearning, delusion, disillusion, remembering and misremembering, the internet--all swirling in a cauldron that gets more confusing as the hours tick by. I believe that most of us are living in dread, whether you support or oppose the new government direction.

So, I now have a better grasp on the why of cultural revolutions and wars thanks to Bigfoot. The stymying question is what can and should be done about it? Where Bigfoot is entertaining and generally harmless, nationally in America, the psychology is anything but.

Life is short and there are rarely backsies, China almost collapsed because the entire country jumped or was pushed off a cliff. America is well along the process of getting irreconcilably carried away.

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1. John O’Connor, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster (Sourcebooks, 2024), Quotes #1 – Page 100, #2 – Page 103 (quoting in part Lynne S. McNeill), #3 – Page 128 (quoting in part Joshua Blu Buhs), #4 – Pages 118-119 (quoting in part Daniel Kahneman), #5 – Page 253, and #6 – Pages 155-156.