On 1947 September 18 the United States Department of War, founded in 1789, shut its doors and went out of business. The same day the United States Department of Defense set up shop in its new digs at the Pentagon. Old wine in a new bottle? No. Far from it.

Substantial changes were made to the organization chart of the old Department of War to reduce interservice rivalry. But, as we shall see, in the larger scheme of things that was inconsequential. The event on 1947 September 18 marked the launch of a new product, the Great American Propaganda Machine (GAPM).

As with most products, the origins of the GAPM can be traced back much earlier than its actual debut. The GAPM is deeply rooted in American history, that somewhat confusing and haphazard jumble of fiction and facts, of myth and reality, of legends and truth. To understand the nature of the GAPM it is necessary to understand something of the nature of American history.

History is most certainly not, in the immortal words of Joe Friday, "Just the facts, ma'am. Just the facts." History is a explanatory story that is based on selected facts about the past. Those two highlighted words, explanatory and selected, make history much more subjective and biased than is commonly realized.

Presumably, one purpose of the high-school textbook version of American history is to explain how contemporary America came to be. This immediately poses a problem. How do you explain how contemporary America came to be when there are, within America, 300 million perspectives on what contemporary America is?

Well, you say, there is a general consensus on what contemporary America is. Indeed there is. And that consensus has been shaped by an education system that uses high-school American history textbooks to explain how contemporary America came to be. When you consider that the writers of the history textbooks are themselves products of the American education system then a chicken-and-egg problem becomes apparent.

Engineers would identify this particular chicken-and-egg situation as a positive feedback loop. The word "positive" when followed by "feedback loop" does not mean "good". It implies unstable. There is a wildly unstable positive feedback loop deeply embedded in the interaction between the American education system and our perception of America. This is not good. But wait, it gets worse, much worse.

Sam Cooke spoke for a lot of his compatriots when he wrote "Don't know much about history." Of course, in his romantic celebration of American ignorance, Cooke was referring to the textbook version of American history. But we Americans, more than any other people on earth, are exposed to our history through our popular culture. Ah yes, our popular culture. Television, radio, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, video games, the internet, even churches.

When textbook American history, as subjective and biased as it is, gets passed through the filter of popular American culture the result is "that somewhat confusing and haphazard jumble of fiction and facts, of myth and reality, of legends and truth" that I referred to earlier. And when this popular version of American history is subject to that "wildly unstable positive feedback loop deeply embedded in the interaction between the American education system and the American people's perception of America" just referred to, the result can hardly be called history at all.

No, the result can hardly be called history at all. But there is a name for it. The oldest institution in the Western world, the Roman Catholic Church, has been in the education business since its inception. For the last four centuries a committee of Cardinals, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, has overseen this educational mission. The Latin name for the committee is Congregatio de Propaganda Fide. Hence the origin of the word "propaganda".

It is somewhat provocative, to say the least, to suggest that our perception of our nation has been shaped by propaganda generated by our schools and our popular culture. But our schools and popular culture are us. This is the nature of the feedback loop. The word "propaganda" suggests an outside agent like, for example, the Roman Catholic Church. In our situation there is no outside agent, so the word "self-propaganda" is more appropriate as we generate the propaganda that shapes our perception of who we are as a nation.

Now, you might be tempted to ask: "So what? What is wrong with a people shaping their own perception of who they are?" Under normal circumstances, nothing. But when those people control the greatest military power the world has ever seen, everything. It boils down to three words: unstable positive feedback. America, the greatest military power the world has ever seen, is in the grip of an unstable positive feedback loop that defines our perception of ourselves as a nation.

So what does that mean? Well, if we collectively shape our own perception of who we are, then what, exactly, determines what that perception will be? We complacently assume that our perception of ourselves is grounded in reality. Is it? Obviously not. Look around you. The nation is divided into two bitter camps each convinced that the other camp is delusional at best, mendacious at worst.

Looking at the invective being hurled in the Fray, I would conclude that, rather than being grounded in reality, much of the nation is borderline psychotic. But that's unfair because the reality of what America is is incredibly complicated. And therein lies the basic reason why our perception of ourselves has not been grounded in reality.

The reality of what America is is so complicated that it simply has been beyond our capacity to understand it. Remember what I said history is? "History is a explanatory story that is based on selected facts about the past." The human reaction to deal with a reality beyond our capacity to understand is to make up a relatively simple explanatory story based on selected facts. When dealing with natural phenomena, this process is called science.

The science of the ancient Greeks stalled out because they never established the positive feedback loop between science and technology. (Note that that particular positive feedback loop exhibits a good kind of instability we call progress.) Our capacity to understand our nation has stalled out for a similar reason. So what happened to the ancient Greeks with their incredibly well-developed mathematics? What happened to their science to make it stall out?

The answer, ironically enough, is that the very success of ancient Greek mathematics caused their science to stall out. The success of their mathematics, based on pure reason, gave the ancient Greeks the idea that they could use pure reason to understand natural phenomena as well. This idea was lent support by their success in applying mathematics to celestial phenomena. But with terrestrial phenomena, Greek science went nowhere.

Our capacity to understand our nation has stalled out for a reason. It is not for lack of facts. It is because of the subjective and biased selection of facts we use to support our competing and unsatisfactory explanatory stories of what America is. Just as the ancient Greeks were blinded by their abstract mathematics, we are also blinded by an abstraction. And that abstraction is ideology. But it is not conservatism. And it is not liberalism. No, our capacity to understand our nation has stalled out because we are blinded by the ideology of materialism.

That old communist, Karl Marx, appears to have gotten the last laugh at our expense. In contrast to G.W.F. Hegel's idealism, Marx grounded his ideas in materialism. As did his contemporary, John Stuart Mill, with his concept of homo economicus. Liberals have often taunted conservatives with the observation that the ideas of liberal economist John Maynard Keynes were so successful that we're all Keynesians now. Well, in an irony that Marx would appreciate, we and our allies have been so economically successful that we're all materialists now.

Materialism is the filter through which we look at ourselves and try to understand our nation. We are the wealthiest nation on earth. We are the most powerful nation on earth. Therefore we are self-evidently God's chosen people. Therefore we have a right to use our wealth and power to project our benign influence all over the globe. But being a righteous nation, we renounce war as an instrument of national self-interest.

So we are back to 1947 September 18 when America renamed its Department of War the Department of Defense. Now, let's return to a question asked earlier: "What is wrong with a people shaping their own perception of who they are?" Well, everything is wrong with the people of the most powerful nation on earth deluding themselves into thinking that calling "war" "defense" means renouncing war. Self-delusion of that magnitude is not connected to reality. Self-delusion of that magnitude leads inexorably from 1947 September 18 to 2003 March 20 when America launched a resource war under the pretext that it was an act of self-defense.

The Orwellian renaming of "war" "defense" was just the beginning of six decades of self-destructive acts of self-delusion I refer to as the Great American Propaganda Machine (GAPM), a machine that has caused America's catastrophic moral decline and descent into hellish militarism. The very heart of this self-propaganda is the notion that a materialistic ideology can be reconciled with the Christian moral foundation of this nation.

As the resources of our planet dwindle, a materialistic ideology that uses wealth and power to project militarism as an instrument of national self-interest will become more and more attractive, not less and less. It will ratchet up the GAPM to levels that a democratic republic cannot survive. It will inevitably lead us into violent conflict with other nuclear powers who are recklessly following our example.

Is this what Abraham Lincoln had in mind when he called America "the last, best hope on earth"? I think not. Is this America's destiny? I hope not. Can we change this terrible vision of our destiny? Perhaps. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The first step to keep that window open by making a careful examination of the GAPM. It will not hold up to a scrutiny grounded in reality.

Start with where we are now and work backwards to 1947 September 18. Start with asking why flag pins became an important issue in this presidential election campaign. Then ask why starting a resource war on a pretext of self-defense is a back-burner issue in this campaign. Peel back the layers of the GAPM onion year by year and decade by decade. When you reach 1947 September 18 what will you have? Nothing. That is the nature of self-delusion. If starts with nothing and builds on that.

The GAPM is more vulnerable to critical scrutiny now than it ever was or ever will be. May God help America if we miss this opportunity.