Here, here’s an example: During my military career every time I boarded one of our Globemasters, I’d wonder how the fuck anything that big could get off the ground. It made no sense. How could thin air support a hundred tons of steel? But somehow it did. I decided what made it possible was the collective belief of all the people onboard; as long as we believed it could fly, it could fly. I worried that if any one of us dared admit the truth, that airplane would not get off the ground. What kept us all sitting there quietly was that cool guy in a crisp uniform wearing aviator shades—aviator shades, they even named them after him—and smiling confidently as he stepped into the cockpit. Our captain. All the Sullys in the world, even before there was a Sully, we trusted that he knew what he was doing. He said it could get off the ground, it could get off the ground. We had a leader who would take care of us so we could sit back with confidence and watch a boring in-flight movie about marching penguins.

As far as I was concerned, for several years that same sort of belief system was the only thing holding together the American economy. It really should have collapsed decades earlier. It made no real sense: it was too big; it had too many structural problems; it was inefficient and unfair. It was capricious and disorderly and depended as much on luck as on ingenuity and innovation. The distribution of wealth created the very rich and all the rest of us. The only reason the economy worked was because people believed it would continue working. That somehow, whatever the problem, the smart guys would figure it out. Even the pandemic hadn’t destroyed that pioneer optimism. Whatever problems existed, somehow our Sully would come along and solve them—just as had happened throughout our history.

That Amazon commercial terrified everyone.

To the surprise of most experts, the American economy wheezed and sputtered through the disasters but did not totally collapse. It proved to be too big, with too many moving parts. But it slowed, and the more it slowed, the more concerned people became, which caused it to slow even more. As I wrote in one of my most widely reposted columns:

We’ve lost our Hojo. We are about as far as we can be from the promise of post–World War II America, when our factories were bursting with economic potential and our politicians were determined to export our unique democracy to the world, when you could find the security of an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s on every spanking new highway crisscrossing the nation, knowing that a coffee-pot-carrying waitress named Esther would be pleased as punch to serve you apple pie a la mode topped with any one of its 28 flavors of ice cream. We’ve lost that American can-do spirit in which we once so confidently believed, and it has been replaced by … an array of overly-confident cats on Facebook.