About the book

Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Q-Anon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have kidnapped the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation: poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current "crisis" in "nonfiction"-journalism-media-"truthiness." If the perceiver, by his very presence, alters what's perceived, Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance-artist-turned-Putin-strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over. Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chavez; Italian space lasers modified voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 attack: this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky's underground man. God is dead, so everything is permitted. Or is it? How We Got Here - provocative, accessible, persuasive, and addictive - is a crucial intervention in which David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.

Praise

"I'm grateful for this brilliant book, which sagely counterposes the massive irony of twentieth-century philosophy with the way it's been put to use. Now that we know we're here, the next question is how we get out of here." — Charles Baxter

"David Shields's genius for deploying the words of others to create wholly original essays is on brilliant display. The connective tissue of his comments is key, guiding us as we jump from Socrates to Luther to Melville to Nietzsche, all the way to Tucker Carlson and Trump. Both erudite and accessible, classical and pop, How We Got Here stitches together the threads of thought that have landed us in the nihilistic abyss of today. Illuminating.'" — Michael Greenberg