Beyond What We Are Told Is Fact

This chapter more fully introduces the theoretical framework for Kruse’s reading of Ditko’s work and includes more thorough definitions for the key terms as well as a historical and cultural context for those terms. The contextualization provided in this chapter offers a look into Ditko’s hometown Johnstown, Pennsylvania and its immigrant community of industrial workers, along with the liberal political voices such as Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden alongside occult and mystic voices such as H.P. Blavatsky, and how popular twentieth-century advocates of the mind power movement like Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, and other members link each of these seemingly disparate ideas and methodologies. The result of this entanglement—in theory and in practice—is mystic liberalism.