Trump and his gang of cruel, hateful, white-supremacist Republican authoritarians are enthralled by cartoonish yet lethal delusions. Their toxic trance doesn’t arise from excess imagination; it arises from its absence.

They suffer from an atrophied inner life, a near-total lack of spiritual literacy, and no authentic sense of purpose that can withstand ambiguity, self-examination, or moral complexity.

They fail to understand individuation and are ignorant about how to achieve it. Individuation requires self-reflection, accountability, and the courage to encounter one’s own shadow.

Their entire psychic economy depends on avoiding that encounter. To individuate would be to lose the brittle certainty, grievance-based identity, and authoritarian belonging that currently props them up.

Compounding this failure is a striking deficiency in critical thinking. This isn’t an accident or an innocent gap in education; it’s a cultivated aversion. Critical thinking destabilizes dogma, punctures false authority, and interrupts obedience. They have been trained by propaganda, grievance media, and demagogues to regard thinking itself as a threat.

So let’s not indulge in faux empathy that pretends their hallucinated grievances deserve careful reverence. That posture flatters delusion and insults reality.

The essential truth is simpler and harsher: These are lazy-minded, willfully hollowed-out people who have outsourced their meaning-making to fascism. Fascism offers them a grotesque consolation prize: a sense of belonging without conscience, purpose without responsibility, and identity without introspection.

And yet here’s a key truth: Having an inner life, spiritual understanding, and a sense of purpose aren’t elite privileges. They are human capacities. Anyone can cultivate them.

They are not distributed according to race, class, gender, or ethnicity. In fact, people of color and people of modest economic means are often more likely to develop these inner resources, because survival itself demands imagination, relational intelligence, and moral improvisation.

Wealth and privilege, by contrast, can function as anesthesia—dulling curiosity, insulating the psyche from consequence, and delaying the reckoning that produces depth.

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Why, then, are so many people left as empty shells. Why are they so vulnerable to delusion and easily recruited by authoritarian fantasies?

As Joseph Campbell observed, modern American culture is largely devoid of living myths. I mean myth not as falsehood, but as a symbolic framework that confers meaning, coherence, and ethical orientation.

When a culture can’t answer the great human questions—Who am I? Why am I here? What is worth sacrificing for?—people grasp at counterfeit answers.

Christianity once served this mythic function for many Americans. But its soul has been decimated out by a hostile takeover: by materialist, authoritarian, anti-Christ forces masquerading as “Christians” while worshiping power, hierarchy, and cruelty. What remains is often a parody of faith: a branding exercise in resentment.

And yet we remember the justice-loving Christians who embodied the real thing:

Harriet Tubman
Sojourner Truth
Dorothy Day
Dolores Huerta
Susan B. Anthony
Martin Luther King Jr.
Cesar Chavez
Oscar Romero
Ralph Abernathy
Fred Shuttlesworth
Desmond Tutu
Kim Bobo
Joan Chittister
Helen Keller
Daniel Berrigan and Philip Berrigan
Matthew Fox
Jesse Jackson
John Lewis

They remind us that spirituality aligned with justice generates courage, not cruelty.

Another meaning-making system that once steadied many Americans was patriarchy. This is the delusional mythology of male supremacy. It’s the poisonous fantasy that men are the prime movers of civilization.

Thank Goddess that this brittle structure is collapsing under the weight of its own lies. Men can no longer coast on the counterfeit authority of the “master gender.” Many are now forced to discover who they are without domination as their identity.

Fundamentalist materialism is yet another ersatz myth. It promises meaning through accumulation, worth through winning, transcendence through profit.

For some, the chase itself provides temporary structure. But the meaning it offers is so thin, so mutilated, that it ultimately leaves people more starved than before, aching with a hunger it cannot name.

When authentic myth disappears, pathological myth rushes in. When inner life is neglected, authoritarian fantasy fills the void. When purpose is abandoned, cruelty masquerades as destiny.

The remedy is not indulgence of delusion, nor polite silence in the face of fascism. The remedy is the restoration of inner life, the cultivation of spiritual intelligence, and the courageous rebuilding of meaning rooted in justice, imagination, and love.

That work is available to anyone willing to begin.

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MAGA Has lost the plot.