The Great Disillusionment

The Spirit of Our Times

I began writing this article on February 26, 2024, moments after watching the video of a young American airman, Aaron Bushnell, burning himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. the day before. The event stirred deep emotions in me, but my emotional response was conflicted and scattered. I felt the call to engage with the moment and the event to discover what it held for me, and what it might hold for others. But after typing a few paragraphs, I ran out of steam. I became bogged down in lethargy and apathy. It’s taken over four months for me to return to writing.

I see my own dispirited state as a microcosm of pervasive energies I’m sensing in the collective. Bushnell sacrificed his life in a horrifying way in order to protest Israel’s war in Gaza. There’s no way to know the entirety of this particular man’s complex inner process in coming to this decision and action. If you feel called to view this moment in history, here’s the link. I don’t recommend you watch the video yourself, but I don’t recommend you shield yourself from it either. The video is there. The event happened.

In witnessing Bushnell’s immolation, I was struck by how helpless and desperate he seemed. As the flames consumed his body, he screamed “Free Palestine!” repeatedly until his vocalizations drifted into incoherent shrieks. He flapped his arms again and again as the scene progressed. The remains of his body eventually collapsed to the ground—his life extinguished. I thought of everything he might have done in his life if he had lived. Assuming his motivations were political, couldn’t he have done more over the course of the next 50-60 years (or however long he would have lived) than by pouring all the potential of his life into this one action? Maybe he didn’t think so. And presumably, he wasn’t thinking about his life as good in itself, or good in terms of the connections he might have shared with others. His life was measured according to its political impact.

I tried to place myself in his position. If I were motivated enough to sacrifice my own life in order to create change in the world, I would use that motivation to spread love, connection, and understanding in my remaining years, unencumbered by the considerations that usually dampen such energies for me (such as establishing my own security and protection, and trying to meet my own needs). Did Bushnell disbelieve in the potential of such commitment and action to meaningfully change the world for the better? I don’t know. I suspect that part of him felt disillusioned by such an idea, perhaps a large part of him. I know it is often challenging for me to keep faith in such ideas. Or perhaps Bushnell was hurting so deeply inside, he just couldn’t stand to wait—he couldn’t stand to suffer by watching what was happening to others in the world. Did it hurt too much to keep living? Did it seem too futile? We can only speculate.

Bushnell’s act of protest seemed to me like it should have been a big news story at the time—a bigger story than it ended up being. Later, I learned that someone else had already immolated herself in protest of what was happening in Gaza. Her sacrifice had come and gone unnoticed. The small amount of attention paid to Bushnell’s suicide seems only to have occurred because he found a way to livestream the video. But soon, he was forgotten as well. The slaughter goes on. There are protests. There are arguments and debates. There are screaming matches. Nothing seems to have any impact. The actions of the Israeli state, the United States, Hamas, other nations, other institutions—the whole machinery of the world—simply grinds on the same as it ever would.

I suppose the monks who set fire to themselves in Vietnam starting in 1963 didn’t really change the world that much either, despite how much press they received. Their actions were duplicated by others in the United States in the years that followed, and still the carnage continued. War crimes abounded. Opinions changed gradually. There were more protests, bigger protests, different kinds of protests. There were more deaths, more slaughter, more war crimes. Eventually, after many years of this, military policies did change. Peace finally came to Vietnam. Would peace have been delayed further still if not for all the protest, debate, and sacrifice? Perhaps so. It’s hard to know for sure.

The June, 1963 image above immortalized the self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc: giving his life to protest the policies of the South Vietnamese Diem regime. Diem was assassinated in a coup some months later. Scant weeks after that, John Kennedy was assassinated in a silent American coup. The way had been cleared for a decade of mass murder and utter madness in Vietnam. Perhaps the fiery deaths of Quang Duc and those that followed accomplished nothing more in the long run than Bushnell’s death did this year. Yet I am struck by the contrast between the desperate screaming of Bushnell and the meditative poise of this monk in his calm, confident energy.

The photograph seemed to capture a steady confidence that lived and breathed in the hearts of many people in the 1960s. This was not an act born of despair or disillusionment. It came from somewhere else. Despite the horror and madness that prevailed in those times—despite the long odds against sanity and peace—many people believed acts of conscience were sure to change the world, one way or another.

That kind of confidence seems in short supply today. I feel some measure of the hopeless, helpless desperation of Bushnell in my own heart. Presumably, he could no longer tolerate watching the death machine continue to grind away, impervious to criticism, impervious to protest, impervious to dialogue. His dying words were, “Free Palestine!” But to me, the crux of his dying message seemed to call out for witnessing, for acknowledgment—as if to say, “Can you see me? Can you recognize the anguish that moves through me? Can you see the anguish and destruction suffered by others in witnessing my anguish? Are you blind? Is your heart dead? Will me burning to death while I scream wildly be enough to attract your attention for at least 5 seconds? Will it be enough for you to set aside even a single instant to think and feel? Am I even here at all? Are you even here at all?”

Bushnell is burned and gone. The death toll in Gaza climbs. I read the other day that Israel has finalized plans to invade Lebanon. Somewhere else I heard that US President Biden has given Ukraine the go-ahead to attack targets in Russia. Warnings are issued regarding the prospect of nuclear war. Threats of a hot war in Taiwan resurface. The people let forth a mighty yawn. And I no longer pay much attention to the news of the day either. If the powers that be insist on these wars, that’s apparently just the way it goes, and that’s apparently just what will happen.

No one seems to believe our rulers would ever refrain from fighting, funding, or fanning the flames of these insane wars—not even if an overwhelming majority of the populace united in opposition to them. The cat’s out of the bag. The rulers of the world will do as they will. The people will look on helplessly. Some will enter the debate, some have given up on the debate. The deadness growing in our hearts reflects the dead emptiness at the heart of the machine. The power and influence of AI grows in leaps and bounds. Events will proceed according to its algorithms and dictates. The world machine grinds on regardless, chiseling out the contours of its relentless insanity, singing the only lyrics of its only song: Impervious—Impervious—Impervious.

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The Politics of Impervious

What is happening? What has happened? In the distant chambers of my memory, I recall the bygone days of 2020. Back then, there was talk of a Great Awakening. Some of us believed the madness and lies of covid governance would kindle a rebirth of the human spirit. One by one, the people would wake up to the state of total capture that prevails in the ruling institutions of our world. We would recognize the power of our humanity. We would insist on a renaissance of spirit. We would withdraw our consent. We would awaken from the spell of politics and the spell of authority. Our numbers would grow. We would form and build communities again. The way ahead was unclear, but full of promise. We were up to the challenge.

Now I stand on the lump of undignified rubble that is 2024, looking back on the events of 2020-2022. Those hopes—the memory of those hopes—seem nothing more than a dead illusion. 2020 was the year of the Great Awakening that never came. 2024 is the year of the Great Disillusionment.

It’s hard to believe it’s even an election year here in the US. With everything that happened—with everything that’s going on now—political discussion is mostly relegated to a single issue: The Cult of Trump vs. the Cult of Never Trump. I observe with numb astonishment. How can anyone still believe Trump is their savior? How can anyone still view Trump as an existential threat? How is it possible for people to care one way or the other about Trump anymore? Not only that, how is it possible—with everything happening in our lives and world—that this seems to be the only issue that motivates people at all?

I have to hand it to the man. Somehow, in this year of our great disillusionment, he has maintained the power to keep one final illusion alive in the hearts and minds of the American people—the illusion of his importance. Everywhere I look, people are heartbroken, defeated, spiritually desolate, wandering aimlessly in the wasteland of dispelled illusions. All around me, people hardly believe in anything at all anymore. Only the flicker of one tiny, dim ember of a candle still burns in the hearts of those who remain politically engaged: the hope that Trump will win the election, or the hope that Trump will lose the election. Presumably, if the election resolves according to their hopes, they will at least be able to lie down and wither to dust in peace, resting their heads on velvet pillows of bitter victory in their death beds.

In a way, I understand. In early 2022, I urged the necessity of breaking the Spell of Politics. In service of breaking this spell for myself, I even registered as a Republican, noticing how strong the conditioned taboo against doing so prevailed in my heart. I even entertained the vain hope that a vast upswell of support for Republicans would occur in opposition to the madness and corruption of covid governance. I fantasized about how this would reorient Republicans to center their focus on opposing the empire of the machine, the corruption prevalent in public and private institutions, and the defense of individual rights and sovereignty. I fantasized about how the shock of this would cause a reckoning among Democrats in response—how left-leaning Americans would sober up and recognize the extent to which they had betrayed their own values of supporting individual rights and liberties, of opposing the military industrial complex, conformity of thought, and institutional corruption. I fantasized about how Republicans and Democrats would both realize that party labels were meaningless. They would realize their support ought never be given to political leaders of any party who demonstrate allegiance to the corrupt machine that has deceived us and stolen our power, peace, health, and wealth for decades. The Great Awakening was just getting started!

Clearly, I still held plenty of illusions that needed to be demolished. It’s utterly depressing to lose too many of your illusions all at once. If you can just hold onto a few of them, it can be enough to keep you going. I lost a bevy of illusions in 2020, all within the course of a few months. But the illusion of the Great Awakening, coupled with the illusion of community and solidarity kept me strong until it collapsed at the tail-end of 2022. So I can understand why so many people are holding tight to their illusions of Trump’s importance.

I have successfully shattered the remnants of the Spell of Politics within me—and it doesn’t feel great on the other side of it. The Republicans didn’t change at all. In fact, I witnessed a huge number of people who seemed to be part of the Great Awakening simply just embrace Republicanism, railing against trans people, turning to Christian conservatism, or lining up behind Putin and Elon Musk. They seemed to think that the Great Awakening consisted of realizing Democrats were bad—and hating the people the Democrats supported, and loving the people the Democrats hated.

I didn’t enjoy how it felt to be registered as a Republican. Whatever good it may have done to help me break the spell of politics was behind me. I briefly considered registering as a Democrat again so I could vote for RFK in the primaries. But the Democratic party made it clear they were hell-bent on rigging their primaries to preclude any challenge to Biden, and RFK became an independent. I decided to re-register as independent myself—something I’d never done before. I used to think it was important to register with one of the major parties so I could vote in their primaries. But what’s the use? Even if the votes are accurately counted, a proposition I find more questionable with each passing year, the process is rigged in countless other ways. If they can’t rig the election or electoral process against you, they’ll assassinate your character, and if they can’t do that, they’ll just plain old assassinate you, like they did to the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s. Who do we think we’re fooling with putting all this importance on our votes? Just ourselves.

In the next turn of the Great Disillusionment, I watched as RFK steadfastly backed and continues to back the party line on Israel, following the launch of their War on Gaza in October, 2023. I couldn’t understand it. Here’s a man who has incisively sliced and diced the hypocrisies and inner-workings of US imperialism over and over again. He could have been, should have been, an inspiring peace candidate, carrying the torch of his father and JFK. Instead, I can’t discern any difference between the Biden, Trump, or Kennedy approaches to the brutal onslaught waged on the people of Gaza. The position of all three platforms is uniform: Go for it.

Other important issues are similarly ignored. RFK barely even talks about the madness we all lived through with covid governance on the campaign trail. Trump continues to praise the toxic and ineffective so-called vaccines he pushed through with his “Operation Warp Drive.” I won’t even bother to mention the vacuity Biden has to offer on the subject. There’s no reckoning offered. No one wants to talk about the calamity we went through—how our rights were annulled, how we were lied to and abused by our leaders, how our bodies and personal lives were harmed. No one dares decry the culpability of the Department of Defense for funding the creation of covid in the first place, in conjunction with the People’s Republic of China.

RFK was a hero to those of us who saw what was happening during the lockdowns and mandates. Why doesn’t he run on that? Why doesn’t he name and challenge the military government that seized power by killing his uncle in 1963, that’s ruled this country ever since, that spreads war and horror across the world, that lies to us with every breath, that gave us covid, poisoned us with fake medicine, and has facilitated the destruction of our economy and society for 60 years? They’ve been robbing us blind, decimating the middle class, enriching oligarchs and tech monopolists who spy on us, program us, pilfer our data and privacy, and destroy our relationships and community with their social media platforms and smart phones. They’re turning us into inert, addicted zombies, feeding us distorted realities through their search engines, fact-checkers, censorship, and shadow-banning.

I don’t know why RFK doesn’t center these issues. He mentions them a little, but not that much. He made a name for himself by speaking about these issues with clarity, courage, and integrity before he started running for president. I don’t know why he supports what Israel is doing in Gaza. You don’t have to oppose the nation of Israel to call on them to refrain from the brutal state terrorism campaign they have been waging against the people of Gaza for 8 months. You can ask them or tell them to stop—the way you would tell a friend to stop engaging in destructive or immoral behaviors. You can pull the weapons and the funds. You’re letting them know it’s wrong because you want to help them, not because you want to hurt them. You want your friend to be the best version of themselves, to shine forth with the beautiful heart you know them to truly have.

Maybe RFK is running his campaign and platform this way because he sincerely thinks it’s a winning strategy on the political chessboard. It isn’t, though. His best chance of winning his long-shot campaign is to distinguish himself by acting and speaking differently from the politicians we’re used to. Look at what we’ve got: Joe Biden is 81 years old and clearly suffers from dementia due to advanced age. Donald Trump is 78 and will also be the oldest person ever elected president if he wins. Robert Kennedy, by contrast, is a youthful, hale, and hearty 70 year-old. If he wins, he will be the second-oldest person ever elected president.  Why are the top three candidates all 70 and older? People used to talk about how old Reagan was, and how he went senile during his second term in office. But he was only 69 when he was first elected.

Is RFK chickening out after all and giving into the fear of being iced just like his dad was? Is that why he’s toning it down and carrying water for the Israeli military-security state, the sacred cow of the US military-security state? I wouldn’t blame him if he was scared. And despite what I wrote above, I wouldn’t care in the slightest that he’s 70 years old—if he would act like the visionary he could be. Otherwise, he’ll just be another old guy running another pointless presidential campaign to be the next human face in front of the curtain that hides the generals and oligarchs who run the show no matter who’s president.

Forgive my ranting, but I’m just feeling the spirit of the Great Disillusionment. It is an election year after all. Even if the elections are meaningless, it should at least be an opportunity for someone to have a real conversation about what’s actually happening in the country and the world. There are people living on the streets all around my home. They set up camps, stay where they are for a few weeks till the camps are swept up, and then set up camp again on some other street. In a few days, other people set up camp in the same place where the last one was just swept up. And it just goes on. No solutions, no shelters, no new housing, rehab centers, or mental hospitals—not even a designated place for people to set up camp off the street. Meanwhile, billions of dollars are poured into pointless wars, year after year, wreaking brutal havoc and destruction all over the world—for nothing. For nothing. For nothing.

I don’t know anybody who looks at the state of our society without seeing a broken, heartless, insane disaster, getting worse and worse. No one believes the Republican or Democrat they intend to vote for has any vision, capability, or even intention to do anything about it. At best, they just think the other guy will be worse. Republicans lost all hope and are just holding onto their guy Trump because they know he pisses tons of people off and they want to hold their middle finger as high as possible in a futile gesture of defiance. If anything, the Democrats are even more degraded, pretending their party isn’t a hopelessly corrupt, captured, empty shell of nothing—with a decrepit, barely cognizant figurehead rolled out liked a macabre mannequin for public appearances—all for the sole purpose of hopefully denying the Republicans the satisfaction of getting their middle finger back in the air.

Not long ago, we were treated to the depressing spectacle of Biden and Trump debating. For years now, Joe Biden’s advanced senility has reduced him to a crumbling sock puppet who can barely remember his own name. I’ve watched in horrified astonishment as he stumbles haplessly through the motions of the presidency. We are all apparently meant to believe this is entirely normal, or that it’s not even happening. With Biden’s incoherence on full display during the recent debate, the Democratic establishment is suddenly acting as if they only now became aware of Biden’s condition.

It is, however, perfectly clear that whoever is running the Democratic Party merely took advantage of Biden’s incumbency so they could railroad Biden through the primaries and deny the voters the chance to nominate a candidate of their own choosing. Now, the invisible leaders of the Democratic Party will be able to select another apparatchik beholden to them and thus maintain their grip on what was once a political party.

At least when Dick Cheney and company were running George Bush, we knew who was actually in charge. But we don’t even know who’s running Joe Biden. Whoever gives him his orders is hidden somewhere behind a black box. I wouldn’t be surprised if there no longer exists any person or even a cabal that runs the party. The job has probably been outsourced to BlackRock and the Aladdin AI engine running it that I wrote about in my last article. And this is all put forward to us as if it’s entirely normal. As if it weren’t utterly insane to pretend that he’s actually president—let alone to quash all vestiges of democracy in their own primaries and just shove him onto the ballot for another four years. It’s not only insane, it’s shockingly sad, and even cruel. It’s hopelessly dispiriting and demoralizing. And Biden himself looks so lost and confused. It sickens the heart to watch his invisible masters continually abuse this elder by forcing him to pretend he’s the president for their own purposes.

On a side corner of the internet, RFK ran a shadow debate, having been systematically excluded from the official one. Despite my lack of enthusiasm, I will likely vote for him. His uncle John Kennedy had to play politics and downplay the truth about how transformative his policies of peace, racial justice, and resistance to US Imperialism truly were.  I believe RFK is downplaying how radically different his own platform is as well. But who cares who I vote for? My lack of enthusiasm is not really based on disappointment with him, but with the futility of winning. If he were miraculously able to win election somehow, the whole impervious public-private partnership machine would be sure to unite against him and cripple his attempts at governance. And if he performed yet another miracle and was able to hold his own against it while in office, he would not be allowed to live.

Let’s not pretend the same powers that killed Robert Kennedy’s father and uncle no longer run the country. They clearly do. We saw both Trump and Biden flagrantly violate the law by withholding the remaining classified government documents on the JFK assassination. Who gives them their orders? Who allows them to violate this law and get away with it? The answer of course, is the same oligarchic and military interests that killed John Kennedy and got away with it. RFK will either be eliminated or be forced to tow the line. That’s why I am urging for him to use the platform he has to speak plainly about the true condition of this country.

I want a president, or at least a presidential candidate, who will step to the podium and say, “No more lies. The men who own and operate the military-industrial-intelligence complex in this country authorized and directed the murder of President Kennedy, and have maintained control of our government ever since. Since then, they have conducted the coverup of this crime, sponsored the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and have continued to direct the United States as a criminal enterprise in a series of ongoing coverups and crimes against democracy and the truth. The men who initially took power in 1963 have since passed on, but their inheritors continue to direct the operations of this country from institutional levers of power in the the financial, military, and intelligence sectors. Their legacy of criminality and coverups continues. The only antidote to this cancer on the soul of America is the truth.”

Can you imagine? An uproar would ensue, of course—led by the bought-and-paid-for politicians and media shills who answer to the operators of the criminal legacy facing exposure. But for the first time since the 1970s, we would be having a legitimate public conversation about truth and power in this country. That has to happen first, before any institutional change in government can occur. That’s the only thing I can think of that would inspire enthusiasm in me politically at this point.

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Celebrating Independence in the Shadow Universe

A few days ago, the Fourth of July came and went. For hours, I beheld a surreal spectacle of relentless illegal firework displays surrounding my home. It was like nothing else I had ever seen or heard. Even the barrage of fireworks engulfing me when I lived in Beijing during the Chinese New Year did not compare. I live in an impoverished area, and I was astonished to think of how much money must have been cobbled together to produce the near-constant train of fireworks, big and small, complete with full scale flowers of light lighting the sky hundreds of feet above me, launched from just blocks away. My neighbors screamed wildly all night, lighting a constant succession of roman candles in the street every few minutes. I felt like a crazed dog, stirred to the edge of panic by the continual eruptions.

The night before, I started to feel very strange, like I’d drifted through a portal into a shadow universe. There was certainly something in the air. Other friends in Portland verified that more fireworks were going off all over Portland than they could remember witnessing in years prior. The concentration of fireworks in my run-down neighborhood seemed to put the rest of the city to shame, however. I live here because it was the only part of the greater Portland area I could afford to buy a home in when I took the plunge and purchased a house last year. It’s kind of a no-man’s land, where the veneer of organized society threatens to fade out entirely.

As my friend Viveka Moon put it, things are getting bad enough for people to start questioning their unifying theories of how the world works, but not fully consciously yet. People are really stressed and need an outlet. Setting off fireworks—blowing things up—feels good for some people, feels cathartic.

As my own thoughts drift back to my time in China, I recall the chilling phrase people used when the question was raised of how political leaders were selected: “It’s not our business.” I heard this exact phrase from many of my students when I worked there as a teacher of English. It’s not our business who sets policy. It’s not our business how decision gets made. It’s not our business to know or care who’s running things. I can only assume “it’s not our business” was the agreed upon English translation for a phrase in Chinese, repeated like a mantra by those subjected to the rule of their superiors for decades.

Another memory that comes to mind from my days in China was one that hit me only a few weeks after I arrived. As I walked through the busy city streets, I found myself noticing that life in Beijing was almost indistinguishable from life in the United States, despite the (ostensible) difference in governing systems. People got up in the morning and hustled to work, trying to keep up with the demands of money-making. They tuned into the news to learn what the people in power had decided was going to happen next. They had no power, no influence, no say in such things. The policies of the government and corporate powers, the changes to technology, the changes in fashion, the entertainment pushed forward as popular—all these things were just events that happened to the regular people, independent of their own influence or input. Just like in America.

After everything that’s happened in recent years, the ways our lives were turned upside down, the wars we were instructed to support, the ways we were turned against each other—the absurd spectacle of Trump, the absurd spectacle of Trump’s persecution, the absurd spectacle of Biden cosplaying President from the recesses of his dementia—all of this has shunted us into a shadow universe. There is no independence to celebrate. We are not independent. We are a captured people. We are ruled. There’s nothing else to do except blow a bunch of shit up and make loud noises on the one day of the year we can get away with it. And then go back to being ruled. Just like the Chinese.

The pantomime of political theater informs the condition we’re in, but the Great Disillusionment is not just a political phenomenon. I see it in the lives of the people around me. I feel it in my own life. We give up on social life and community life. Our friendships and relationships are falling apart. There’s little left for us to believe in—little left to draw us together. Alternative subcultures of ecstatic dance, polyamory, new age and neo-indigenous spirituality, and the vaunted psychedelic renaissance—all of it has been growing a sour edge. All of it progressively hollowed out, converted into empty escapism, hedonistic pursuits or “scenes” for posing and posturing. People are gradually losing heart. The train seems to be headed nowhere. Some people have gone through their own Great Awakening and discovered their own Great Disillusionment on the other side of it. The more they awaken, the more the illusions fall away—including the illusion of a new society, of the New Earth we hoped to awaken into. Others drift back to sleep, finding nothing to awaken to. Others eschew the awakening process entirely, but even in the confines of mainstream reality, the disillusionment sets in all the same.

Politically speaking, it’s been the war in Gaza that’s served as the biggest catalyst of disillusionment this past year. There have been plenty of horrible wars and atrocities over the years that just go on and on, but this one has done something different, at least here in the US. As listless and pathetically absurd as the political situation is here, the effects of the Gaza War may actually be helping to break the Spell of Politics. The apathetic malaise gripping the country may be a necessary stage in the process. The Ukraine War divided people on the Right—some lining up behind the patriotic war machine, and some resisting support for a pointless war to bring Ukraine into NATO rather than allowing it to remain unaligned. The Left lined up behind that war in lockstep. As far as I can tell, they did so because they had been entrained into rank obedience by state covid propaganda, and the same institutions previously instructing them to lock down were now instructing them to rally behind Ukraine.

But the Left’s turn to fracture finally came with the Gaza War. The decades of occupation and apartheid governance in Israel has increasingly and gradually alienated more and more of the Left as it drags on, but Israel has never inflicted such jaw-dropping and ruthless brutality prior to now. However awful the Hamas attacks of 2023 were, and whatever is believed about the impetus for those, the proportionality of bloodshed in Israel’s response exceeded that of Hamas early on, and the bloodshed just keeps compounding. Meanwhile, half of the Left and most of the Right staunchly supports Israel.

I can sense the internal disillusionment wrought by the splitting of both Right and Left through these two wars. The impulse in American politics has been to vehemently condemn the other side as bloodthirsty, inhuman savages. But now the lines are all scrambled. It’s hard to deny how brutal and savage the Israeli war machine has been in targeting and terrorizing Palestinian civilians. But does opposing Israel’s actions mean one is supporting the brutality and cruelty of Hamas? Or is that justified because Israel is so awful? Or is supporting the Israel’s war policy justified because of how bad Hamas is, and because of how bad other opponents of Israel are, such as Neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic jihadists? But wait, don’t we need to support the Ukrainians, even though that government has enlisted and empowered Neo-Nazi support from the Azov battalion and similar groups in their crusade against Russia? After all, Putin is so cruel, dictatorial, and evil. But wait, isn’t it the case that Ukraine is just a proxy-state of the US and NATO, established through a covert action coup in 2014 to threaten and harass Russia? Does that mean we should support Putin in resisting the global Anglo-American military empire that wreaks havoc all over the world in a campaign of forever warfare and economic domination?

Is Israel committing genocide and therefore we need to oppose them with everything we have? Or do we listen to the warnings of the pro-Israel people who claim their opponents want to commit genocide against the Jewish people? What about the global policies that led to covid, followed by a toxic and ineffective pharmaceutical billed as a vaccine? Do those policies, supported by Trump, Biden, Putin, and Israel alike, constitute democide—a deliberate and systematic attack on the lives of the people of the whole world? Or is that just misinformation, and the real villains are the common people who opposed the policies of lockdown, social distancing, mandatory masks and vaccination?

But wait, hasn’t the establishment media now admitted that all those policies were utterly fruitless? Haven’t we learned that those policies only accomplished oligarchic enrichment, together with massive economic and social displacement, if not widespread medical injury? We just lived through the crime of the century. It deeply impacted nearly every person on the planet, whatever is believed to be true about it. But wait, I forgot—we’ve all decided to collectively sweep everything that happened regarding covid under the rug and pretend it never happened. Not so we can come together and unite around our common humanity, but so we can fight viciously about other stuff. Let us never speak of it again.

So, in the interests of social compliance, let’s get back to conventional politics. It’s hard to know whether we should hate the Left for supporting Palestine and Ukraine when the US and NATO are propping up Ukraine against Russia, but propping up Israel in aggressing against Palestine. Or do we hate the Right for supporting Russia against Ukraine and their American masters, but supporting Israel and their American masters against Palestine? Do we hate the US and NATO some of the time, or all of the time, or none of the time? And how to decide whether to hate the Right or Left when the Right is split on the Ukraine-Russia War, and the Left is split on the Israel-Palestine War? And how not to hate ourselves to the extent that we’ve supported any of these ghoulish regimes?

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Peace and Truth

So here we are. There are no good guys in the wars between states and political parties. Instead, there is organized militarism, crime, secrecy, and economic oppression—and the people who suffer at their hands. Winning the fight is not victory. Victory consists of withdrawing our support for war and secrecy. If I were to offer a political slogan for the movement we need (the movement I thought we were building, but which turned out to be an illusion) it would be Peace and Truth.

War and Deception are the greatest political enemies of the people of this country and this world. With them, there can be no democracy. Policy debates become pointless. How can we have an honest discussion about policy when the truth is forbidden? But when we are invested in a peace process, restorative political and human energies are available. When the truth is no barrier, any policy can be proposed, attempted, discarded or exchanged. The truth will bear out its efficacy, and peace will enable the transfer of power to competing policies.

Peace and Truth. That is what we need, more than anything else.

We’re burned out after years of divide-and-rule conditioning. We were encouraged to cancel, condemn, and vilify all those on the other side of the political divide. Now we are starting to acknowledge the stark moral vacuum of whatever side we thought we were on. The bankruptcy of what we once hoped to believe in is laid bare. Somewhere in the backs of our minds, perhaps, we experience pangs of conscience regarding the extent to which we participated in the cancelation, condemnation, and vilification we were vigorously encouraged to enact.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps we have shunted those thoughts into a memory hole of compartmentalized denial. Or perhaps we are still keeping the faith, rallying around the only flag we can still believe in: whether Trump is an existential threat or an existential savior. Or maybe we’re just getting our hands on as many fireworks as we can find and blowing the hell out of them. Maybe we are withdrawing, getting depressed, wondering how and where we will find the shreds of hope needed to rebuild our trust—to find something we can believe in again—something to believe in that we can share with others.

Or maybe the spirit of our times is totally passing us by. We cheerfully recite the mantra of the Chinese citizen: “It’s not our business.” Life goes on while we work hard and play hard. Our technological overlords impose new changes on us with ever-advanced intrusions. Our political and media masters issue instructions and we obey them; then we wait for the new instructions. The wars rage on, ebbing and flowing. We dampen out the echo of someone’s voice. It warns us we are closer to the brink of nuclear warfare than we’ve been since Kennedy and Khrushchev walked us back from the abyss during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. We hope the leaders will figure it out without our help. After all, it’s not really our business.

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The Bitter Pill of Disillusionment

For myself, the Great Disillusionment has been characterized by depressive and nervous collapse. The life I had before 2020 was wiped out by the covid debacle, and the life I rebuilt in the wake of that has dwindled and disintegrated away as the return to supposed normalcy set in. Everything that transpired left me drained to the marrow. I look to the supposed New Earth I believed I was joining and building, and I don’t see community there. I don’t see peace and truth. I see the remnants of an illusion—barely less illusory than the one I lived in before the Twenties erupted and swept it away. I feel alien in both worlds, in all worlds, like the ghost of someone I once was, or might have been.

I don’t say these things in the interest of complaining. This is a necessary stage of disillusionment. Most of us hate to be disillusioned—and with good reason. It feels terrible. It feels terrible, but it’s good. Yes, it’s good to be disillusioned. True medicine is hard to swallow. If we want to put our energy and hearts into something real, into something truly meaningful, we must be relieved of our illusions. How else can we see the truth and live accordingly? The illusion I believed in was wiped away, but losing the illusion enabled me to see the seeds of the movement and consciousness I have hoped for. Without losing the illusion, I would never be able to see the seeds—I would never know how to help them grow.

When we are illusioned, our actions are skewed in accordance with unrealities. Sooner or later the realities behind them will break our hearts. If we never see through the illusions and perceive those realities, our hearts will just get broken over and over again. We will put our energy into phantom projects that are suddenly revealed to be empty, even non-existent. Or worse, our energies will be hijacked by others who take advantage of our illusioned condition. They may divert our love and care accordingly, deceiving us into building something that would horrify us—if we could only see through the illusion that masks it as something good and beautiful. Disillusionment cannot betray us, only illusion can do that. If we are lucky enough to become fully disillusioned, our energy can only flow into that which we truly love and support.

But disillusionment comes at a price. We have to suffer through our grief. The bigger our illusion was, the more grief we will have to confront. Our hearts, minds, and bodies can only hold so much grief at once. Overloads of grief will be experienced as trauma. I am currently recovering from traumatic grief. Maybe you are too. Maybe not.

But I’m looking forward to the next stage of disillusionment. I’m looking forward to my pessimistic illusions getting pulled away, revealing the beautiful truth of foundational goodness I can align myself with once I’m able to clearly see it. I don’t yet know where these illusions currently cover my eyes. If I knew that, I’d be able to see through them already.

But underneath the grief and trauma, I know that I hold estel for the beauty, goodness, love, and trust of Truth. Estel is a word derived from the works of JRR Tolkien. It’s a variety of hope, counterposed with amdir. Amdir refers to the kind of hope we usually mean when we talk about hope. “I hope I pass the test,” or “I hope I get the promotion,” or “I hope I find lasting love with a partner.” It’s the kind of hope that can often be founded on illusion, like the utterly fraudulent “Hope” we were sold by Obama in 2008. I like to say that Obama really came through on his “Hope” campaign promise. He accomplished this by not delivering on anything we wanted, needed, or hoped for, and indeed, by betraying our hopes in myriad ways. If he had delivered, we would no longer have “Hope,” we would have “Satisfaction.” By not delivering, we were ensured that we would still have plenty of “Hope.” Indeed, “Hope” was about all we had left. My thoughts return to Aaron Bushnell. I’ll never know what transpired in his heart the day he ended his life in protest. Had he lost all hope? Or was he taking action on the only hope remaining to him—that the sacrifice of his life would help the world?

Estel refers to a different kind of hope. Estel is something closer to “hope against hope,” or “hope beyond hope.” But it really refers to a deep spiritual hope—a kind of faith. It is a hope grounded in the heart’s insistence on trusting this world, in trusting the Divine. It is a hope that insists the shadows and evils that beset us in our lives and in this world are truly just a passing thing. It is a hope that insists it is truly safe to exist as a being in this world, in the next world, in all possible worlds, in the World. It is safe to trust in Trust. It is a hope that insists Love is the Truth, that Love is Trust and Trust is Love, that when we Trust, we encounter the Truth.

It is often hard for me to hold estel when I’m feeling disillusioned—when I’m navigating grief and trauma. And so I look forward to losing the illusions that obscure and frustrate my estel. I wonder what those illusions are. I wonder how blessed I will feel to be relieved of the illusions that keep me from recognizing and knowing the divine, loving, goodness of existence. I consider how much better it will feel, how much better it will be, to exist in the Truth. So much better than it was to subsist off the illusions that kept me going in the past—before they dissolved away, leaving me grief-stricken.

I think all this heartache and struggle will have been worth it. So come join me! Let’s get disillusioned. It’s the spirit of our times. It’s a different kind of thrill than the one you’re probably used to. It will help if you’re a little bit masochistic. But not too masochistic—hat would keep you addicted to the cycle of illusion and heartbreak forever. No, on some level, you’ll need to really dislike feeling bad—and sign up for it anyway. There, now—you feel that heartbreak? That terror? That madness of confusion and overwhelm? That’s the feeling of your illusions dissolving away.

Next stop, Truth and Bliss! Wait… where did everybody go?

Oh well, if I have to journey through disillusionment by my lonesome self, it’ll just have to be like that. But it would sure be nice to have some company. Peace and Truth will eventually find us all, sooner or later.

What are we waiting for?