Cultures do not collapse because they are evil they collapse because they are exhausted by their own metaphors. And the de-evolving radically regressive wanna be-fascism mixed with idiocracy American hating Trump regime - whether one speaks of the leader whose been a lifelong criminal, the cult, or the psychic weather that produced it, is best understood as the right-wing American Empire in a state of neurological overload.
Empire is a kind of hallucination. It’s a story a society tells itself about permanence, inevitability, and divine exemption from the laws of nature and real history. America’s story of building an empire through slaughtering indigenous people's, has in many ways since been expanded in many bad ways without limit. Novelty channeled into material accumulation. But real novelty belongs to mind and meaning, not to strip malls and derivatives.
Oligarchic criminals are not the cause. They are the symptom. They are what happens when the operating system of an empire caters only to the top of the socio economic hierarchy.
What we are witnessing is cultural feedback failure. The corpotized institutions no longer metabolize reality. Light spirituality, higher thoughts, the arts, the sciences are all ignored and or degraded, myth replaces reason, and power becomes performative - pure spectacle. This is classic late-empire behavior. Rome did it. Spain did it. Britain did it. They all mistook domination for destiny.
The radically shitty rightward attempted takeover is the empire’s reptile brain trying to seize control. Fear of demographic change. Fear of ecological reckoning. Fear of lost mythic centrality. When an empire is taken over by regressives trying to pull its people into a past that never existed, it retreats into a fantasy - flags, walls, strongmen who are weak men, purity narratives, and ICE goon squads. This is not strength. It's pathetic weakness and panic ritualized as politics.
Wet diaper Trumpism is cargo-cult authority: loud, simplified, emotionally charged, hostile to nuance. It bubbled to the surface because the culture has been flattened by suboptimal media saturation, which are owned by previously said oligarchic criminals, where attention is the only remaining currency. The empire is trying to expand outward; with eye roll worthy dumb AF talk of Canada and Greenland, while in actuality it is imploding inward, cannibalizing its own symbols.
“American Empire on Overload,” is: Too much inaccurate information. Too little real wisdom. Too much abused power. Too little actual humility.
The system has exceeded its own mythological bandwidth and evolution doesn’t ask permission. What comes next is not decided by elections alone and rural folks not voting against themselves, but by whether consciousness itself can re-ground. Whether people continue to rediscover community, ecological sanity, and a relationship to the living planet rather than to abstractions of dominance.
When an empire overloads, the question is not how to fix the machine, but how to outgrow it. Empires cannot be saved, but people can be redirected. The radically shitty right thrives on attention. Rage is its sacrament. The first solution is refusal. Not apathy - selective disengagement. Don't feed the cultural machine your fear, outrage, and nervous system.
Re-localize Meaning. Empire is abstraction. Numbers, flags, markets, identities without faces. Decentralize Power Through Networked Intelligence - The empire overloads because it is top-heavy with criminal assholes running it. The future is decentralized networks over dominator hierarchy pyramids. Sourced locally. Food grown nearby, people known by name, and shared nature based rituals, are all skills that actually work. When meaning returns to the village, authoritarian mythology collapses. The strongman really weakman has nothing to say to a community that already knows how to live.
Re-mythologize the future and not the past - Trumpism is also necromancy. It raises the dead myths of hierarchy, conquest, and masculine certainty. We need to continue better systems such as those inspired by the good aspects of hardware and software technologies combined with the natural technologies indigenous peoples have known: which are humans as caretakers, not rulers. Intelligence being ecological and not extractive. And technology as a partner with biology, not its replacement.
Restore the Sacred Through Direct Experience. Authoritarianism flourishes in populations such as Supremacist Zionism, the Christian Right, or fundamentalist Islam because they actually spiritually starved. People who have touched the mystery and continue to work on their development in their day to day lives, and we just had an ayahuasca experience ourselves, do not need supremacist religions or their weasley tyrants. Direct experience, whether through deep meditation, ritual, time in wilderness, or yes, responsible entheogenic exploration, reintroduces humility. It dissolves the cartoon ego that fascism depends on. A person who has experienced ego-death cannot be easily recruited into a cult of dominance.
Teach Media Literacy as Survival Skill. The ultra-right is a memetic infection. Images, slogans, emotional hooks bypass reason and lodge directly in the limbic system. Teaching people how the media manipulates attention is not optional anymore - it’s as essential as clean water.
Re-ally with the Planet This is the deepest solution. The American Empire is collapsing because it declared war on Gaia. Climate chaos is not a side issue - it is the central intelligence pushing back. Any politics that denies ecological reality will inevitably become authoritarian, because it must suppress truth to survive. A culture aligned with Earth does not need enemies. It has higher responsibilities.