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.

These insight sub-episodes are mirrored on our primary YouTube channel which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@NilesHeckman/videos

The fabulous comedian David Cross, whose comedy decades ago first raised our eyebrow to lowest common denominator political American stupidity, has a great bit where he says “I would like to officially change and substitute 'casting spells and chanting' in place of 'thoughts and prayers'. Hilarious and even more American!

This is not only wonderful and delightful because it draws attention to the fact that language itself is micro magic. When a likely fake Christian politician stands at a podium after a 2nd Amendment related tragedy and utters that eye roll worthy, tired, and empty phrase, “thoughts and prayers,” instead of passing very popular common sense policies to help reduce gun violence, what they are actually doing is a kind of spiritual bypassing substituted for spell-casting, though a spell so worn down, so emptied of intention, that it has become little more than background noise. The words drift out, ritualistically, to soothe and placate, but not to transform a culture into something better.

These insight sub-episodes are mirrored on our primary YouTube channel which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@NilesHeckman/videos

Doomy titles, those grim little prophecies scattered across the scrollable wasteland of social media such as “It’s over” “The end is near” “We’re cooked” "This country is done".

These are not messages; they are emotional tripwires, engineered in the same factories of attention where clickbait is synthesized like a psychic plastic.

The culture has learned something very old and very potent: fear is the most efficient solvent of attention. Long before corporate news and controlled algorithms, sub-optimal priests and kings understood that if they can convince people the sky is falling, they can rearrange the ground beneath their feet.

These insight sub-episodes are mirrored on our primary YouTube channel which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@NilesHeckman/videos