By Dr. Althea Mentes

A Diagnostic Guide for the Late-Stage Empire (Satire)

The Empire's Mirror-When Power Becomes a Clinical Condition

By the dusk of the American republic's moral standing, its leadership's pathology no longer attempts to masquerade itself as statesmanship. It is now a clinical syndrome that manifests in the obsessive-compulsive need to dominate, the narcissistic disdain for dissent, and the paranoid surveillance of friends and foes alike. The ruling elites-presidents, Pentagon technocrats, and intelligence operatives have a collective psychology more worthy of a diagnostic manual than a democratic polity.

Consider the recent actions of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has placed unprecedented restrictions on media access within the Pentagon. Journalists are now confined to secured areas and must request escorted tours to venture elsewhere, a move justified under the guise of protecting sensitive information. This expresses a fundamental authoritarian urge, an outcropping of what might be labeled Institutional Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, in which the imperative to govern information flow trumps democratic standards.

Yahoo! The Guardian The Times of India

The application of AI to military operations is yet another instance of this pathology. The Pentagon's investment in agential systems of AI that can operate autonomously and make their own decisions heralds a delegation of human judgment to algorithmic determination. Not only is this morally questionable, but it is also a neglect of responsibility-a hallmark of narcissistic administration.

National Defense Magazine Public Citizen

Further, surveillance of dissenting voices and silencing of alternative reporters are indications of a paranoid mindset anchored in power elites. Using AI technology for mass surveillance and censorship, as highlighted by a House Subcommittee report, is an indication of how far the ruling class will go to maintain its version.

New York Post

This essay will examine the mental illnesses that afflict America's ruling elite and how their psychological pathologies have become institutionalized, setting policies to dismantle democratic ideals. In diagnosing these control diseases, we attempt to explore the underlying disease that is afflicting the empire and speculate on what the future of the empire will look like.

Section I: Obsessive-Compulsive Empire-The Tyranny of Total Control

Clinically, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is marked by intrusive thoughts (obsessions) and compulsive, ritualized, repetitive behaviors intended to deflect anxiety. These compulsions have metastasized as a holistic governance model in the US security state.

The Pentagon's fixation with "total information awareness," the FBI's endless pursuit of "domestic extremists," and the White House's weekly briefings on "disinformation threats" are not security strategies but are ritualistic performances of control designed to soothe the anxiety of an elite class that has lost all organic connection to the populace it governs.

1. The Rituals of Power

The modern Nigerian president does not lead by action but as chief priest of national neurosis. Is it Barack Obama's drone kill list (ritually performed every Tuesday), Donald Trump's retaliatory Twitter decrees, or Joe Biden's AI censorship programs ritually purifying chaos? These are not empty gestures. They resonate with the compulsion of the OCD sufferer who must flip a light switch 17 times exactly.

Author: Joseph Nanga.

"Every Tuesday, Obama was shown a list of human targets to be killed," The New York Times reported in 2012. "He would cross off names with the gravity of a man choosing a wine." The procedure was almost sacerdotal-a moral cleansing through mechanized slaughter.

To the imperial elite's suffering mind, power is security, randomness is danger, and democracy is a messy burden. Thus, power cannot be shared; it must be run ritually, algorithmically, and top-down.

2. The Weaponized Bureaucracy

Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan are not bureaucrats-they are clerks of compulsion. The cables, the briefings, and the memorized talking points all serve one purpose: to construct a buffer between the elite dread of uncertainty and the raging chaos of public will. In a healthy democracy, one seeks conversation with dissent. In an OCD empire, dissent must be classified, tracked, and ultimately defeated.

And so, we have programs like the Pentagon's Surveillance Role Player program, which role-plays, not terrorists-role-plays you. Alt-journalists, whistleblowers, and anti-war thinkers are scripted into live-action role-plays so that the intelligence community can rehearse how to spy on, stifle, or undermine them. That is not security- it's a political rehearsal for social control.

As Matt Taibbi documented, "The Pentagon doesn't just monitor journalists. It plays live, AI-enhanced war games with them as the enemy." The media war of the empire is not hyperbole- it is doctrine.

3. Obama: The Drone Narcissus

Among all the recent presidents, Barack Obama is the one that best represents the paradoxical charm of the sociopath. Cerebral, restrained, and eerily unbothered by the civilian death toll of his drone program, Obama redefined technocratic war as therapeutic governance. "Turns out I'm good at killing people," he told aides during his Nobel Peace Prize tenure.

The pathology here is clear: the illusion of surgical precision becomes a form of moral self-soothing, a compulsion to cleanse the world of "bad actors" without getting his own hands dirty.

4. Biden: Dissociation and Delegation

President Biden's mental deterioration is a joke and a metaphor for the system itself: democracy on autopilot managed by aides, algorithms, and unaccountable councils. Biden signs off on AI surveillance technology identifying reporters as "threat vectors" to protect democracy. His handlers use "national security" as an incantation to ward off transparency.

His behavior is dissociative leadership—a psychic disconnect between the acts of governing and the morality of such actions. Decisions are made and orders issued, but no one is there in the moral or ethical sense. It is like the presidency itself has a dissociative identity disorder, and there are different agencies with broken personalities, such as the NSA and DARPA, responding to one name but having one soul.

5. Trump: The Authoritarian Id

At the other extreme, Donald Trump was the unself-conscious American empire's Id: boastful, vengeful, incapable of holding himself back, and free of tact. Obama was the OCD Superego, and Trump was the paranoid Id-obsessed with enemies, domination, and television appearances. Trump's war on the media was more overt than Biden's but not less unhinged. Trump believed that truth was something to be imposed rather than negotiated.

Just like in a narcissistic injury, every fact that hurt his ego was converted into an existential danger to the country.

Section II: Narcissism in the Surveillance State - When Leaders See Only Themselves in the Mirror of Power

In the imperial imagination, the surveillance state is not one of protection but projection. Surveillance is the mirror through which America's elite gaze not out into the country but into themselves and demand the world reflect to them their power. It is the echo chamber of the narcissist: dissent not only has to be crushed but disbelieved into oblivion.

Surveillance means the evolution from biometric data collection to algorithmic behavior prediction, which is not only the result of statecraft. It's a symptom of technological narcissism: a desire to observe, shape, and control the world in the mirror of rulers' ego constructs.

1. The Narcissistic Equation: Power = Validation

In traditional narcissism, the self is hypertrophied and fragile, requiring outside affirmation to maintain an inner emptiness. For empire-builders, the state must continually reassert its legitimacy through 24/7 surveillance, AI-based threat analysis, and the ongoing war on "disinformation."

As Chris Hedges noted, "Narcissists can't grasp truth because truth is always about others. They only see themselves."

Players like CIA Director William J. Burns, who supervise digital wiretaps and psyops in the guise of "democratic resilience," act not as truth-keepers but as reflections of regime unease. They spy not because they need to but because they cannot bear to exist without being spied upon.

2. The 'God View' Delusion: Total Surveillance as Divine Fantasy

Drone warfare, predictive policing software, and metadata fusion centers all prove the same madness: the desire for omniscience. Surveillance Role Player program the neutralization of journalists and protestors- mirrors the imperial elite's messianic aspiration of not merely ruling but being gods of data.

They call it "situational awareness." What they want is omniscient domination.

They don't want to understand reality. They want to possess it.

Michel Foucault once called it "Visibility is a trap." It is also an American empire fetish.

DARPA's push toward "cognitive warfare" and "neuro-modulation" of targets isn't science fiction-it's the neurosis-graced rational summit of narcissistic pathology: when the tyrant tires of simply watching his subjects and instead wishes to reprogram their perceptions in real-time.

3. Shadow Bureaucrats and the Personality Disorder of Secrecy

Think of Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, and General Paul Nakasone, once head of the NSA and now AI counselor at Microsoft. These are not public servants. They are shadow priests-custodians of silence, concealment, and meta-manipulation. Their preoccupation with secrets and hidden knowledge of the law reveals a paranoid-delusional complex, where openness is not civic virtue but existential menace.

They exhibit traits befitting Cluster B, specifically antisocial behavior (manipulation without empathy) and narcissistic privilege (immunity to consequence). The circumstance that it was these people's line of work to create ethical AI governance systems is not ironic. It's wild.

Noam Chomsky warned that power hierarchies founded on secrecy always hide pathology. "If you want to understand power, ask what it hides," he thought. And here, it hides the minds of people with no right to be anywhere near power.

4. Facebook, Google, Palantir: The Playground of the Techno-Narcissists

The imperial narcissist's dream is a world where thoughts can be measured, emotions tracked, and opposition anticipated and smothered. Welcome to the technocratic priesthood: Palantir's Alex Karp, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet's surveillance arms. They are not makers-they are digital necromancers, calling forth virtual specters to replace human ones.

They insure Pentagon contracts to police "information terrain." They market their face recognition technology to foreign autocracies. Their feign shadowbanning does not occur while beating it. They do not buy into civil liberty. They buy into metrics.

And like all narcissists, they gaslight: "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear."

But the elite always fear. And they most fear the truth they cannot script.

Section III: The Psychotic Split - How America's Leaders Take Apart Reality to Preserve Power

A psychotic split is a reality vs. perception condition in which delusion is substituted for fact to uphold a crumbling psychic structure. Clinical psychiatry discovers it in schizophrenia, where the mind splinters to avoid unbearable truths. It exists in the empire as official versions that deny material reality, laced with patriotic or scientific terminology, designed to uphold the illusion of moral ascendancy.

Here, we do not simply diagnose the American elite as narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive but as collectively delusional-sustaining the power machinery through shared Psychosis.

1. MKUltra to Lavender AI: A Continuum of Psychotic Control

Where MKUltra started with attempts at mind control through LSD and electroshocks, it has evolved into Project Lavender's algorithmic kill lists step along the way of psychotic urges. The CIA's 1950s quest for breaking minds now repeats itself in AI-driven systems that simulate "threat behaviors" of independent reporters and civilians, predicting "deviance" through online trails.

We are no longer watching behavior," a leaked Pentagon memo notes. "We are now watching potentiality ephemeral cues of future dissent."

This is not security. It is digital phrenology: delusional reliance on machines to read minds, predict heresy, and strike before thinking is done.

The Psychosis is this: the system imagines its algorithms as all-knowing but represses any attempt to audit or question them. It denies the public access to reality, announcing that reality is whatever its machine priests decree it to be.

2. The Schizoid Bureaucracy: Fragmented Agencies, Unified Paranoia

During the post-9/11 period, power was dispersed but never dissipated. CIA, FBI, DHS, NSA, and DARPA compete with each other, but each has a shared delusion: those they are supposed to serve are the enemy. This generates interagency Paranoia, duplicate blocklists, and reality-twisting policies.

A journalist may be "radicalizing" according to the DHS and, at the same time, be labeled by the NSA as "foreign-influenced"-without interdepartmental coordination and a hearing for the accused.

This schizoid fragmentation allows for plausible deniability. Nobody is in charge because nobody's agency is intact. It is a Frankenstein of shattered minds- each limb spasm independent, governed by its terror.

3. The Doctrine of Preemptive Madness

In orthodox fascism, dissent was punished after the event. In the American model of surveillance, punishment is preemptive. The Department of Homeland Security's MDM (Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation) concept criminalizes the tone of suspicion itself.

This is a delusional projection: the ruling class is so afraid of their illegitimacy that they project it onto everyone else. As with paranoid psychotic convinced neighbors are plotting against him, the state surveils citizens for thoughts that cannot prove exist-only pretend.

As Orwell foresaw, "It was not enough to obey him: you must love him." In AI dystopia, it is not enough to perform; you must never have a different thought.

4. Reality Engineers and the Suppression of Painful Truths

At the apex of this pyramid of Psychosis are the "reality engineers": defense contractors, cognitive warfare strategists, and media asset managers. They create multi-layered deceptions that allow elites to rule without ever confronting the destruction they cause.

Such as:

• Victoria Nuland's denials of US involvement in Ukrainian Biolabs in response to leaked State Department cables.
• Jake Sullivan's pledge that Israel's use of AI kill lists in Gaza was "a triumph of humanitarian precision."
• Anthony Blinken's comment that free reporters reporting on civilian casualties are "not credible sources" unless endorsed by U.S.-authorized NGOs.

Each of these statements is not a common lie. They are psychotic reversals of fact, cognitive defenses against the intolerable fact that the empire no longer dominates- only pretends to rule as it institutes destruction.

5. Group Delusion and Group Death Drive

In Freudian analysis, Thanatos—the death drive—lies underneath this imperial architecture. Gaza is not a war zone; it is the altar of sacrifice of a state that has no longer been constrained by human feeling. Lavender AI, as revealed in investigative reports, wasn't implemented judiciously but industrialized, producing kill orders with 90% automation.

The architects of this horror- Yoav Gallant, IDF cyber units, and Talpiot-attached analysts-did not apologize. They boasted. "We are the most moral army in the world," Gallant boasted, as 30,000 children were entombed in algorithmic devastation.

Empire is not madness as a metaphor. It is institutional psychopathy, masquerading in jargonized aggression, cleaned up on CNN, paid for by a public gaslit into submission.

Section IV: The Inversion of Therapy - When Psychiatry Serves the Tyrant

From Bedlam to Langley: How the Language of Healing Became a Weapon of the State

Psychiatry, the domain of mending shattered minds, is now imperial servitude. A method of charting inner life has been commandeered to stifle dissent, track words, and pathologize resistance. The psychiatric label in today's America functions more as a gag than as a description, a medical curse to exorcise the heretic from the table.

The bad temper is this: while the governing class descends into narcissistic fantasy, compulsive surveillance, and tyrannical suspicion, the therapists have abandoned the truly mad and engaged with the mob. And they're wielding the scalpel in the wrong hand.

1. The Weaponization of Labels: From Dissident to Delusional

In 2023, a Pentagon-related research initiative, Project MindShield, proposed adding online "conspiracism" to the list of emergent psychiatric syndromes. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was surreptitiously amended with inserted terminology indicating that "persistent distrust of authority" could be a sign of "schizotypal thinking."

Think of the insanity of this reversal: Trust in a government with 1,000 foreign bases, a 20-year torture regime, and an everyday drone kill list is sane. Suspicion is pathological.

We live at a time when:

• Questioning CIA = Paranoia
• Suspecting Pfizer = Psychosis
• Criticizing Israel = "Delusional ideation with antisocial fixations."

This is not therapy. This is neuro-Lysenkoism. The Soviet abuse of psychiatry to declare dissidents mentally ill has been computerized, anglicized, and algorithmically magnified.

Pending new disorders to be appended to DSM-5-TR:

1. Authority Dependency Syndrome (ADS)

Defined by the inability to challenge hierarchical orders even when unquestionably immoral. Victims experience acute anxiety when forced to think independently. Common among police officers, military officers, and corporate middle managers.

2. Media Hypnosis Delusion (MHD)

A dissociative disorder in which the suffering confuses manicured narratives with hard facts. They show symptoms like repeating talking points word-for-word and perceiving fact-checks as personal attacks. Prevalent among audiences of cable news and social media "centrists."

3. Nationalist Grandiosity Disorder (NGD)

It is characterized by delusional exceptionalism, where the patient believes their nation is somehow inherently good despite empirical facts. This manifests itself in ritual flag adoration, selective memory loss, and intolerance for opposition. It most frequently affects politicians, military leaders, and talk show hosts.

4. Algorithmic Paranoia Psychosis (APP)

A delusion caused by a machine in which statistical noise is interpreted as an existential threat. Patients actively eliminate "risk variables" (e.g., activists, lost documents) with mechanistic precision. Frequently misdiagnosed in intelligence analysts and predictive policing units.

5. Bureaucratic Moral Aphasia (BMA)

The selective inability to comprehend the moral implications of institutional actions. Victims describe war crimes in the passive voice and refer to human suffering as "collateral metrics." Common among Pentagon and IDF strategists and NGO spokespeople.

6. Obedience Hyperfixation Disorder (OHD)

Uncontrollable urge to enforce rules regardless of context. Patients derive euphoria from punishment behavior and display withdrawal when deprived of authority. Commonly, it is among riot police, TSA agents, and HOA board members.

7. Dissociative Policy Disorder (DPD)

Being able to advocate for human rights values while condoning atrocities. Patients react with "nuance" when confronted with inconsistency—the long-term condition of liberal interventionists and "humanitarian war" enthusiasts.

8. Cognitive Dissonance Immunity (CDI)

It is a very rare adaptation that allows unshaken belief in two conflicting ideologies (e.g., "freedom" and monitoring of the masses). It is most resistant to evidence-based interventions. It is prevalent in senators and op-ed columnists.

2. The Absence of Diagnosis Where It's Needed Most

There is no official diagnostic term for compulsive drone warfare.

There is no psychiatric evaluation for cognitive dissonance in national security elites.

There is no mental health protocol for those who greenlight the starvation of entire populations and then attend TED Talks about empathy.

If truth-tellers wrote the DSM, entire sections would be devoted to the sociopathy of empire.

Psychopathy, obsessive control, emotional flattening, and pathological deceit are not only present at the top-they are incentivized.

• Biden's smiling incoherence.
• Trump's malignant self-regard.
• Obama's drone eulogies.
• The Pentagon's PowerPoint death spirals.

These are not mere quirks of statecraft. These are signs of a class-wide mental illness masked by euphemism, lubricated by PR, and abetted by institutional psychiatry.

3. The Therapist-Turned-Interrogator: Clinical Psychology Joins the Counterinsurgency

The American Psychological Association (APA) has never formally apologized for its role in enabling CIA torture, despite documented collaboration in the "enhanced interrogation" program. The field did not merely stand by; it provided language, justification, and procedural camouflage.

Today, many of those same clinicians work in:

• Counterterrorism behavioral units
• "Cognitive warfare" divisions of NATO
• Google's Jigsaw initiative to "debunk" conspiracy theories
• YouTube's and Facebook's behavioral psychology teams for content moderation

This is not therapy. It is thought policing under the guise of care.

4. The Hypocrisy of Silence: When the Healers Won't Speak

Not one primary psychiatric association has issued a collective diagnosis of the ruling class's evident pathology.

There is no cognitive-behavioral analysis of why a senator smiles during a genocide.

No DSM entry for "algorithmic sadism"-the deliberate tuning of AI kill tools for efficiency in civilian death.

Instead, psychiatry has become the empire's doorman: issuing clean bills of health to monsters in suits while slapping trauma survivors with mood stabilizers.

The asylum doesn't notice when the power goes mad because it's been paid not to.

5. The Alternative Path: Toward a People's Psychology

What is needed now is not a better surveillance model of the mind but a radical decolonization of psychiatry itself.

A field that once housed thinkers like R.D. Laing and Frantz Fanon has become a tool of the Pentagon, Silicon Valley, and the State Department. Truth-tellers, whistleblowers, and survivors must reclaim its language.

The first step? Diagnose upward.

The delusional is not the man who is terrified of the state. The delusional is the state that is terrified of the man.

1. The Moral Absurdity of Empire: A System Without Soul

The American empire has continuously operated under the guise of moral superiority. The "exceptionalist" rhetoric surrounding US military intervention in the language of democracy and freedom has become so routine that it is no longer questioned within the corridors of power. However, this same rhetoric conceals a more resounding, darker reality: the empire's success has not been the spread of democracy but the unimpeded exercise of violence, exploitation, and fraud.

"Empires always need to justify what they're doing. The real question isn't why we do, but how we rationalize what we do to ourselves."

This widely misattributed quotation by the geopolitics theorist John Mearsheimer summarizes the self-deception that has allowed America's rulers to make war, spy on citizens, and corporate depredation legitimate methods of holding power.

But at what cost? The moral hypocrisy of the empire is this simple contradiction between its public values and private sins. These men, like Obama, Biden, Trump, and their faceless counterparts in the Pentagon and espionage agencies, all preside over a gigantic apparatus of militarized surveillance, drone killing, economic imperialism, and domestic domination, yet present themselves as moral beacons of freedom and justice.

This ethical hypocrisy is not an accident but necessary to their power. As narcissists cannot bear the consequences of their actions, the empire's ruling class will not tolerate seeing the human cost of their actions and instead wrap themselves in a shroud of sanctimonious rhetoric.

2. Psychopathy in Power: The Narcissism of Empire's Ruling Class

The vacuum at the heart of the empire is perhaps best explained by examining it through the traits of psychopathy in its typical criminal application, but as it is exhibited by those who hold power over others and feel little to no remorse for the havoc they create. This is particularly evident in the behavior of high-ranking officials in the White House, the Pentagon, and the intelligence communities.

Take, for example, the rhetoric of Barack Obama, who, as president, legitimized thousands of civilian casualties from drone strikes as "targeted killings" under the guise of counterterrorism. Even when there was irrefutable evidence that the majority of these attacks were carried out based on faulty intelligence, Obama's rhetoric remained constant. His self-narcissistic commitment to the righteousness of his actions and deeply rooted belief that his sense of moral righteousness justified all methods allowed him to stay largely unmoved by the growing number of civilian victims.

So, too, were Donald Trump's reactions to military action, economic sanctions, and immigration policy both a reflection of his emotional immaturity and an indication of a narcissistic power dynamic attuned to cruelty and vindictiveness. His ego-centric, spectacle-oriented governing style further solidified the gap between American exceptionalist rhetoric and reality.

"Empires do not just destroy the people they occupy. They destroy the souls of the occupiers." - Chris Hedges.

It is not an accident that the leaders of America have displayed psychopathic behavior-their actions are systematized, a result of the moral corruption that supports their power base.

3. Machiavellianism and Dehumanization of the Other

Empire architects follow a Machiavellian philosophy in which the ends justify the means, and ethics are secondary to accumulating power. This hard-boiled pragmatism is exemplified in the way human life is commodified-whether in the collateral casualties of drone strikes in the Middle East, the systematic killings of journalists who contest the orthodoxy, or the utilization of AI to make "undesirables" obsolete.

The other dehumanization is the Gaza people, the refugees from the Mexican border, or enemy journalists required for the perpetuation of this regime of domination. To maintain power, empire rulers must establish an "enemy": a body to be feared, crushed, and destroyed. This labor of othering gives those in power an excuse for violence against the very people they claim to protect.

"Empires are built on the ruins of the 'other.' In each empire, there has to be a face to demonize, a people to scapegoat, so that the power system can legitimate its violence." - Noam Chomsky

This requirement of an enemy is at the center of imperial psychology, for it allows the ruling class to go on its psychic manipulation conscience-free.

4. The Narcissistic Collapse of Empathy: From War Crimes to Human Rights Rhetoric

Behind America's ruling elite's psychic collapse lies a horrific deficiency in empathy. Empathy, the ability to imagine and share other people's emotions, is the antithesis of narcissistic control. It is not only an effective failure but a defining characteristic.

To be able to sense the suffering of the victims of drone strikes, for example, would be to recognize them as human beings, an unpleasant reality for those who consider themselves the final arbiters of justice.

"Lack of empathy is the psychopath's defining feature." - Dr. Robert Hare, Without Conscience.

That same absence of empathy by the ruling elite is seen in the coldness of their policies, whether it's the condoning of genocide in Yemen or the unabashed support for Israel's apartheid system.

This lack of rhetoric's correspondence with reality results from psychic numbing—the dehumanization needed to maintain control. Biden, Trump, and Obama behave not because they consciously intend to cause harm but because they do not see the damage they cause.

Their narcissism here is not so much self-advertisement as a psychic defense that protects them from the human cost of their actions.

5. The Final Dehumanization: The Empire's Bottomless Desire for More

The narcissism and psychopathy of the ruling elite are not accidents; they are a natural consequence of the empire itself. Empires, by definition, are perpetually in need of expansion geographically and on the individual.

The compulsion to control is all-encompassing, and soon, there will be no distinction between the state and the individual. They're the same thing: a power system, a machine that must continue functioning no matter the cost.

"The most powerful weapon of control is manipulating the human mind." - Aldous Huxley.

The empire builders honed the weapon, creating a world where they became the arbiters of truth and morality.

The collapse of the human soul within America's political elite is not a product of power-disabling. It is the inevitable result of an underlying system designed to penalize healthy relationship-building and eliminate the most essential elements of humanity.

Section VII: The Collapse of Empathy - Can the Empire Be Fixed?

The American empire, reeling from its contradictions, teeters on an edge. Its psychopathic, narcissistic, and Machiavellian ruling class has deliberately torn its moral moorings asunder. The question looms over us: Can this system ever be reformed? Is its corruption so systemic that only its destruction can create a new era?

Digital McCarthyites are acting out Freudian analism.

1. Imperial Fatigue: The Self-Eating System

With every empire, the tools of control begin to destroy themselves. Economic collapse, domestic conflict, and military extravagance are all manifestations of a larger existence crisis—the decay of the imperial core.

"The empire devours itself until it has devoured everything." - Chris Hedges.

Moral and economic exhaustion is a direct result of the empire's insatiable hunger for dominance. History shows that no empire endures forever, and indicators of American imperial decay are stark.

2. Public Resistance: The Last Hope for Reform

Reform will not come from the belly of the imperial system. The establishment was rooted in the Pentagon, the White House, Thee Media, and Wall Street- and cannot reform itself.

"Genuine reform can only occur when public pressure is so intense that even the most entrenched power elites are forced to move." - Noam Chomsky.

The domination system is vast, encompassing military contractors and corporate media. The question is: Will enough people challenge the dominant narrative and reject the fantasy of American exceptionalism?

3. The Erosion of Empathy: Are the Ruling Class Irredeemable?

Can leaders like Obama, Biden, and Trump regain their lost humanity?

"Empathy can't be turned on and off like a light... it's nearly impossible to reestablish in individuals who have invested their entire sense of self in a system of control and exploitation." - Dr. Robert Hare

The possibility of redemption is not only remote-it is, in most cases, impossible.

4. The Failure of the American Dream: The Vanishing of a Myth

The myth of American exceptionalism has collapsed. American Freedom and justice for all have imploded under the weight of economic oppression, state violence, and imperial overreach.

"The empire will have to face its contradictions... and nothing will be left but a system of control that can no longer sustain itself." - Aldous Huxley.

5. Can Reformation Prevail? A Call to Dismantle the Empire

Revolution is the only choice. Polite pleas to reform will not suffice. Change occurs only after the public rejects the fantasy of exceptionalism and unites in demanding justice.

The Reckoning

At the edge of collapse, we must ask: Are we ready to confront the psychopathology of power?

"The empire is on the path of collapse, but collapse is not inevitable... What is inevitable is pain for those unwilling to see, and courage required from those who will fight for a world after it." - Chris Hedges.

The empire is stumbling. The corruption is plain. The future is ours to choose.

References

Chomsky, N. (2003). Hegemony or survival: America's quest for global dominance. Metropolitan Books.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punishment: The birth of the prison. Pantheon Books.

Hare, R. D. (1999). Without Conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us. Guilford Press.

Hedges, C. (2007). American fascists: The Christian Right and the war on America. Free Press.

Huxley, A. (1932). Brave new world. Chatto & Windus.

Mearsheimer, J. J. (2001). The tragedy of Great Power politics. W. W. Norton & Company.

Nanga, J. (2012, May 29). Every Tuesday, Obama was shown a list of human targets to be killed—the New York Times.

Taibbi, M. (2014). The divide: American injustice in the age of the wealth gap. Spiegel & Grau.

The Guardian. (2021, May 13). Israel accused of war crimes in Gaza as conflict intensifies.

The New York Post. (2023, October 9). Biden says the US supports Israel "fully" after Hamas attacks.

The Times of India. (2023, November 4). Gaza crisis worsens as civilians face starvation, UN warns.

Yahoo! News. (2023, October 30). US approves weapons package amid rising Gaza death toll.

The Psychopathology of Empire: Diagnosing the Control Disorders of America's Ruling Class

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© 2025 Dr. Althea Mentes