To be an apostate takes courage, tenacity and perseverance. Oh, and bloody-mindedness.

But in addition, becoming an apostate–an outsider–requires introspection. An examination of your own consciousness reveals a lot of unfounded assumptions about who we are, our place in society and the institutions we learned about in school.

Of course, to be an effective critic you have to understand the system that you’re critiquing. That means history, politics, economics, foreign policies etc. But also sociology, psychology and anthropology, because you’re dealing with people who aren’t rational but rationalizing. Then there’s the art of pattern recognition utilized to connect the dots. It really helps to have a galvanizing sense of outrage.

Along the way you come to the realization that our world is organized by sociopaths and actual psychopaths, and that there are an abundance of perverse incentives that drive their behavior. This has led to decades of right-wing policies like more tax cuts for billionaires, more deregulation for monopolists and more handouts to fossil fuels, which are not only wildly unpopular, but have created the massive crisis we face as a country. Our present political and economic moment is characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is social in nature.

Liberals may whine but the Democrats are totally down with these policies too, Meanwhile they deploy identity politics as a cover for their betrayal. Then they wonder why millions of working-class Americans vote for a scumbag like Trump. The Democrats evidence no sign of changing, instead conjuring up new and improved ways to be just as corporate and warlike as the Republicans, while covering it all up with slick liberal propaganda and hatred of Trump.

I’ve also come to realize that everything they warned us about the USSR and its oppressive state-controlled communism should apply to the monopoly capitalism that controls every aspect of our lives here in the homeland. Crazy that. In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, came to the realization that the communists and fascists were, at the base level, identical, simply with a different set of elite. Our elite are similar in the way in which how ideologies may change but the commitment to subservience to power is constant. The result is that the US state has been fully enlisted in the authoritarian project, where you can vote all you want but local, state and federal authorities will still ram through approval for the construction of massive data centers, with its concomitant usage of energy and water.

Fellow iconoclast, Ian Welsh writes—“This is the fundamental disconnect in the West: the people who are making the decisions do well no matter how much ordinary people are hurt; no matter how much they weaken their own countries. In fact, it’s worse than that: the worse their countries and citizens are doing, the better they do.

Every disaster is used to allow more looting. Are there oil shortages? Raise prices even more than costs? Food? Same thing. Are some companies going bankrupt? Buying opportunity! Are citizens desperate? Great, they’ll work for less.

Life is good for our elites and the more they destroy our countries, the better life is for them.

So sorry about high gas prices, high food prices, high health care costs and no future for you or your children. None of that matters. Trump’s getting rich being President and so are American elites and in the eternal honest words of George W. Bush “who cares what you think?”

You don’t matter. It’s been 60 years since anyone in power in America cared about America or Americans. Europe’s leaders are about the same.

Suck it up buttercup. Life’s getting worse and no one with the power to change that cares, because they’re doing more than just fine—they’re the richest rich in the history of the world, and life is good”