Armageddon Outta Here!

How MAGA's rejection of the Psyche drives the world toward destruction

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. - Revelation

A big reveal—albeit utterly unsurprising if you have been paying attention—was Jonathan Larsen’s recent article, “U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus”. He details how U.S. officers across the Middle East have been telling their troops that the current conflict with Iran is not a normal conflict but a “Holy War.” The real goal in attacking ancient Persia without provocation is to bring about the biblical Armageddon and the return of Jesus. These commanders follow the “Christian warfighting” doctrine of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, who just said:

Death and destruction from the sky all day long… We’re playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.

Many evangelicals apparently see President Trump—convicted felon, whose businesses declared bankruptcy six times, showing signs of cognitive decline—as “anointed by Jesus” to initiate the end times.

One NCO reported that his superior “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God's divine plan.’” The reality is that MAGA is infested by a fanatical religious cult that is similar, in many ways, to Jim Jones’ People’s Temple or Heaven’s Gate, but with tens of millions of adherants, ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, killer drones, and Palantir. Although many evangelical Christians wear business suits and look “normal” in a Western corporate sense, they are as fanatic and extreme in their beliefs as the Taliban or other radical sects, as the Heritage Foundation’s recent report on the family makes clear.

I wrote in depth about Apocalyptic visions from different traditions in my book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (2006). I am fascinated with the apocalyptic strain in both Western monotheisms and indigenous traditions. However I seem to understand the Apocalypse in a completely different way than Hegseth and the Christian Nationalists. I thought it would be helpful to explore my alternative perspective today, as missiles fly, children die, and “Revelation” is in the air.

The book of Revelation is a bizarre, jumbled, surreal, self-contradictory text that reads as if it was written in a manic episode. It is startling that this murky text has maintained such ideological power—to the point where literal adherents of scripture are now murdering innocent Iranians and may blow all of us to smithereens to fulfill their vision of it. As Jung’s student Edward Edinger wrote in Archetype of the Apocalypse: “It strikes the modern mind as bizarre and almost unintelligible.” Yet it points toward the conjunction of opposites and the eventual integration of shadow material. In 2012, I wrote:

Edinger argued, following Jung, that the Apocalypse of St. John had to be understood, not as something specious or far-away, but as something literally taking form in our current reality. “We have evidence all around us in our daily analytic practice and in contemporary world history that this earth shaking archetypal event is taking place here and now. It has already started. It is manifesting itself in international relations; in the breakdown of the social structures of Western civilization; in political, ethnic, and religious groupings; as well as within the psyche of individuals.” He considered the Apocalypse—with its structure of separation, judgment, destruction, and reintegration at a new level of wholeness—to be a profound psychological event, representing “the momentous event of the coming of the self into conscious realization.”

For Edinger, the apocalypse—apokalypsis, “unveiling”—is a transformative encounter with the Self that requires the ego to humbly surrender. When we reject this archetypal process as inner event or initiation, we project the Apocalypse onto the external world. Uninitiated people trapped in adolescent ego structures turn a psycho-spiritual necessity into a literal obsession with “end times,” political enemies, crusades, and Holy Wars, as Hegseth and his cronies in the Republican Party have done.

There are other dimensions to this Apocalyptic threshold which seem relevant to me right now. We seem to be undergoing a metamorphosis in our relationship to time, consciousness, and being. AI is a projection of the human Psyche that is revealing, reflecting, and transforming elements of our inner being. I explore these ideas of a transformational threshold and a new experience of time in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, which is relevant now. As we find ourselves in this eerie “End of Days” moment, I thought I would offer an immediate “flash sale” on the audio version:

To understand Hegseth a bit better, I took a look at American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, his 2020 book where he defends “traditional American values” against what he frames as an existential threat from the “insurgent Left” and “Islamists.” Born in 1980 in Forest Lake, Minnesota, Pete Hegseth was raised by devout middle-class Christians. He went to Princeton University and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, then joined the Army and served as an infantry officer. He guarded detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2004 and led men in combat during tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He sees the current political landscape as a “holy war” or “crusade” for the soul of the nation, believing that the institutions of the United States have been dangerously compromised by leftist ideologies — like concerns for the climate, social justice, and the desire for universal healthcare — that seek to dismantle the country’s founding principles.

The rigid moral, marital and martial standards Hegseth demands for the nation are conspicuously absent from his private life. In The New Yorker, Jane Mayer has detailed a history of professional and personal misconduct. Hegseth was pushed out of leadership roles at two veterans' advocacy groups, Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America, following a number of alarms regarding his behavior. Whistleblower reports and internal memos allege that Hegseth engaged in the mismanagement of organization funds for personal expenses, fostered a hostile and "sexist" work environment, and struggled with alcohol abuse so severe that he was reportedly "drunk on the job" and had to be physically restrained at a hotel bar. A former employee reported a heavily intoxicated Hegseth chanting "Kill all Muslims! Kill all Muslims!" at 2:30 a.m. in a public setting. He failed to disclose a secret legal settlement related to a sexual assault allegation, and his own mother chastised him for his poor behavior with women in a letter that went public.

Hegseth’s tattoos include a prominent Jerusalem Cross, an emblem of the Kingdom of Jerusalem established during the First Crusade. The symbol has been appropriated by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. It was displayed during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville and by the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch mosque massacre. On his bicep, Hegseth has tattooed the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” (”God wills it”), which was the battle cry of the First Crusade. He also has a tattoo of the Arabic word, Kafir, which means “infidel” or “unbeliever,” and is associated with militant anti-Islamic views.

In American Crusade, Hegseth discuss the word “freedom” a lot, but his view of freedom is, I find, a radically non-inclusive one. In his view, to be “free” is to be “unapologetically American,” which involves a total ideological conscription to one specific interpretation of Judeo-Christian values. For Hegseth, dissent is not an exercise of liberty but a sign of “leftist rot.” He frames the choice for his readers in starkly binary terms: “Whether you like it or not, you are an ‘infidel’ – an unbeliever – according to the false religion of leftism... You can submit now or later; or you can fight.”

As he writes in the opening of his book: “Surrounded by the Left, with the odds stacked against us, only a crusade will do.” By invoking the Crusades of the eleventh century, Hegseth suggests that the current moment requires a suspension of civil norms. The “Deus Vult” (God wills it) motto tattooed on his arm serves as the philosophical core of his politics and identity—a conviction that his side’s victory is divinely sanctioned and therefore exempt from the compromises of secular democracy.

Of course, this kind of fanatic extremism has always been with us, but it is astonishing that it has come to the fore at this time. Nazi ideology is rapidly ganing popularity among young Republicans. The Miami Herald reported on a group chat for conservative students in Miami: “Within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”” The Republican students “used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics.” Trump’s practice of encouraging racism, misogyny, and attacking any marginalized “other” has now taken root among Republicans.

Ironically, I kind of think that Hegseth is correct in some ways. There is, indeed, an erosion or even a breakdown of the patriarchal control system underway. Women and other marginalized groups have been naturally gaining more political and economic power in the relatively peaceful, post-industrial societies of the West. Hegseth, Trump, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon and their cohorts found this loss of control to be an unbearable threat. They over-compensated by gripping onto ideological certainty. Now they are plunging the word into war and chaos, seeking to prevent further evolution toward collective emancipation and equity.

Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941) posits that as modern humans achieved “freedom from” the traditional constraints of the Middle Ages—such as the rigid hierarchies of the church and feudalism—they were left with a profound sense of isolation, insignificance, and ontological anxiety. “The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective,” he writes. “They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.”

Fromm argues that this state is often psychologically unbearable, leading individuals to seek an “escape” by surrendering their hard-won autonomy to authoritarian leaders or totalizing ideologies that promise a return to certainty and belonging. “The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.” By identifying with an “anointed” leader and a “divine plan,” the individual escapes the burden of personal moral choice and the complexity of a pluralistic society, where multiple perspectives have value.

For Hegseth, “freedom” is redefined as the right to belong to the dominant, uniform group. Any desire to live outside these values is viewed as a threat that must be eliminated. Fromm warns that, in the “escape from freedom,” the individual gains a sense of pride and purpose by surrendering their independent critical faculties. Willingly giving up their conscience, they become a robot-like instrument of an imposed ideology.

For Edinger, the Apocalypse is an “event” within the Psyche or the
”objective psyche”. For Jungians, the “objective psyche” refers to a layer of the human mind that exists independently of the personal ego. This “objective psyche” is not a product of your personal history, your childhood traumas, or your specific education; rather, it is the vast, impersonal landscape of archetypes and universal patterns (the collective unconscious) that every human being inherits by virtue of being human. The Apocalypse is the moment when the objective psyche breaks through the ego’s defenses to reveal a larger, more capacious reality. In Archetype of the Apocalypse, Edinger writes that when this internal “revelation” is blocked, it gets “projected onto the screen of history.”

Christian Nationalists like Hegseth literalize the “divine plan” or “Armageddon” because they refuse to undergo an internal psychic process that requires initiatory surrender and humility and a certain level of ego death. Instead of facing their shadow, they project it on the world as an external reality requiring violence, control, domination, and terrorism. By doing so, they avoid the threat of an inner confrontation—which requires that we face the darkness within and surrender our egotism—and instead seek to kill the “other” on the physical battlefield. Their failure to do the hard work of integration and initiation now threatens all of us with ruin.