sleep walking into dystopia

You could see it in the way people clung to their groups, their tribe, like that was all that kept them from falling apart or fading away. The far right really got this, even if they’d never say that out loud. It was like they dangled these signifiers, these tags and slogans and postures, and people flocked to them without even knowing why. Underneath it, there was this weird hunger, a craving deeper than any rational want, like something got lost a long time ago and the only way to patch it up was with whatever brand of loyalty the group was selling. Lacan would have called it a lack, the old mirror stage thing, but you didn’t need to be a psychoanalyst to see what was happening. The whole show—the double-talk, the smug “gotcha” moments, the hero-worshipping of guys like Trump and Farage who were obvious fakes, the almost religious intensity of the crowds—it was all one big feast for people who secretly knew they were split down the middle and wanted someone else to tell them it was okay.

You’d look at the mess—the political noise, the chaos—and you’d see these slogans popping up again and again: “Make America Great Again,” Brexit, whatever. People latched on like those words were a doorway back in time, back to when things felt whole, or at least less broken. But that wasn’t really about some golden past. It was about chasing the thing they could never actually get, some lost scrap of desire, a piece of themselves always out of reach. The brands got built on this, movements grew fatter and louder, and all the while the left just floundered, never managing to conjure the kind of burning fantasy that kept the right’s crowd coming back for more.

Surface-level, it looked like brand loyalty, but you got the sense it was thicker than that. Like, people needed to be seen taking sides, and if the side they picked was ruled by someone who didn’t play by the rules, who broke every code and laughed about it, so much the better. It was like finding the one thing in the world that mirrored back their own confusion, their contradictions, and made it look like power. Trump could say or do anything, and the followers ate it up, almost desperate to prove they were part of something, even if that something was full of holes.

The real question: what kept them locked in? Was it just hate and the thrill of division, or was there another layer, some shadowy force haunting the whole thing? Once people got hooked on those fantasies, could you even lead them out? It felt like hope was just a word, drained of meaning by the endless repetition of the slogans, the rituals, the memes.

Now, the way people get targeted and profiled, it’s almost surgical. You had things like programmatic ads, real-time bidding, all these ways to get inside your head right at the moment when you were weakest, when your guard was down and your real wants spilled out. It was never really about the content, the facts; it was about tuning the pitch to the exact frequency of someone’s secret fears and dreams. But even the best tech didn’t work if the message didn’t hit that raw nerve—the hidden desires and old aches that made a person easy to move.

You could see the pattern in everything, if you cared to look. Picking a favorite coffee shop, or a political movement—it was never as simple as taste or logic. It was about grafting a piece of outside identity onto your own busted reflection, filling in the cracks, even if it didn’t fit. The politicians knew this, or at least figured it out by accident. Give people a fantasy that made the world feel safe, or big, or full of meaning, and they’d ignore everything else. Even if chasing the dream meant screwing themselves over, they’d stick with it, because the alternative—a blank, drifting self with nowhere to belong—was worse.

When you looked at the science, the books about persuasion and bias, it all lined up. People didn’t want the truth. They wanted a story that held them together, a superego whispering that they were right to stay loyal, to keep believing, even as the evidence piled up that their cause was shot through with contradictions. Every tweet, every sticker, every time they said the line in public, it locked them tighter to the fantasy. Eventually, there was no way back. The identity was the chain. Even if the real world busted in, even if the whole scene turned out to be a lie, they couldn’t walk away.

So if you wanted to break out of that, or help someone else do it, you had to start by seeing the trap for what it was. The signifiers were everywhere, built to stick in your head, designed to make you forget there was ever anything outside the echo. And if you could see the edges of the illusion, maybe you could start to pull it apart, even just a little.

That was the only real hope. Not some perfect fix, but an honest look at how you’d been stitched together by borrowed desires and old, secondhand fantasies. If you wanted to change, you had to start there, in the mess, with the broken self. Maybe you could get free enough to see the difference between the story and the reality, and not just swap one lie for another. Maybe. If you could keep your eyes open long enough to notice.