Around 2015, during the Trump-Clinton campaign, the American mind began to fracture. Families splintered. Friends became strangers. Civil discourse collapsed into tribal chant. It was no longer possible to speak, only to choose sides. I tried to bridge the divide, to reason with both camps. I wrote. I debated. I pleaded. None of it mattered. The more I tried, the more alien I became. Reason has no place in a country at war with itself.

This wasn’t just political—it was existential. I kept asking: why is it impossible to change anyone’s mind? Why do people believe wildly opposing things with equal certainty? It can’t be that both are right. But neither side can admit it’s wrong.

The answer came, not from pundits or professors, but from a battlefield. During the Iraq War, American soldiers mocked Baathist loyalists as “dead enders”—men clinging to a lost regime, fighting on when the war was clearly over. But what made them fight? What made them hold on?

They weren’t unique. We are all dead enders.

As children, we’re sponges—open, pliable, curious. But that flexibility hardens. As adults, we don’t seek truth—we protect memory. Ideas, like language and music, sink in deepest when we’re young. Prejudices and beliefs get baked into identity. Challenge them, and people feel attacked at the root. So they dig in. They defend what they grew up with—nostalgically, emotionally, irrationally. Race, religion, sexuality, even tech habits—they’re echoes of childhood. This is not freedom. It’s programming.

Now we live in a country of dead enders, each clinging to our version of truth, convinced we were raised right. America—the freest, richest, most powerful nation on Earth—was supposed to be chosen. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we took it as proof. Not just that we won, but that we were right. Our trinity—God, democracy, capitalism—became sacred. Challenge them, and you risk exile.

But what if we were wrong?

Take God—not the poetic spirit, but the Christian God: omnipotent, omniscient, intervening. That God doesn’t show up. The logic fails. The evidence is void. Yet most Americans can’t even ask the question. They’ll defend the myth to the grave. Because to surrender it is to admit they were lied to—and worse, that they believed it.

Democracy? Beautiful theory. The people rule. Their voices matter. But it’s a lie. Majorities get swayed by fear, anger, and propaganda. They choose bad leaders. They cheer unjust wars. Truth and justice almost always begin as minority positions. In democracy, progress is uphill. And worst of all, the ignorant vote counts the same as the informed. Your neighbor’s delusion becomes your law.

Capitalism, at least, doesn’t lie. It promises only profit. It’s amoral and ruthless—but honest. The problem isn’t capitalism itself—it’s that we stopped regulating it. Unchecked, it devours everything. Unlike religion or democracy, it doesn’t hide its hunger in virtue.

So what have we become? A divided, self-consuming empire, addicted to its own myths. Free, but using that freedom to entrench division. Powerful, but wasting that power on tribal feuds. Privileged, but blind to our own decay. And through it all, we chant: we’re still the greatest.

No one pulls the brake. No one dares question the Founders. Suggest the system is broken and you’re branded a traitor. We will go down fighting for God, for democracy, for freedom—even if we can’t define what those words mean.

And I—what of me? I no longer side with Republicans or Democrats. I can’t pretend with Christians or atheists. I have no interest in friendships where truth is off-limits. I used to resent the blindness. Now I understand: this is the human condition. Dead enders, all of us. Fossilized by childhood, armed with certainty, immune to change.

But here’s the difference: I see it. I name it.

And there is a way forward. Hope lies with the young. They’re not yet calcified. The majority of them already reject democracy—not out of ignorance, but disillusionment. They see the flaws more clearly than we did. If we let them question everything—if we stop indoctrinating them—they might build what we could not: something new.

So I say to you—my friend, my family, my fellow citizen—you are a dead ender.

But you don’t have to stay one.

The rest is up to you.

- Not One of US