The myth is the machine

Real freedom doesn't come from loyalty to broken stories. It starts after they collapse.

I don't believe in magic I don't believe in I-ching I don't believe in Bible I don't believe in Tarot I don't believe in Hitler I don't believe in Jesus I don't believe in Kennedy I don't believe in Buddha I don't believe in Mantra I don't believe in Gita I don't believe in Yoga I don't believe in Kings I don't believe in Elvis I don't believe in Zimmerman I don't believe in the Beatles

I just believe in me, Yoko, and me, that's reality

-John Lennon

I was indoctrinated twice. Once by religion. Once by nation.

Mormonism and Americanism sold me the same story. Both told me I was chosen, blessed to be born in Provo, Utah, USA. The modern motherfuckin’ promised land, Sister Butler, dontcha know?

Both promised salvation in exchange for obedience and loyalty. But I see it now: The myth is the machine, the story is the spell and belief is the leash that can eventually become the noose.

Mormonism promised eternal families and divine purpose. America promised liberty and justice for all. But both were built on exclusion, hierarchy, and control. Stories designed to sustain a very specific kind of power. They asked for my loyalty in return for the safety of my body and soul, demanding reverence and calling it faith and patriotism.

It’s no accident that the mechanisms behind the religion of my childhood mirrored the country I was raised to revere. Both taught me that loyalty mattered more than truth and made questioning their dogma feel like sin or treason.

Despite the supposed separation of church and state, the state has always used the church as a weapon. The church, in turn, aids and abets the collusion by publicly blessing policy in the name of morality, cloaking power in righteousness.

Prayers open political gatherings. The Ten Commandments hang in schools and courthouses. Republican lawmakers in multiple states are pushing bills to bring prayer, Bible readings, and religious chaplains into public school classrooms. The Pledge of Allegiance is a barely disguised prayer to America, recited by the very youngest and most vulnerable with hand over heart like a sacrament. Mormon bishops urge members to support laws oppressing homosexuality.

Religion and nationalism prop each other up like partners in crime. Religion makes the story feel morally righteous and noble. Nationalism makes it enforceable. Moral motivation absolves the enforcement, no matter how extreme. Together, they keep the myth intact, one polishing the front door while the other locks it and swallows the key.

But when a reality TV mogul with a lifetime of public godlessness can stand at a podium invoking the white, Christian God like a pastor or suggest he could replace the pope, the truth becomes impossible to ignore. It’s not about belief and it never was. It’s about control. And suddenly, the machinery isn’t hidden. It’s right there onstage, a snake-oil salesman speaking in scripture while hocking his evil cult of personality.

This is the one true church on Earth.
This is the greatest country on Earth.

Faith and country, selling salvation for the price of obedience. Different bottles, same poison. One sold as heaven, the other as freedom.

What is patriotism if not a prayer with a gun in its hand?

What is nationalism if not a religion where the god is power?

What is myth, if not a soft name for control?

The boy prophet my people revere like Jesus Christ himself rewrote American history with his magical rock translations. He claimed Jesus visited the Americas, that this land was consecrated. The scriptural additions he made into his Book of Mormon stitched theology into the forefathers’ exclusionary American exceptionalism and taught me that questioning the origin story of either meant I was disloyal to both.

A doubleshot of hot and frothy patriarchal control mainlined straight into my tender blue veins from the moment of my birth in the once wild and free frontier land ultimately colonized by Brigham Young; pledging allegiance and praying daily before I could tie my own shoes. Born into a lineage that still recites the boy-prophet’s visions like holy scripture, mythologizing those silly stories into legend until questioning them felt like betrayal of something ancient and sacred.

But myths crack, and once you see daylight leaking through, you can't go back to praying in the dark of night.

In my twenties, when the whitewashed fairytales of forever families and eternal salvation began to buckle under the weight of hypocrisy and contradiction, I asked a real question. And another. And then another until the whole world I'd been handed imploded. It wasn’t just the doctrine that crumbled, it was the scaffolding of my entire existence.

When I began to question the religion of my childhood, I wasn’t just walking away from a church. I lost the version of myself who existed inside that story for decades.

If the story isn’t true, who are you without it?

If the cosmic courtroom was a lie, what does it mean to live a life without a verdict waiting at the end? Do souls even exist, or are we just meat sacks pretending we’re something more? (Yes.) What Is all the suffering for, if no one is keeping score? Was it just a story to keep us obedient? (Yes.)

There are no clean breakups with belief. There’s only the slow, savage untethering. The loosened ends of a rope fraying until SNAP! The dream is over.

Years later, I recognize that same rupture playing out at a national scale. So this thing so many Americans are experiencing now? The disorienting collapse of a country? A collective identity? Your identity? The marketing masterpiece? It is uniquely familiar.

The stories we were told about America, about freedom, fairness, and greatness were never universally true but they were marketed as if they were. The nostalgia so many cling to isn’t memory. It’s branding. And like all good branding, it relies on selective storytelling. It sells a past that only existed for a privileged few and asks the rest of us to shut up and be grateful for the illusion.

Nostalgia isn’t just a personal hazard, it’s a clever political strategy. An American dream that, for centuries, has been packaged, sold locally and exported around the world like gospel to anyone desperate enough to believe it. A weapon disguised as Fourth of July parades draped in flags you must stand for and bagpipes that summon tears from men who never cry, a baseball diamond, a church steeple against a perfect blue sky, Saturday morning ballgames and lemonade stands in front of white picket fences. Support the troops. Thank you for your service. A carefully curated memory of a country that only ever existed for the few who controlled the narrative.

Make America great again! That’s the reality star messiah’s battle cry.
Great like it used to be, when "freedom" was a pretty story those in power could tell while others bled for it. When public lynchings were community events and "separate but equal" was a national lie. When Indigenous children were stolen from their families in the name of "civilization," and gay people risked everything just to exist. When women were locked away for being too loud, too sad, too alive or bled out in alleyways after being denied the right to their own bodies.

When freedom rang, but only for the ones holding the bell.

My disillusionment with Mormonism taught me how myths work. They don’t just shape what we think. They shape how we feel, who we are, who we want to be and how we want to be seen. The myth isn’t just a belief. It’s a system. Lived. Felt. Worn every day like a favorite t-shirt. Like a red baseball cap with white lettering. #mythmerch

This isn’t accidental. It’s the infrastructure of control.

I know what it feels like to fall in love with an idea. There was a little chocolate shop in the town I moved to after my divorce. I never actually went inside, never bought a single piece of candy. But I loved knowing it was there—the old brick building, the hand-painted sign, the ivy curling into the cracks. It made me feel like I lived in a world that still cared about quiet, beautiful things. Where people still hand-whipped marshmallows and set out chairs for neighbors passing by.

When the shop closed, I felt a real pang, but not because I missed the chocolate. I missed the idea of the chocolate. I missed the story I had built around its existence, the fantasy of what it meant about me, about my life, about the world I wanted to belong to. It wasn’t about what was inside the shop, it was about the meaning I assigned to its presence. It made my life feel closer to something soft, innocent and comforting. Something worth believing in.

That’s what nostalgia does. Not just in tiny towns, but across whole countries. It sells us the idea of a thing we never actually had. It polishes myth into memory and stitches longing into loyalty.

Make America ‘great’ again.

Except ‘the good ol’ days’ aren’t real; they’re chocolate shops we never stepped inside. Slogans for things that only existed if you didn’t look too closely. Promises America built its identity around because we wanted so badly to believe the world could be that simple, safe and good. We needed the forefathers to be superheroes even though they were only human men, with human fears, building systems that enshrined inequality and calling it freedom.

The same spell that kept me clinging to Mormonism: the desperate need to believe there’s a plan, I just need to follow the map the good men laid out for us in scripture and parchment. The fairytale is real if I am as virtuous as a Disney princess.

But it's not real. It’s marketing.

The reality star messiah didn’t hijack America; he tore the curtain off the stage and showed us what was always waiting in the wings: supremacy in a star-spangled jacket. Trump is a modern-day Uncle Sam. Weaponized nostalgia. Violence dressed as virtue. Those old fairytales of small towns and “family values,” leveraged like an Instagram filter over the enslavement of millions, segregation, Jim Crow, voter suppression and the oppression of women.

Men and now women, too, building empires from pulpits and senate floors, sermons and legislation tangled together like weed roots in poisoned soil despite every parchment that once promised separation of church and state. Greedy men and women still playing their ancient game of thrones, scrambling for crowns while sacrificing the very people they swore to protect.

"Americans," as a national identity, was never a real people. It was a brand stitched together by memory lapses and marketing slogans, sold back to us under the glow of fireworks and polyester flags. A machine that preached bootstraps while rigging the ground beneath those feet. The reality star messiah didn’t invent the game. He just gave it a never-ending stadium tour, casting himself as circus ringleader.

Though I have never been comfortable pledging allegiance, I can understand why so many still reach for the story. But I can't stay loyal to a myth that was never meant for everyone.

Others are starting to see it too. Like Dorothy pulling back the curtain and learning the wizard's true identity, the illusion is becoming harder to sustain. The flags are still waving, but their spell is weakening and now we’re left asking the same questions in different voices: Do we try to take the country back? Make America great (for the first time)? Do we burn the map?

So we scroll, rage-share, meme and post essays like this one. We scream into algorithmic voids, not because we’re stupid, but because the silence of doing nothing feels too much like giving in. The media lays out new outrage breadcrumbs every hour, every minute, every second everywhere all the time and, like Hansel and Gretel, we follow the path deeper into the forest, still believing it will lead us home.

But we are deeply lost. We are a country tearing apart at the seams. Numbed by mass shootings. Outrageous headlines piling up around us like the bills nobody can afford.
Shattered reality keeps us riding the political merry-go-round, arguing over the rules of a game we can’t even speak the same language to play.

Small talk with colleagues and strangers feels like a coded exchange; reading between the words, waiting for the signal to breathe or brace. Talking to family and friends feels like defusing a bomb you can't see. We are drowning in anger too shapeless to carry, a fear too big to name and we are afraid to hope because anymore, hope feels like a setup.

When the most rational news coverage is Weekend Update on SNL, it’s not funny, it’s an alarm bell. When satire is more reasonable than allegedly legitimate journalism, the machine is in motion.

What follows is heartbreak. Overload. Anxiety. Grief. And often, numbness. We lose our ability to think clearly because we’re stuck in survival mode, not by choice, but by design.

Your nervous system wasn’t built for push alerts, endless headlines, algorithmic panic loops, and dueling opinion pieces your brain starts to absorb as truth while slowly short-circuiting. It was built for presence. For real danger, followed by real rest.

FOMO, doomscrolling, and the constant pressure to stay informed create the illusion of responsibility but mostly they just keep you locked in a cycle of outrage and powerlessness.

And the cost?

You stop noticing what’s actually good. You miss beauty, softness and the incredible human moments happening right in front of you because your system is stuck scanning for threat and fearing the future. But beauty and softness are not distractions, they’re fuel. They’re the emotional infrastructure we need to build a world rooted in love, compassion and justice that truly includes everyone. These aren’t luxuries. They’re survival strategies for a future worth fighting for.

This is the line I’m trying to hold: stay informed without being consumed. Care without burning out because concern doesn’t require collapse.

The question I keep circling back to is this: What beauty will I miss if I’m stuck in outrage? What am I slowly losing myself to if I continue to follow the bread crumbs? If your clarity, your peace, your presence is eroding then pull back. Honestly, it might be your only way out. Shit, it might be OUR only way out.

Overconsumption of news doesn’t sharpen awareness, it saturates it. Paying too much attention doesn’t necessarily bring clarity; it often quietly distorts it. The distortion creeps in disguised as vigilance. QAnon energy in a liberal outfit. Different aesthetic, same confusion machine. Stories designed to keep you spiraling instead of really seeing.

This isn’t a call to disengage. It’s a call to pay attention to what the machine is costing you, not just politically, but personally. Because refusing to live in constant outrage isn’t apathy. It’s strategy.

Empires are built to fall. Systems collapse. But if you’re too fried to see clearly, you’ll miss the moment the path forward opens. And you’ll follow the loudest voice, not the truest one. There’s a difference between being informed and being emotionally waterboarded by the news cycle. The headlines will still be there tomorrow, like your laundry, but dirtier.

Endless online outrage, screaming across dinner tables, rage-posting into the void… None of it is moving us anywhere. It’s just feeding the system we say we want to dismantle. There’s nothing holy about burnout just because it’s dressed in civic duty.

I don't want to drown in headlines the way my ancestors drowned in scriptures and lost the plot of what goodness and compassion really mean.

I also don't want a country that worships its own reflection and calls it freedom while enforcing a relentless empire of belief that demands blind allegiance in exchange for selective memory. I’m not even sure this country is worth fighting for anymore. Dreams are worth fighting for when they lift everyone, not when their entire history is built around grinding millions at home and abroad into the dirt to maintain supremacy.

Saying that out loud, writing it here, scares me in the same way it terrified me the first time I admitted I no longer believed in the Mormon church. When I finally realized apostate wasn’t just a word for other ‘bad’ people. It was a word describing me.

There’s a special kind of fear that comes from rejecting the only story you've ever been allowed to live inside. But I’m starting to believe maybe that’s where real freedom begins. Not in finding a better myth to replace the broken one or polishing the old story until it gleams like the rhinestones on the reality star messiah's star-spangled jacket.

Oh, but rhinestones are so sparkly! Blinding, even.

Real freedom isn’t myth or ceremony. It’s not a pledge of allegiance or the Star-Spangled Banner and it doesn’t start with a flag or a parade. It begins in the wreckage. Freedom begins the moment you refuse to let the systems that tried to erase you define your worth. Choose not to play the game on their terms in whatever way you can. Not all resistance is loud.

When I left the church, I thought freedom would feel like certainty. It didn’t. It felt like ruin. Like standing barefoot outside the only home you’ve ever known with nothing but your own clarity. But eventually, I learned that’s where freedom lives. Not in the overly filtered myth, but in what you choose to build after it burns.

No script or scripture. Just the stubborn desire to reach the full potential of what humanity could be. What so many Americans dreamed the forefathers meant when they said, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union," even though millions of others always knew better.

Mormonism sold me virtue in one hand and shame in the other and called it salvation. America does the same, stitching promises into the flag like sutures over a wound it refuses to clean. Survival isn’t about waking up smiling, it’s about refusing to pledge allegiance when they hand you a pretty new myth all polished up for sale. It’s about standing barefoot in the ruins, calling it what it is.

The dream is over
What can I say?
The dream is over
Yesterday
I was the dreamweaver
But now I'm reborn
I was the walrus
But now I'm John
And so, dear friends
You'll just have to carry on
The dream is over

-John Lennon

Some stay in the fire, calling power to account with every breath. Others step out of the noise to protect clarity in a system that survives on distraction and distortion. Both are resistance. Both are refusal.

For me, because of the religious conditioning, the real heresy will always be to step outside the temple and set it on fire. To refuse both the altar and the battlefield. Some things don’t deserve rebuilding; they deserve to burn. I’m not here to rewrite the story or fix the myth. I’m here to outlive it and build something new.

The machine runs on belief. Refusing to give it yours is the most radical thing you can do.

I see you. I name you. And I will not kneel.

No map. No myth.

Just horizon. And endless possibility.