Entry IX of the Truth-Seeking Series
— On False Promises, Broken Narratives, and the Collapse of What Was Never True
Illusions are easy to live with.
They’re warm. Convenient.
They let us believe the story is simpler than it really is.
America has been built on many of them.
The illusion of justice for all.
The illusion of endless growth.
The illusion that leaders serve the people.
The illusion that if we work hard enough, truth will naturally rise to the top.
But illusions have an expiration date.
They hold only as long as we agree to play along.
And something in the collective is refusing now.
The Masks Cracking
Illusions have an expiration date. They hold only as long as we agree to play along.
Look around:
The institutions we were told to trust are crumbling under their own hypocrisy.
The media, once presented as a watchdog, is now exposed as a stagehand.
The politicians who claim to protect democracy do so while tightening their own grip on power.
Even churches and schools are not immune — once sanctuaries of meaning, now battlegrounds of ideology.
The masks are slipping.
The public is noticing.
And the age of illusions is ending.
The Panic of the Powerful
When illusions fall, those who profited from them panic.
They double down on propaganda.
They invent new distractions.
They rewrite history in real time.
But it doesn’t work forever.
Because once you see the strings,
you can’t believe in the puppet show anymore.
And this is what terrifies the powerful:
not the chaos,
not even the collapse,
but the moment the people stop believing their story.
The Birth of Vision
The end of illusions is not the end of hope.
It’s the beginning of vision.
For the first time in generations,
we have the chance to see things as they are —
without polish, without spin, without the veil.
That clarity is painful.
But it’s also fertile.
Because you can’t plant the future in a bed of lies.
The soil has to be cleared.
And that’s what the end of illusions gives us:
bare ground.
The Responsibility of Truth-Seekers
In this moment, truth-seekers must resist two temptations:
To despair, believing there’s nothing left when illusions die. To gloat, believing we alone were immune to them.
Neither helps.
Our work is to name the illusions clearly,
to grieve them honestly,
and then to point toward what can be built in their absence.
Because this is not just the age of illusions ending —
it is the age of truth beginning.
If we dare.
I feel this tearing every day — the illusions slipping, the truth standing bare.
It is unsettling, sometimes unbearable.
And yet, I know this is what we came here for.
We were not born to decorate illusions.
We were born to watch them fall,
and to begin again in what’s real.
Hellènic Muse 