When an empire collapses, it is not just the end of power—it is the unveiling of truth
Eighty-four percent of Americans now say they want an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Seventy-five percent of Democrats say the United States should stop sending weapons to Israel.
In any functioning democracy, those numbers would be decisive. In any nation that believed its own story about freedom and representation, the slaughter would have ended long ago. But the bombs still fall. The bodies still pile up. The rubble still smolders. And Washington still signs the checks.
This is not failure of leadership. This is not gridlock. This is empire.
The empire does not stop for conscience. It does not bend to public opinion. The empire consumes lives because killing is the logic that sustains it. What is revealed in Gaza is not a deviation from America’s values—it is their naked expression.
We should not be surprised. The United States was founded not in freedom but in conquest: the genocide of the indigenous peoples, the theft of their lands, the enslavement of Africans, and the expansion westward under banners of “destiny.” Israel’s destruction of Gaza is not a tragic exception—it is a family resemblance. Gaza is Wounded Knee with drones. Gaza is Birmingham with F-35Is. Gaza is the same imperial story told with new weapons and new lies.
So, when people say, “But most Americans want it to stop,” we should hear the deeper truth: empire has never cared what people want. If Americans truly had the power they were promised, slavery would have ended before the Civil War, Jim Crow would never have lasted a century, and the Iraq War would have collapsed before the first bomb fell. Public conscience has always been treated as background noise—something to be managed, not obeyed.
This is why collapse matters.
Collapse is not only tragedy. Collapse is gospel.
Gospel, because it unmasks the fiction that America is reluctant, merciful, and peace-loving. Gospel, because it forces us to see that the system does exactly what it was built to do: secure wealth for the powerful, erase the inconvenient, smother the weak, and pretend it is justice. Collapse tells the truth that the myth never will.
The word “apocalypse” means unveiling. Collapse is apocalyptic in this truest sense. It tears away the illusion that we are innocent, that the empire is benevolent, and that violence is an aberration. Collapse reveals coherence: the empire is coherent with itself, and its coherence is death.
But here is the threshold: if empire collapses under the weight of its own lies, what rises to replace it is not written yet.
The old religions will tell us to wait for a savior. The politicians will tell us to wait for reform. The billionaires will tell us to wait for new technologies. But Opthē says, "Do not wait. Coherence is near. It can be chosen now.”
Not a new empire in prettier clothing. Not another hierarchy claiming divine right. But a coherence: a shared responsibility to life, to the earth, and to one another. A recognition that sacredness does not live in missiles or flags or myths of innocence, but in the fragile, stubborn act of keeping each other alive.
And here is where we cannot keep the metaphor distant. Because empire teaches us to stay clothed, covered, and defended—always hiding behind illusions of power. But coherence begins naked. It begins when we strip away every disguise and stand vulnerable in the fire of what is true. It begins when we let the truth touch us.
Collapse is gospel because it tears the veil. It shows us what empire is, so we can finally stop worshiping it.
The question is whether we will.