Cosmology of Hate: The Black Hole Model of American Collapse

How narcissism, sadism, and nihilism form a closed system from which nothing escapes.

As the United States careens toward a recession or worse, the one commodity we have in abundance is hate, which has become normalized and weaponized by the Trump regime. While hate is nothing new, there has never been an American president who has used the kind of rhetoric we’re hearing now—much less one that has taken this kind of hateful action.

Where does this new infusion of hate come from? And how has it captured the American people so completely?

Three-Layer System of Hate: Self → Other → World

Hate is not a singular concept. There are numerous names for it, and many forms of it. But in my view there are three basic kinds of hate: hatred of self; hatred of the other; and hatred of the world.

• Narcissism is usually thought of as self-love, but it is often, if not always, based in self-hate. The grandiosity of the narcissist is usually compensation for equally grand insecurities. Simplistically speaking, narcissism is hatred of the self.

• Sadism is pleasure in others’ pain, but it is almost always animated by a scapegoat. In simple terms, sadism is hatred of the other.

• Nihilism is the desire to destroy, or to simply not exist at all. Nihilism is hatred of the world.

Few thinkers understood the psychology of authoritarianism better than Erich Fromm (1900-1980), a German Jew who escaped the Nazis in 1934 and spent his life tracing how the individual’s disordered need for control metastasizes into collective hatred and destruction.

Fromm’s later work invoked a similar triad to what I’m proposing: narcissism, sadism, and necrophilia—which he saw as the three primary orientations of “malignant destructiveness.”

In The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (1964) and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), Fromm redefined narcissism not as self-love but as a pathological withdrawal into the self-image. Fromm noted that the narcissist cannot see the world as it is, because it is only valued insofar as it reflects the ego. Fromm saw narcissism as a form of self-idolatry that can infect whole societies when they lose their ability to reality-test and project their inner emptiness onto “inferiors” or scapegoats. In short, this is self-hate made divine.

Sadism, according to Fromm, grows out of narcissism. When the false self cannot maintain omnipotence internally, it seeks control through others: “the passion to have absolute control over a living being.” Fromm saw sadism as the psychological engine of authoritarianism: submission to a higher power, and dominance of those beneath. Sadism is a cycle of brutality.

Finally, for Fromm, he redefined necrophilia as not just a sexual perversion, but more broadly as “a love of death and decay”—an attraction to things that never resist: corpses, machines, and rigid systems.

“The necrophilous person loves all that does not grow, all that is mechanical. The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic.”

— The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973)

What Fromm called necrophilia—the love of death and the mechanical—is what we now call nihilism: hatred of the world itself, the wish to turn the living world into code.

Each of these hatreds feeds the next: self-hate fuels hatred of others, which confirms the world’s worthlessness.

Brief Astrophysics Refresher

At the center of a black hole is a singularity, a single point in space-time with gravity so intense nothing can ever escape. At its boundary is the event horizon—the last observable step before oblivion. And surrounding this system is dark matter, an invisible force that gives the universe structure.

Just as gravity provides the invisible architecture of the universe, hate has become the underlying substrate of American politics.

System of Annihilation

For me, this is a powerful metaphor for America‘s psycho-political scenario. It looks like this:

• Narcissism → Self-hate → Singularity

• Sadism → Hatred of the other → Event Horizon

• Nihilism → Hatred of the world → Dark Matter

Together, these form a closed system of annihilation—a political singularity from which light, law, and life cannot escape.

At its center lies a narcissism so powerful that nothing can ever leave it: Donald Trump’s psyche is the black hole eating America. This is replacing the East Wing with a golden phallus, filling his Cabinet with incompetent loyalists, and grifting billions of dollars as president. While he is undoubtedly a sadist, his motivations are almost entirely about his self-image.

Core Collapse: Trump’s Detonation Is Inevitable

Surrounding this singularity of narcissism is a violent event horizon where the infinite blackness of Trump’s personality combusts objective reality. This is the sadism of Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and countless others who see Trump’s personality as a tool for acting out their own sadism. This is the cruelty of ICE, blowing up Venezuelan fishing boats, and letting 15 million people die from cutting emergency food and PEPFAR.

Just as dark matter provides the substrate in which a black hole can exist, nihilism is the dark force that gives permission to the authoritarian mindset. It is the mechanized, Palantir-run surveillance state that sees humanity as the “biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence.” It is Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Curtis Yarvin, and JD Vance. It is the accelerated heat-death of the universe.

The self-hate of Donald Trump creates the gravity well that gives people like Stephen Miller the ability to act out his hatred of others at the event horizon—all enabled by those who hate the world.

In short, the system is: Trump → Miller → Palantir.

How It Manifests

Asked about his serial murder of people on small boats in the Caribbean—43 people have been extrajudicially executed—and whether he’s going to ask Congress for a declaration of war on Venezuela, Trump said:

“Well, I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people who are bringing drugs into our country, ok? We’re gonna kill them. You know, they‘re gonna be like, dead.”

Trump is the black hole where everything ultimately dies.

At the event horizon, we see the sadism of Stephen Miller acted out more and more violently on the streets of the U.S.—to pull more and more people into the black maw of the Trump regime. In this video, the night manager of The Laugh Factory in Chicago is arrested after defending a worker who was kidnapped by ICE. His elderly mother was tackled as he was arrested and abducted into a minivan.

This scene bears no resemblance to the America I was born into. It bears no resemblance to the democratic republic the founders imagined. It is violence born of our own failure to protect liberty; it is the tiki torch lighting the way into the dark.

Stephen Miller, the architect of this organized domestic terrorism, throws kerosene on the fire by falsely claiming that ICE officers have “federal immunity in the conduct of your duties” and threatening JB Pritzker with arrest. This is the sadism exploding into violence on the event horizon of American cities.

The nihilism that pervades the system, that keeps it intact and inexorably headed to annihilation, is perfectly demonstrated by the AI-enabled surveillance state provided by Peter Thiel’s Palantir.

Here is how it works in action. ICE officers chase down high school students and demand their papers. When a 16-year-old boy doesn’t produce them, the camouflaged, masked agents “do facial” recognition to determine if he’s a citizen.

In the second Trump regime, this nihilism has spread far and wide: Apple, Google, and Meta are lining up alongside Palantir to fund Trump’s golden ballroom and expansion of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) which was formerly beneath the now-flattened East Wing.

The nihilism of corporate America, its willingness to simply go along to stay profitable, regardless of the human consequences, is one of the most important revelations from this catastrophe.

Hate Is Not Infinite

The primary motivation of the Trump regime is to ensure it never ends. As a close observer and documentarian of January 6th, there has never been a question in my mind that if Trump got power again, he would never relinquish it.

Alt-right hate merchant Steve Bannon, who shines brightly on the event horizon of Trump’s narcissism, told the Economist that Trump will find a way to violate the 22nd Amendment and serve a third term:

“We have to finish what we started. Trump is a vehicle… He’s a vehicle of divine providence. He’s an instrument of divine will… We need him for at least one more term.”

Bannon’s exhortations to keep Trump in power past a second term are arguably criminal—a Conspiracy against rights—a plan to break the supreme law of the land, the Constitution, and disenfranchise voters.

But what Bannon, Trump, and so many of their followers are really expressing is fear. Hate is born of fear; fear generates hate. Fear is not strength; it is weakness.

Fear Hole

While I wish I could provide a rosy diagnosis, there is no way out of this scenario by the normative means of American politics. This black hole of hate has captured all three branches of the U.S. federal government.

But, and forgive me for a trite but relevant statement: love is stronger than hate; and empathy is stronger than fear. The proof of this is all around us. It’s every parent who spends a life raising a child. It’s every doctor, teacher, and volunteer. It’s every smile to a stranger.

Hatred is destruction, a poison exuding from the inside out. We’ve all felt it, but it’s usually transient: a limited period of time when we had an outsized negative emotion toward another—or others. But when this emotion is unregulated by normal psychology, the only logical end point is death.

That’s why it’s so destructive, and so abnormal to have people like Trump, Miller, and Thiel running the show. They represent hatred of the self, hatred of the other, and hatred of the world all working together to create a single system of control.

We’ve seen this before. It never lasts, and ultimately it never wins. But it’s still up to us to determine how much damage it does before it falls apart.

In black hole astrophysics, there is a small leak in the system, called Hawking radiation—which means that ultimately, despite their reputation as infinite, black holes, like hate, always disappear.

Every act of resistance, love, and empathy is light escaping the event horizon.

“Evil is the refusal to see the humanity in others.”

— Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man (1964)

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