End Times Hunger Games: The Mythological Battle Raging Below the War on Iran

How five distinct visions of the apocalypse conspire to create endless war.

Eschatology

“Some of this weaponry is unthinkable. You don’t even want to know about it. Oh, you could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to.”
—Donald Trump with the PM of Japan, 3/19/26

The study of human events, including seemingly incomprehensible actions like Trump going to war with Iran, is largely about motivations. In order to form useful models of complex relationships and behaviors, you must look the participants’ vested interests: What is their goal? What is the end state they envision?

Eschatology is the study of beliefs about the final state of the world and humanity. While it generally focuses on religious apocalyptic doctrine, it can be also used as a window into the psychological foundations for much of human behavior, especially at the extremes.

eschatology: the part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind.

Donald Trump’s seemingly impulsive, unplanned attack on Iran was the end result of a long, persistent campaign by many around him. The underlying currents that caused Trump to begin his war were his extensive personal pathologies combined with pressure from those who benefit politically and economically—and from those who see it as a fulfillment of prophecy.

This matters a lot because people motivated by eschatology are generally immune to other arguments. Unshakable beliefs about the final fate of humanity are definitionally mythological, and most are overtly supernatural. Eschatology provides a “meaning of life” to believers that sits psychologically deeper than every other socio-cultural structure—and can provide a strong foothold to extremism and violence.

Clash of the Messiahs

The war in Iran can be seen as a clash of five major categories of eschatology, each with different variations: Islam, Jewish Zionism, Christian Zionism, Technological Accelerationism, and Trump’s malignant narcissism.

• Islam

  • Iran’s Twelver Shi’ism is the majority form of Shia Islam which teaches that there is a “Hidden Imam” who lives in occultation right now, a messiah who will return as “the Mahdi”—along with his ally Jesus. Before the Ayatollah Khomeini, a formal government was seen by Twelvers as heretical, but Khomeini’s doctrine of velayat-e faqih changed that to accommodate his rise to power. Under the Islamic Republic, the senior jurist rules during the Imam’s hiding as the Imam’s representative. Most of Iran’s proxies, like Hezbollah, are also Shia—with the exception of Hamas which is Sunni.

    

    Iranian state propaganda

  • Sunni Islam—the largest form of Islam which is practiced by monarchical Islamist nations like UAE, Saudi (Wahhabism), and Qatar which reject the idea of a divine hidden authority. These regimes see populist revolutionary Shia as dangerous to their dynasties, which partially explains why Sunni regimes are largely aligning with Israel and the Trump regime over Iran in the war. Extremist forms of Sunni Islam include ISIS and al Qaeda, both of which emphasize apocalyptic, messianic versions of Islam.

• Jewish Zionism

  • Orthodox messianic Zionism—Bibi Netanyahu is aligned with right-wing orthodox Judaism which is distinctly messianic and shares a partial vision with its Christian counterpart: the rebuilding of the Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem, which is currently occupied by the Al-Aqsa mosque. Netanyahu himself frequently uses apocalyptic religious formulations and eliminationist terms like “Amalek” and staffs his government with messianic extremists like Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir.

    

    Smotrich, Ben Gvir

  • Chabad-Lubavitch is a global orthodox Hasidic movement that emphasizes outreach to Jews to bring them closer to what Chabad sees as core beliefs of Judaism, which include a focus on hastening the return of the messiah or Mosaich—as well as rebuilding the Temple Mount. Many Chabad adherents believe we are already in the End Times and the Mosaich was actually the man who transformed Chabad into a powerful political tool through the 20th century, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. Jared Kushner’s family and Ivanka are deeply connected with Chabad, and Trump has both privately donated to it and recently made official White House decrees to honor Chabad and Schneerson. This follows in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan.

    

    Chabad official photo, Rebbe Schneerson

• Evangelical Christianity

  • Dispensationalism—Contrary to popular understanding, the apocalyptic version of Christian eschatology (the Rapture, Armageddon, Left Behind) that we’ve culturally assimilated is new to the religion in historic terms. The violent prophetic interpretation of Revelations and the Millennium in the Bible, along with the elevation of Israel to a starring role in the upcoming Final Battle, was invented in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby. It was Darby’s special role for Israel in the sequencing of the End Times, including the reconstruction of the Temple Mount, that led to much of the mythology behind evangelical Christianity—and the overwhelming support for Israel among its believers.

    

    John Nelson Darby; dispensationalist chart

  • Christian Zionism is the strange bedfellow of Jewish Zionism in that it also sees the formation of Israel in 1948 as the sign of the beginning of the End Times—and seeks to hasten its progression. There is a heavy overlap between dispensationalists, who make up a healthy minority of Christianity, and Christian Zionists, who focus intently on ensuring that Israel can fulfill its role in the end of the world. Pete Hegseth and his racist, misogynist pastor Doug Wilson fall into the this category.

• Technological Accelerationism

  • The Dark Enlightenment is a brand name for a worldview formed in the bowels of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk’s takeover of Silicon Valley which merges a desire to accelerate technological advances as fast as possible—regardless of the consequences—with white supremacist “scientific racism.” It sees the human race as a messy requirement of running a business, seeks to purify the gene pool for the benefit of future populations, and is in the process of trying to create its own Armageddon: to delete democracy in favor of a web of feudalist fiefdoms ruled by billionaire CEOs aka “the Network State.”
    

    Delete Yourself: The Metaphysics of the Dark Enlightenment

  • Transhumanism is a movement based in the belief that humans can transcend their bodies, either through augmentation or “uploading” to take on a digital (and theoretically immortal) existence. This relates to an explicitly eschatological feature of broligarch techno-fascist mythology—the Singularity—the conviction that the world is accelerating towards a moment when computer intelligence outpaces humans and begins to build its own even smarter intelligences, and so on, exponentially. Elon Musk has repeatedly said we are already in the Singularity, and said last year “humans are a biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence”—meaning that after the Singularity, humans will no longer be needed.

    

    Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; transhumanist

• Malignant Narcissism / MAGA

  • Donald Trump is not a believer in a higher power. As a messianic malignant narcissist, such an admission would be anathema to his essential being. His psychology requires that he constantly seek to dominate those around him, especially when his ego—his self-image in the eyes of others—is threatened. Trump’s eschatology is built into his own degenerating brain circuitry. He is wired to see any injury to his ego as nothing short of annihilation. His apocalypse is always chasing him. But his evident terror over the Epstein revelations and the extraordinary lengths he’s gone to distract from them, shows that he sees the Epstein files as nothing short of his personal Armageddon.

  • Much of MAGA has been trained through propaganda to believe that Donald Trump is some version of the Second Coming—or at the very least anointed by God to bring on the End Times. He has actively cultivated his image as both a martyr and a savior to his followers, many of whom see Jesus as a distant second to an immoral, demented man who has no idea what Jesus taught. Nevertheless, Trump’s fate has been psychologically welded to his followers’ through the media.

All of these existential belief systems share one common gene: they provide a psychological bridge to conquest and violence. In the real world, of course, there are separate currents that mix and merge with eschatological beliefs. There are always personal, financial, political, and nationalist motivations which may or may not be perfectly aligned with how one sees the end state of the world. This can, as in the case of the war on Iran, create strange, if temporary, bedfellows.

End Times Hunger Games

In the U.S., the rise of the Christian Nationalist right that propelled Donald Trump has been fueled in large part by Christian Zionism, the conviction that prophecies about Israel—including rebuilding the Temple Mount—must be fulfilled in order to bring about the return of Jesus Christ. This eschatology has aligned with Jewish Zionism, which shares much of the same prophecy. And Iran’s official state religion, Twelver Shi’ism, also sees a return of Christ to Israel, in a different role.

This belief that the war on Iran is part of divine prophecy is being repeated loudly across the Christian Nationalist echo-sphere.

But all of these beliefs have very different endings. It’s like a version of Hunger Games, where your alliances are transient by definition because everyone knows underneath there can be only one left standing in the final chapter. This tension is what makes for good beach reading in a fantasy book, and for never-ending war in the real world.

“Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?” —Donald Trump to the PM of Japan 3/19/26

In a briefing at the Pentagon on Thursday morning, “War Secretary” Pete Hegseth, without a trace of irony, warned about the apocalyptic eschatology of Iran’s religion.

“Their core industries are state sponsored terrorism, proxy militias, underground networks, ballistic missiles, and a violent messianic islamist ideology chasing some sort of apocalyptic endgame.”
—“War Secretary” Pete Hegseth, Pentagon 3/19/26

A few minutes later, Hegseth ended his appearance with an unconstitutional request that all Americans pray for the troops “in the name of Jesus Christ”—referring to Hegseth’s own apocalyptic endgame.

“May almighty God continue to bless our troops in this fight. To the American people, please pray for them every day on bended knee with your family, in your schools, in your churches, in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Donald Trump has never been religious because he sees himself as the messiah—and the martyr—in every scenario. The biblical eschatologies of Hegseth, Netanyahu, and Iran’s leadership are totally foreign to Trump which, needless to say, has created a highly volatile and unpredictable scenario. When the people calling the shots have no understanding of the motivations of their opponents, you get a quagmire—at best.

Military-Industrial-Eschatological Complex

After Trump floated the idea of using a nuke in Iran, and brought up Pearl Harbor with the Prime Minister of Japan on Thursday, there was an official state dinner for her in the White House. On the guest list were two of Peter Thiel’s Dark Enlightenment graduates: Palmer Lucky of military drone manufacturer Anduril, and Alex Karp, CEO of surveillance monster Palantir—presumably to sell their wares to Japan.

Trump Dinner with Japan PM; Alex Karp & Peter Thiel; Palmer Luckey

In the end, the only people who benefit from the kind of rotating war of attrition we see in the Middle East are corrupt leaders like Trump and Bibi Netanyahu, and the military-industrial complex typified by companies like Anduril and Palantir—exactly what Eisenhower warned about 65 years ago:

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.

We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”

The military-industrial complex has not just created undue influence over the government, it has created its own religion, its own eschatological formulation for the end state of the world which is the most extreme of all:

God is not just in the machine. God is the machine. Humans are disposable tools of the machine. And for those who don’t comply, humans are the target of the machine.

The “proper meshing” of the war machine has long been abandoned. It is now a completely autonomous instrument of people in power who only give up the controls when forced to. The “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” has been lost to end times fantasies, poisonous conspiracy theories, the former Twitter, TikTok, and Fox.

We, dear reader, must be the alert and knowledgeable citizenry Eisenhower wanted. We must take back the controls of the war machine and interrupt the clash of eschatologies driving us to global conflict. Otherwise, the many prophecies of an apocalypse will be self-fulfilling:

“Stupid people are dangerous.”
—Katniss Evergreen, Hunger Games

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