Misguided Hunger and the Search for Wholeness

Power has always been a passing season. Empires bloom, speeches thunder, faces fill the screen — and then, silence. The cycle repeats with new names, new slogans, the same ache behind the eyes. There’s something tragic about watching a powerful person destroy themselves while believing they’re saving the world. You can almost see it in their eyes — that glint of moral purpose mixed with a subtle panic, the fear that if they stop talking, stop moving, stop defending, they’ll have to face something they can’t bear to see.

When I think of those who once stood proudly before the cameras — the polished faces, the trained confidence, the lines repeated until they hardened into belief — I don’t see monsters. I see hunger. A spiritual hunger disguised as conviction. They wanted to belong to something larger than themselves, to dissolve into a cause that could make them feel necessary. But what they really wanted was wholeness — and they went looking for it in all the wrong places.

In our age, that confusion is everywhere. You can see it in the performative certainty of pundits, influencers, and strongmen who live on the narcotic of attention. From Trump to Putin, from the pseudo-mystics of Silicon Valley to the self-anointed “truth-defenders” of the culture wars, the pattern is the same: the higher the pedestal, the deeper the insecurity. At the center of it all lives a story the ego will do anything to preserve: Everyone loves me. It’s the lie that makes power addictive — the illusion that adoration can fill the void where self-knowledge should be.

Power never exists in isolation. It draws to itself the very hunger it embodies — those who need to believe, those who need to belong, those who need to be seen. Every tyrant, prophet, and reformer gathers around them a familiar constellation of longing. What begins as one person’s need for significance becomes the stage on which countless others seek their own reflection.

Among the crowd, this hunger takes its most visible form. Many who follow such figures aren’t blind — they’re hungry. What starts as a spiritual longing for meaning often collapses into an emotional hunger for authority. Unable to bear uncertainty, the soul seeks a parent to believe in. They’re looking for a father in a fatherless world. In his defiance, they sense protection; in his bravado, permission; in his certainty, relief from their own confusion. It’s the same ancient longing for guidance and love — only now projected onto a man who mistakes adoration for proof of divinity. What they crave is not him, but the safety he impersonates.

Closer to the center, the same hunger refines itself. His inner circle doesn’t see him as a father but as a sun — and they orbit him, desperate not to drift into the dark. Their praise is currency; their loyalty a form of insurance. They don’t love him; they need his love. It’s the oldest courtly ritual in history — the illusion of devotion masking the terror of irrelevance. In that mutual performance, the sickness of our age is laid bare: everyone playing their part in a theater of dependence, feeding on each other’s insecurity, mistaking proximity to power for significance.

Even those who oppose such figures are often caught in the same current. The righteous, too, move within the circle — those who believe they can cleanse the world, purge it of corruption, and restore some imagined order. Their hunger feels nobler, and often it is. Yet it springs from the same source: the longing for wholeness expressed as the urge to fix what is broken. And perhaps we need them, if only to keep the world from collapsing entirely into greed and graft. But from a certain height, it all begins to blur — one great performance, a civilization at war with its own reflection, each side convinced it is saving the world from the other.

But this isn’t only his disease — it’s ours. A culture built on noise and spectacle inevitably confuses obsession for conviction and volume for truth. An immature society elects an immature leader, and the two feed each other’s need to blame. What he enacts on the stage of politics, we enact quietly in our daily lives — the endless war against whatever threatens our fragile sense of self.

The Orbit of Misguided Hunger

Layer	Description	Psychological Expression	Vedantic Parallel
1. The Ego-Idol	The false self that must be adored to survive.	Lives by the story “Everyone loves me.” Uses power as a cure for emptiness.	Ahamkara — the ego mistaking reflection for reality.
2. The Courtiers	Those who orbit the idol for reflected light.	Validation as currency; fear of irrelevance. Their loyalty is survival.	Manas serving Ahamkara — thought reinforcing illusion.
3. The Followers	The crowd seeking a father in a fatherless world.	Devotion confused with dependence; awe masking insecurity.	Misdirected bhakti — love projected onto form.
4. The Righteous	The reformers and saviors who seek to purify what they perceive as corrupt	Moral hunger disguised as virtue; the need to fix the world to quiet inner dissonance.	Sattva entangled in rajas — clarity mixed with restlessness.
5. The Culture	The outer machinery that rewards noise over truth.	Spectacle mistaken for meaning; attention mistaken for worth.	Maya — collective ignorance sustaining delusion.
6. The Witness	The one who turns inward and breaks the orbit.	Sees through the cycle of need and validation.	Atman — realization of the Self beyond hunger.

Every layer effects the same unhealed longing in a different form — domination, obedience, virtue, or distraction. The tyrant's hunger for power and the reformer's hunger for purity are not opposites, but mirror-images of the same search for wholeness. Only the witness steps beyond the play, seeing both good and and evil as movements of the same restless mind.

That’s how good people do bad things. Not because they’re evil, but because they’re afraid. They’ve built their entire identity on performance — the posture of certainty, the rhetoric of righteousness — and to stop performing would mean confronting the void behind it. For some, self-knowledge is more terrifying than guilt.

The more fragile the ego, the louder it becomes. When cornered by truth, it doubles down — needing ever more attention, ever more validation to drown out the dissonance. We see it in leaders who can never admit error, in billionaires who mistake conquest for enlightenment, in political evangelists who think their outrage redeems them. It’s all the same disease of direction: a desperate flight from silence.

But this hunger isn’t limited to the powerful. It animates the whole machinery of modern life. Every scroll, purchase, and opinion is a small attempt to quiet the same inner ache. Our economies are built on dissatisfaction; our politics on belonging; our technologies on the promise of completion. We have mistaken stimulation for meaning, and in doing so, built a world that feeds on its own restlessness. What we call “progress” is often just hunger refined into systems.

From a Vedantic lens, this is the soul’s universal predicament. The same longing that propels the sage toward liberation propels the tyrant toward domination. Both are driven by mumukshutva — the desire for freedom. The difference lies in direction. The sage turns inward, dissolving the ego in truth; the tyrant turns outward, expanding the ego through control. One seeks to be free of the self; the other seeks to make the self godlike. Both hunger for the infinite, but one mistakes imitation for union.

That’s why we keep seeing these archetypes appear — in every generation, every nation. They aren’t aberrations; they are mirrors. They reflect a world that worships ambition, spectacle, and certainty — a world terrified of stillness. They are what happens when spiritual yearning gets funneled through the machinery of politics, media, and ego. In that sense, they’re not separate from us at all. They are our collective shadow — the proof of how far we’ll go to avoid seeing ourselves.

If hell exists, it isn’t a punishment after death; it’s what happens when truth finally catches up with illusion. It’s the moment of seeing clearly after a lifetime of deception — the unbearable knowledge that you built your own suffering and called it destiny. And yet even that is mercy, because the same fire that reveals falsehood also points the way home.

Perhaps that’s why compassion, not condemnation, is the only sane response. Not because these people deserve our sympathy, but because they show us what happens when longing loses its way. They remind us that everyone — even the most deluded — is seeking the same thing: peace, meaning, an end to the inner ache. Some find it in truth; others try to manufacture it through power. The results are vastly different, but the root is the same.

In the end, every human being stands at the same threshold — the choice between projection and perception, between building a kingdom and finding the Self. Those who choose the outer path may rise for a time, but the collapse is inevitable. For the light they chase isn’t the light of awareness, but the glare of desire reflected back at them.

And when the glare fades, what’s left is the same still question waiting beneath every life, every ambition, every failure:

Who am I?

Until that question is answered — not with words, but with seeing — the world will continue to produce its false messiahs and misguided heroes. They are not the cause of our sickness, but the symptom. And if we look closely, if we see without flinching, we may recognize in their downfall the same hunger that lives quietly in all of us.

That is the quiet tragedy of our age: we have organized society around misdirected yearning. The markets, the algorithms, the ideologies — all exist to harvest the ache we refuse to understand. We are not merely surrounded by misguided souls; we are a civilization of them, mistaking appetite for purpose, motion for meaning. Until that is seen, the world will continue to move brilliantly, efficiently — and blindly.

We are all caught somewhere on that ladder of longing — tyrant, reformer, follower, and bystander alike. The outer struggle is only a reflection of the inner one. The only difference is whether that hunger drives us outward into the noise — or inward, into the silence that ends it.