We Agree on the Symptoms

The Three Poisons and the Limits of Political Diagnosis

Ross Douthat’s recent conversation with Curt Mills, executive director of The American Conservative, is worth the attention of anyone trying to understand what is actually happening to American political culture.

https://youtu.be/iXb9kpqWEak?si=skW-cs106ocJLIk9

Mills is not a figure easy to dismiss. He is intelligent, historically literate, and — unusual in today’s commentary class — willing to name the contradictions within his own coalition. His critique of what he calls “market absolutism,” the decades-long GOP theology that treated free markets as both economic policy and moral framework, is persuasive. His analysis of deindustrialization, the opioid devastation of the Rust Belt, and the offshore migration of American productive capacity as causes of the current populist rage is substantially correct. He is, in the best sense, a serious interlocutor.

And yet.

After following the argument to its end — through protectionism, the critique of the managerial class, and the explicit acknowledgment that concentrated wealth has captured both political parties — one arrives at the same impasse that every serious political thinker eventually reaches. Mills can name the disease. He cannot name the cause.

This is not a criticism unique to Mills. It is the predicament of every school of political thought on offer right now. The progressive left names the disease: oligarchy, structural racism, ecological collapse. The nationalist right names the disease: globalist capture, cultural erasure, deindustrialization. The libertarian center names the disease: regulatory capture, government overreach, the death of civic trust. They are all, in various proportions, correct about the symptoms. None of them can explain why the disease keeps recurring — why every reform eventually calcifies into a new form of the same corruption, why every revolution produces its own version of the order it destroyed.

I have long held that political alignment is not a linear continuum but a circle. The farther one travels toward either extreme, the closer one draws to the other side — until the distance disappears entirely. Political scientists have a term for it, Horseshoe Theory, but the observation predates the label. What it means in practice is this: Mills’s worker-first nationalism and Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism share more structural DNA than either would comfortably admit. Both identify a parasitic ruling class. Both advocate state intervention in the market. Both are skeptical of foreign military entanglement. The ideological labels diverge. The actual program converges.

But the circle has a point where it closes not on socialism but on something older and more dangerous. There is a place at the far right of the current American landscape — the place occupied by Pete Hegseth and his ideological mentor Doug Wilson — where political nationalism dissolves into theocracy. It is here that the analysis must become unflinching.

The Hegseth-Wilson Axis

Pete Hegseth, the current Secretary of Defense, is not simply a political appointee with Christian convictions. He is a man who has built his worldview in deliberate and documented partnership with Doug Wilson — the Moscow, Idaho pastor and intellectual patriarch of a movement called Federal Vision Theology, and the most prominent voice of American Christian Nationalism in its most aggressive form. Wilson is not a peripheral figure in Hegseth’s formation. He is central to it.

Wilson’s positions are not ambiguous. He has publicly advocated the repeal of women’s suffrage. He has argued that homosexuality should be a criminal offense. He has proposed that the United States become an explicitly theocratic state governed by Biblical law. He has defended American chattel slavery as a form of social order consistent with scripture. Hegseth has welcomed Wilson to lead worship services at the Pentagon — the Department of Defense of a constitutionally secular republic — and Wilson’s influence permeates the ideological architecture of the current Defense Department. This is not guilt by association. It is a chosen intellectual lineage.

Hegseth’s own iconography makes the theology explicit. The Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his body. The Latin phrase Deus Vult — “God Wills It” — the battle cry of the First Crusade, announced by Pope Urban II in 1095 to mobilize Christian armies for holy war. These are not decorative choices. They are a creed.

It is in this light that the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s reporting must be understood. The MRFF — founded by Mikey Weinstein, a former Air Force JAG officer and Reagan White House counsel — has received over 200 complaints from active duty service members across every branch of the military, spanning more than 40 units and at least 30 installations. The complaints are specific and on the record. One non-commissioned officer wrote:

“This morning our commander opened up the combat readiness status briefing by urging us to not be ’afraid’ as to what is happening with our combat operations in Iran right now. He urged us to tell our troops that this was ’all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ. He said that ’President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth.’ He had a big grin on his face when he said all of this.”

A big grin on his face. That detail is not incidental. It is the whole of it.

The Mirror

Here is what theocratic convergence actually means, beyond the surface irony of enemies who resemble each other: when both sides of a conflict believe God has ordained their violence, there is no longer any ground from which peace can be negotiated, because peace would require defying the divine will. The conflict cannot end. It can only escalate toward the apocalyptic conclusion both sides are, in their deepest conviction, seeking.

The Hegsethian worldview and the Islamist worldview it claims to oppose are structurally identical in precisely this way. Both believe the current conflict is divinely ordained. Both believe God has chosen a particular leader to fulfill prophetic destiny. Both believe that the suffering and death of war is not a tragedy to be minimized but a sacred mechanism to be welcomed as part of the divine plan. Both encode this theology in the bodies of their warriors — the Jerusalem Cross and Deus Vult on one side; the Shahada and the black flag on the other.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the day of the initial strikes, invoked the Torah commandment to remember and destroy the Amalekites — a specific biblical injunction of total, divinely mandated war — in reference to Iran. Three distinct religious traditions, three distinct cultural aesthetics, one shared apocalyptic grammar. And a shared apocalyptic grammar means a shared destination.

From the vantage point of the Dharma, this is not irony. It is the most predictable outcome in the world. It is what happens when the Three Poisons are not merely personal afflictions but state policy.

The Fetishization of War

Something requires naming plainly, without diplomatic hedging. The celebration of killing — the grin on the commander’s face, the Deus Vult tattoo, the exultation in warrior lethality, the theological delight in Armageddon — is a moral catastrophe of the first order. Not a political problem. Not merely a constitutional violation. A moral catastrophe.

Killing is, at times in human history, a terrible necessity. The tradition acknowledges this without flinching. There are moments when violence to prevent greater violence is the least harmful path available to a person of conscience. What the tradition does not acknowledge — what it explicitly and categorically repudiates — is the glorification of it.

The Buddha’s teaching on karma turns on a single axis, stated with stark precision in the Anguttara Nikaya:

“Cetanaham, bhikkhave, kammam vadami” — “It is intention, monks, that I call karma.”

Karma is not constituted by the act itself. It is constituted by the mental formation — the intention, the spirit, the orientation of mind — from which the act arises. When harm arises from compassion, from desperate necessity, accompanied by grief at what it costs, the karmic weight is entirely different from the same act performed in triumph, in exultation, in the conviction that God is grinning alongside you.

Killing while grinning. Killing while invoking Armageddon. Killing while wearing the battle cry of the Crusades on your skin as a mark of sacred identity. This is not necessity navigated with sorrow. This is desire dressed in armor. This is anger consecrated as holiness. The tradition’s name for it is precise: the fetishization of war is dosa — anger — in its most dangerous and most fully corrupted form.

The Three Poisons

In the Buddhist analysis, all suffering — personal and collective, individual and civilizational — arises from three root causes. They are called the Three Poisons: lobha, dosa, moha. Greed, anger, ignorance. Not as metaphors. Not as character flaws requiring individual moral improvement. As the structural conditions of unexamined mind, operating at every scale from the personal to the geopolitical. When a civilization does not examine its mind, these three poisons do not stay in the background. They become policy. They become institutions. They become wars.

They are, I want to suggest, the only lens precise enough to explain not just the current crisis but the recurring pattern — why the same crisis keeps returning in different historical clothing, why every cure eventually becomes a new expression of the disease.

Greed. Lobha in Pali is not simply the desire for money. It is the fundamental orientation of a mind that experiences itself as insufficient — perpetually lacking, perpetually needing more in order to be secure, to be real, to be enough. In its civilizational form it drives the behavior Curt Mills correctly identifies and incorrectly diagnoses: capital that has no loyalty to any nation, community, ecosystem, or generation — only to its own endless expansion.

It is what happens when an entire economic architecture is built on the foundation of lobha — when the organizing principle of the system is the perpetual stimulation and satisfaction of craving, and when that craving is rebranded as freedom. Mills wants to use tariffs and industrial policy to re-tether capital to community. This is a reasonable tactical response to a specific symptom. But capital did not become untethered because of bad trade policy. It became untethered because a civilization decided that the satisfaction of craving was the highest human good. You do not fix that with tariffs. You fix it by examining the mind that generates the craving.

The oligarchic capture of American political institutions — the phenomenon that unites the Sanders left and the Mills right in their shared outrage — is not an aberration of the system. It is the system working exactly as a system built on lobha will always eventually work. Concentrated greed concentrates power. Concentrated power rewrites the rules to protect concentrated greed. This is not a conspiracy. It is cause and effect.

Anger. Dosa is the poison easiest to see in the current landscape, because it is wearing its most lurid costume. The crusader grin. The Islamist mirror. The zero-sum tribalism that cannot sustain its own coherence without an enemy to organize itself against.

But dosa is subtler and more pervasive than its most extreme expressions. In the Buddhist analysis, anger is not simply an emotion. It is a cognitive architecture — a way of organizing experience around the axis of threat and aversion. A mind shaped by dosa does not see a world of causes and conditions. It sees a world of enemies and obstacles. Every problem has a culprit. Every culprit deserves destruction. Every alliance is temporary, instrumental, and ultimately zero-sum.

This architecture is visible across the entire political spectrum. It is the architecture of the cable news cycle, of social media engagement optimization, of every political fundraising email sent in the last twenty years. Outrage is the fuel. The enemy — whoever the enemy happens to be this week — is the engine. The Dhammapada opens with two of the most consequential sentences in world literature: “Mind is the forerunner of all actions. If one speaks or acts with a corrupt mind, suffering follows as the wheel follows the ox.” This is not poetry. It is a description of every civilization that has ever organized itself around the manufacture of enemies.

What makes the Hegsethian and Islamist expressions uniquely dangerous is not that they are angrier than the baseline. It is that they have solved the problem of moral accountability by outsourcing it to God. If God wills the destruction of the enemy, then the anger is not anger — it is righteousness. The grin on the face of the commander is the face of dosa that has achieved complete theological permission. It no longer needs to justify itself. It has been ordained.

Ignorance. Moha is the most important of the three poisons. It is the one that makes the other two possible. And it is the hardest to see, because it is not simply the absence of information. It is a more fundamental darkness: the misperception of the nature of reality itself.

Ignorance. The specific form of moha most visible in the current crisis is what I would call the political delusion: the belief that winning — electorally, militarily, ideologically — solves something ontologically broken. The belief that if only the right party prevails, the right leader is anointed, the right ideology takes hold, the disease will finally be cured. This delusion is held with equal conviction by the progressive left organizing for the next election cycle, the nationalist right awaiting its strongman, and the theocratic fringe expecting the return of Christ to vindicate its wars. It is the water all of them swim in.

The reason this is moha — ignorance in the deepest sense — is that it mistakes the symptom for the disease. Political dysfunction is not the cause of human suffering. It is an expression of it. The cause runs deeper: the untrained mind, operating from greed and anger, will reproduce those patterns in every institution it builds, every ideology it generates, every revolution it launches. The Bolsheviks were right that the Tsar was corrupt. They reproduced the corruption at greater scale within a decade. The neoconservatives were right that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant. They produced conditions for something worse. Every political program that does not address the soil addresses only the fruit, and the tree keeps bearing.

Moha is the insufficiency at the center of every political program. It is the acknowledgment that is always missing — that the mind generating the problem is the same mind being asked to solve it, and that without examining that mind, every solution carries the seeds of the next crisis inside it.

The Soil, and What Grows in It

Curt Mills is correct that oligarchic capital has captured American political institutions. The MRFF is correct that what Hegseth is doing at the Pentagon violates the First Amendment and the foundational principles of a secular republic. The historians are correct that American empire has generated catastrophic blowback. The progressives are correct that inequality has reached a civilizationally destabilizing extreme. All of these observations are accurate. None of them are sufficient. None of them reach the soil.

There is no political fix to an ontological problem. This is not cynicism. It is the Second Noble Truth, stated in political terms. The Buddha’s second great insight — samudaya, the arising of suffering — is that suffering does not arrive from outside. It is generated from within, by craving: the lobha that is never satisfied, the dosa that is never vindicated, the moha that never stops mistaking the map for the territory. Every structural reform that does not address the craving is a sand castle built below the tide line. Beautifully constructed, sincerely intended, and temporary.

The institutions we build are expressions of the minds that build them. Change the institutions without changing the minds, and the minds will rebuild the old institutions inside the new ones. This has happened so many times in human history that we have stopped noticing it. We call it cynicism or corruption or the iron law of oligarchy. The Dharma calls it the Second Noble Truth in action.

But the Buddha did not stop at the diagnosis of suffering and its cause. The Third Noble Truth — nirodha, cessation — is the declaration that the chain can be broken. That craving is not the permanent and unalterable condition of human existence. That the ground of the mind can be transformed. This is the move that no political program makes, because no political program can make it. It is not a legislative achievement. It is not a policy outcome. It is a transformation of the interior conditions from which all exterior conditions arise.

The path to that transformation is what the Buddha called the Noble Eightfold Path, summarized in the tradition as the Threefold Training: sila, samadhi, panna — ethics, meditation, and wisdom. Not a checklist. Not a set of commandments. A complete re-orientation of the human person — cultivating the ethical conduct that stops generating harm, the meditative clarity that sees the mind’s own poisons directly, and the wisdom that understands, at the level of lived experience rather than mere belief, that greed, anger, and ignorance are not the ground of human nature but distortions of it. That beneath them something else is possible. That the ground of the mind can be transformed, and that when it is, action in the world changes accordingly.

This is the change that the current crisis is, underneath all its noise, calling for. Not a better trade policy. Not a more muscular military posture. Not a theocracy of any flavor. A civilization that decides, with deliberation and seriousness, to examine the minds that are generating its crises — and to cultivate the interior conditions from which genuinely different actions become possible.

We agree on the symptoms. The convergence of diagnosis across the political spectrum is not nothing. It is, perhaps, the beginning of the right question. The question is not: which political program will finally fix this? The question is: what kind of mind generates a world worth living in?

The Eightfold Path is one answer. It is not the only answer. But it is an answer that begins in the right place — not with the enemy, not with the institution, not with the ideology, but with the irreducible fact of the present mind, and the irreducible possibility of its transformation.

That is the hope. Not a small one.