NO LABILES:

The realm of illusion is more than just the realm of ideology taken to the paranoid extreme. The John Birchers and the Weathermen, the survivalists and the militia groups of the 1990s, exemplified the latter. They saw very specific but unreal threats to the economy, to the American democratic system, to the state of their physical security, or to the social quality of their lives, and they lashed out violently. 

In contrast, in the realm of illusion, people experience unhappiness in their private lives for no clear reason. Some of them may credit that unhappiness to loneliness, yet their unhappiness seems to flow from no obvious source, tapping as well into a weariness they feel toward their daily duties, a bitterness they feel toward the fatuity and soullessness of their relationships--even boredom. They have somehow bruised themselves against the rocks of life. In their unease, they start to dream of a better life. The origins of their dream can be equally hard to pin down, drawing, for instance, from a passion to love others and be loved, from a desire to feel "well" in some existential sense, and from a nebulous faith in humanity. Their dreaming gradually leads them into an illusory world where they find an explanation for their personal unhappiness that is, at best, distantly related to any specific threat coming from the outside world. Then they, too, like radical ideologues, lash out, sometimes violently. 

American politics have traditionally been a fight between competing interests or ideologies. Debates over taxes are an example of the former, and the struggle over racial integration during the early 1970s is an example of the latter. Today, because of people like Elliot Rodger, a new dimension has been added to American politics: fights between competing illusions. People vociferously defend their false version of reality against an opposing false version of reality, as well as against reality itself. 

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