04/02/2026
The Truth isn't Selling This Year
Years ago, an editor turned down my self-help book because she said, ‘The truth just isn’t selling this year.’ She was right.
We love to be lied to. We love it when politicians, marketers, and gurus tell us that getting what we want will be fast, easy, and simple.
But I’m going to tell you the reality that nobody wants to hear: The only way out of our current national and personal nightmare is slow, hard, and complicated.
The salesman in the white house understood that one rule for getting people to buy him as our leader.
All he had to do was tell the gullible public that fixing our problems would be fast, easy, and simple. And he won. Twice.
So yes, we have seen that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time if you simply use those three magic words. Fast, easy, and simple.
Now we have some evidence about whether that works. Let’s check that out.
As a psychotherapist, coach, and mentor, I’ve spent decades helping people get unstuck. and what I’m going to show you is that our national political circus is just our personal psychology written on a massive scale.
You see, our great salesman understood that one rule to get people to buy. All you have to do is tell them that the way for them to get what they want will be fast, easy, and simple. So yes, we have seen that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time if you simply use those three magic words. Fast, easy, simple.
Another thing that our sales gurus tell us is that we must speak with absolute conviction and certainty. I’ll break that rule, too right now.
I have convinced myself that after decades of sitting with people, reading the words of the wise and going through my own process of transformation, that I have some idea of some of what I call “the universal laws of reality.”
One of those universal laws corresponds to something Confucius said, which was, “you cannot pull the shoots.” This means that growth happens at nature’s rate. When tiny shoots come out of the ground, if you tug them and try to make them grow faster than nature allows, you’ll simply pull them out of the ground. That’s what I observe in people, and that’s back up for my “hard, slow, and complicated,” claim.
But what if I’ve been wrong about this? What if my biased eye isn’t seeing what might be right in front of my nose? Maybe getting what you want in life is fast, easy and simple?
The beauty of the current moment, if we can call it beauty, is that we have evidence for our national experiment in this sales pitch. Let’s see how it is going. Our very own Elmer Gantry, “Lonesome” Rhodes, Professor Harold Hill, Buzz Windrip, and Wizard of Oz (I’ll tell you who these people are a little bit later) promised to end the Ukraine war, lower grocery prices, dismantle the “deep state,” eliminate 2 trillion in spending, end birthright citizenship, end the income tax with tariffs, deport twenty million people, end conflict in the middle east, bring world peace, bring manufacturing back to America, and have so much winning that we would get tired of winning on his first day in office.
Now whether you liked those promises or not, it does appear that those universal laws of reality have some teeth. None of those promises came true. Not on the first day. Not at all.
Elon Musk’s D.O.G.E. was an utter disaster. The few billion he may have excised from our spending has already been spent in the Iran War, and the main result of the program has been untold children’s deaths. After a massive backlash, Musk retreated, mewling, with his tail between his legs, to go on to his more important task of selling his AI platform, Grok, by allowing it to make n**e fakes of the mother of one of his children.
The Ukraine War grinds on. Trump’s “special relationship” with his doppelganger Putin has yielded nothing but more death and destruction.
Sautéing in the Orwellian peace-prize Iran non-war, oil prices are skyrocketing and grocery prices, along with inflation in general, are following suit.
Talking about that Iranian excursion, peace has not been brought to the middle east. Quite the contrary, we now see chaos, destruction, and death spreading throughout the region and economic pain throughout the world.
Thankfully, birthright citizenship remains. The administration hasn’t quite figured out how to toss out the constitution yet. We’ll see what the Supreme Court has to say about this.
We still have an income tax and the see-saw of tariffs end up being an additional regressive tax on the American consumer without lowering our deficit spending. The tariffs were named unconstitutional, so there is a strong likelihood that whatever monies came in from these taxes will have to be returned.
Yes, Stephen Miller and his minions are doing their best to create concentration camps and hiring anyone with a trigger happy finger to round up just about anyone with brown skin that they can find, but even the N***s couldn’t round up all the Jews on day one. Thankfully, our incompetent band of sociopaths are way off track to that 20 million number.
In contrast to the manufacturing boom promised, there has been a net loss of 100,000 jobs in that sector, mostly blamed on Trump’s tariffs and the economic uncertainty he has created.
There is our evidence! Fast, easy, and simple is bu****it!
Now that the campaign is over and the bamboozling is proving to be just that, what is the new story that the administration is promulgating? Believe it or not, it is the universal law that change is slow, hard, and complex.
For example, tariffs have been causing Americans pain. Economic analysts estimate these import taxes are costing the average U.S. household between $1,000 and $2,400 extra per year, driving up prices on everything from groceries to cars and appliances. The administration argues that this financial squeeze is a necessary sacrifice to force multinational companies to stop relying on cheap foreign labor, build factories on U.S. soil, and revitalize American manufacturing and that things will improve over time. Give it time, they tell us now.
The American agricultural sector has taken a massive hit. The 2025–2026 crop season resulted in an estimated $34.6 billion in losses, particularly devastating the soybean market as foreign buyers simply sourced their crops from other countries. Republican lawmakers and administration officials are telling farmers they must endure this shrunken export market to “level the global playing field,” and that this will lead to better days in the future. Not so fast, is it?
Yes, it turns out that improving the American economy for the vast majority of people is slow, hard and complicated.
In fact, this abrupt about face on reality is the exact sentiment that has become the central justification for the massive military operations the U.S. and Israel launched against Iran at the end of February.
When President Trump addressed the nation on February 28 to announce the major strikes he directly addressed the inevitable human and economic toll. He stated: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war. But we’re doing this not for now. We’re doing this for the future. And it is a noble mission.”
However, the “short-term pain” side of that equation has escalated rapidly over the last three weeks: According to recent Pentagon leaks to Congress, just the first week of this new phase of the war cost the U.S. roughly $11.3 billion. The U.S. is rapidly chewing through its stockpiles of incredibly expensive missile defense interceptors (like the $13 million THAADs). To keep the campaign going, the administration is reportedly drafting emergency supplemental funding requests running anywhere from $50 billion to $200 billion.
Iran’s retaliation has effectively paralyzed shipping through the Strait of Hormuz (which normally handles about a quarter of global seaborne oil). As a result, global oil benchmarks recently spiked above $112 a barrel. If the strait remains closed, economists are warning of a massive secondary spike in gas prices and inflation back home, compounding the economic squeeze Americans are already feeling from the administration’s tariffs.
Yes, it turns out that war, more often than not, is slow, hard, and complicated.
Yet, despite this evidence, as David Hannum allegedly said, there’s a sucker born every minute. Some 40% of the American public still prefer the gooey comfort of the fast, easy, simple lie than face the actually more promising reality of slow, difficult, and complicated.
Why do they buy it? Before I get into the internal psychology of it all, we need to acknowledge that there is a long lineage of American characters from fiction who fit the mold of the “charismatic charlatan” or the “American confidence man” who turns into a demagogue. These prescient creators anticipated the rise of Trump. The only mystery is why it took so long for someone like this to assume the ultimate mantle of power.
There is no perfect psychopathological category in the standard manual of diagnoses, but each one of these characters, that I named before – Elmer Gantry, “Lonesome” Rhodes, professor Harold Hill, Buzz Windrip and the Wizard share common characteristics.
While their specific arenas differ - evangelical religion (Gantry from the novel “Elmer Gantry” by Sinclair Lewis), mass media and television (Rhodes from the film “A Face in the Crowd”), traveling sales (Hill from “The Music Man”), and fascist politics (Windrip from Sinclair Lewis’s all too prophetic book, “It Can’t Happen Here”) they all operate using the exact same psychological playbook.
They are masters of the common touch. They present themselves as straight-talking “men of the people” who understand the struggles of the average citizen. In reality, this is a highly calculated performance; behind closed doors, they often view their followers with contempt, seeing them merely as gullible “marks.”
They do not persuade with logic; they mesmerize with rhythm, rhetoric, and showmanship. Whether it is a revival tent, a television broadcast, a town square, or a political rally, they are entertainers first. They use emotional crescendo and fast-talking cadence to bypass their audience’s critical thinking. These are classic Ericksonian hypnotic techniques.
They possess a predatory instinct for figuring out what a community is most desperate for, whether it is salvation, civic pride, a return to a mythical “golden age,” or protection from outsiders—and they sell the illusion of it.
They represent the dark side of American exceptionalism, hustle, and salesmanship. They embody the idea that reinvention and aggressive self-promotion can be weaponized to achieve absolute power, wealth, or adoration without any underlying moral foundation.
The ultimate symbol of the type might be the Wizard of Oz, the “man behind the curtain.” He is a literal carnival barker and balloon salesman from Omaha who uses pyrotechnics, fear, and grand promises to rule an entire nation, despite having no actual power to make anything happen.
These masters of manipulation have no contact with a conscience, what we conventionally call sociopathic. They pray on human weakness and exploit it for their own gain of money and power with no concern about the consequences to others.
We now have entire industries of advertisers, marketers, sales people, who have turned these techniques into a science. These manipulations have been embedded into our technologies. They are inescapable, as we are offered every shortcut to fulfillment, drowning out the voices of wisdom that tell us that fulfillment comes from immersion, it comes from the investment of time and energy.
Why spend a lifetime cultivating enlightenment when you can take the shortcut of a couple of bumps of co***ne, some milligrams of M**A, a THC gummy, and a few cocktails? Oh, and if you actually want to put some effort into it, go upstate and vomit into a bowl and meet the Great Mother on that Ayahuasca journey.
If you are not into that, find your favorite kink by clicking a button or two on your phone. Try for the get rich quick of online gambling. Feel the satisfaction of pressing the angry emoji on your political enemy’s 30-second obnoxious TikTok.
Here’s the problem with fast, easy and simple. All those promises turn out to do just the opposite. Whether we are talking about wars in the Middle East or your inability to find satisfaction in work, love, and life, every time you try to take a shortcut you get further away from your destination.
It’s not easy. Oh yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Temptation is everywhere. The wise of all time have been banging this drum of the true path since Buddha sat under the tree for 49 days and nights. Since Moses travelled through the desert for 40 years. Since Jesus wandered through the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. (That big number? That’s a symbol for “long”.)
But has anyone listened? Clearly, only a few. In fact, this is central to the problems that people bring into my therapy office. This leads to one way of defining what we amorphously call “neurosis.” These are people who are stuck in their lives, who are living far beneath their potential whose symptoms include self-loathing, avoidance, procrastination, fear, bad habits, pessimism, resistance to learning, and poor self-care.
I don’t like these words like neurosis, anxiety or depression because I do not believe they capture human complexity. I prefer the construction of the ancient Chinese sage Mencius who wrote about this 2500 years ago, and called it having a “lost heart.” He tells us that in order to find our hearts we need to “self-cultivate.”
That is, just like the farmer needs to tend his land, respecting the process of natural growth and understanding the complex laws of nature, he needs perseverance and daily work to have the greatest yield, that is, to be in a constant condition of growth, moving ever forward to becoming our best selves and living our best lives.
He tells us that when we follow that path of daily work, of digging deep, of non-stop learning, that through that process itself, we find access to what he calls “flood-like Ch’I” which scientists might call mitochondria, but which we mystics might call the infinite energy of the universe. That is hard, long work builds on itself and leads to freedom, success and fulfillment.
We have been sold a bill of goods, believing that everything will come to us without time, effort, and learning. The result is all too many of us are spiritually flabby. Just like we get into good shape by working out several times a week, we develop the capacities for pride, confidence, courage, strength, faith and love by working on them every day.
If we don’t work out, you get physically flabby and susceptible to all kinds of physical ailments. If we don’t take the slow, hard and complicated path of daily development, we become spiritually flabby and subject to all kinds of psychological ailments. We become increasingly susceptible to the hypnotic charms of the demagogue, the drug, or the phone.
And that’s how our country ended up where it is right now. The clever sociopaths have rendered the masses pliable and weak. And anyone like me, who is saying slow, hard, and complicated is better than fast, easy and simple, is simply drowned out by all the noise that screams the opposite.
The facts are in folks. If you have any doubt, check out the news. The ancients knew it but they were ignored in their day and very few of us want to pay attention to this inconvenient truth.
I guess the editor was right. This message? It’s just not selling this year.
Glenn Berger PhD
