Here’s a passage I ran across in my reading of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world–no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then–more miserably–within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 11.

Campbell — in 1949 — accurately describes the political situation in the (not-so) United States of America and, indeed, much of the rest of the Western world:

. . . schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death–the birth, not of the old things again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be–if we are to experience long survival–a continuous ‘recurrence of birth’ . . . to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 11-12.