Absolution Without Remission: The psychic contract of a dying civilisation

Absolution without Remission: The Psychic Contract asks you to look past Donald Trump the man and into the mirror. Rather than treating Donald Trump as a one-off aberration, this book uses him as a lens to expose the deeper bargain our civilisation has struck with itself: a psychic contract that promises power without responsibility, grievance without self-examination, and absolution without change. It shows how this deal plays out not only in American rallies but also in Modi's India, Erdogan's Turkey, Netanyahu's Israel, Brexit Britain, Davos boardrooms, and beyond. Across its chapters, the book traces how brittle masculinity, weaponised religion, racial and caste hierarchies, denial of grief, and a fantasy of endless progress all feed a politics that feels like "relief" to many, even as it accelerates collapse. It distinguishes the noisy theatre of demagogues from the quieter machinery that outlives them and asks what it would mean to grow up politically and emotionally in a civilisation trained to dodge limits and guilt. This is not a campaign book and not a neutral diagnosis. It's an invitation to deep discomfort: to recognise ourselves in the cracked mirror, to see how everyday habits of domination prepare the ground for grander tyrannies, and to contemplate what a different psychic contract might demand of us—at home, at work, in our institutions, and in how we face the end of familiar stories.