Risk and Extortion III: What do powerful men want?

Avoiding the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is important, but so is avoiding the fallacy of misplaced abstraction. The fallacy of misplaced abstraction suggests that there is no material link between estate and establishment and that there is no link between the interests of an establishment and the interests of those who speak in its name. Again, simplification may help us here. When we consider the three most powerful politicians in the world today: Putin, Netanyahu and Trump, we have to understand that these are at once three men, with bodies  that breathe, eat, defecate, fornicate, cheat and brag, and three networks or figurations in which they function as a figureheads (which becomes very clear when considering the relationship between Trump and the  technobillionaires).  It would be a detrimental mistake to ignore either of these two components, but rather than switching back and forth between them, we should look at that which connects them. What do powerful men want?

Jeffrey Epstein has given us three important clues. His network consisted almost exclusively of rich and powerful men and vulnerable girls, many of whom were forced to participate against their will. Hence: rich and powerful men enjoy the company of vulnerable girls. That is: rich and powerful men are motivated by three forces: (1) a desire for wealth, enabling them to live comfortably; (2) a desire for power, enabling them to do what they like; and (3) a desire for admiration, enabling them absorb the attention and veneration from others (for example through sexual services) for their own glorification.  The fact that many of these girls had been coerced into providing sexual services to these usually older, powerful men might have given an extra perverse twist to this desire for admiration as this also affirms the power-motivation.

These three motivations help us explain the association between the embodied individual “powerful man” and the assembled configuration bearing the same name. It is not difficult to understand how the wealth-motivation coagulates around the office of a president or prime-minister. The executive branche of government has always had the closest connections to the forces of wealth-accumulation and the crossovers between public and private enterprise are often very fluid and opaque and can also be used to co-opt the two other branches of government (A good example of this is the bribing of judges on the Supreme Court of the USA).

Perhaps even more obvious is the power-motive, as it is clear that the figurehead needs his network to dominate, exploit and subjugate others. As the political and economic forces melt into one, so do wealth  and political influence. Both can also easily resort to other forms of domination, such as the threat and even use of violence. It is a key component of the Professional­ Managerial Class to represent the Establishment in its most decent form, which in most western nation states is that of a “liberal democracy” in which free speech is a common good. In exchange for doing so, members of the PMC are allowed to enjoy certain privileges involving wealth, power and admiration. Of course the lower down the pecking order, the smaller the actual amounts of this, but as part of institutions, members of the PMC can always wrap themselves in the mantra of the Establishment, even if some of them, for example university professors as virtue hoarders, cosplay as being their fiercest critics.

However the energy of the admiration or appeal-motive is the one most overlooked in political and sociological analyses.  Yet, the fact that – for example – Jeffrey Epstein was able to gather many rich and powerful men to engage in illegal sexual activities with young, vulnerable girls suggests that this is quite significant. It is not difficult to imagine that when such activities were to be recorded, these rich and powerful men could also be subjected to extortion by other figurations of wealth and power, such as the intelligence services of other establishments, that would obviously benefit from being able to blackmail figurations of wealth and power.

Why would rich and powerful men want to risk their reputations to have sex with underage girls? What kind of energy is the appeal-motive? It cannot be simply the relief of sexual tension as most of these men have partners; they will also know how to masturbate. What is it about vulnerable young girls that could make the likes of Jeffrey Epstein be interesting for foreign intelligence agencies? As it is not a simple kind of sexual desire, we have to look more specifically at two aspects: the age of the girls, making the act illegal, and their vulnerable status, significantly reducing the likelihood of this becoming a public scandal (after all, who would believe a few girls who initially looked very happy to be in the presence of rich and powerful older men that they had been violated? Is it not more likely that they are just trying to get some more money out of it?) Indeed, the most logical assumption is, that this is about perversion and power. Being able to pervert the law and get away with it, which is certainly also the thrill of tax evasion, bribery and other forms of corruption, is in itself a major source of pleasure. On top of that, being able to experience more or less forced admiration from young girls amplifies the perversion of sexual desire in relation to power.

A major part of the motivation to become a successful politician is very similar to the desire among teenagers and young adults to become movie stars or pop stars: the desire for public adoration. One of the main insights of the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler is that the culture industries – and in particular media – have transformed the libidinal economy: Technology has overtaken it and transformed it; it has expropriated it to an extent that “we” (those enthralled by it) have become alienated from ourselves in the sense that our desires are now primarily technologically manipulated, especially in terms of visual sense perception and to a lesser extent auditive sense perception.

One peculiar symptom of this is the explosion of voyeurism and exhibitionism in relation to visual media. It is not simply restricted to the circulation of images, but also the narrations, reactions, reusing as memes etc. Mimetic desire is now technologically manufactured and deployed as algorithms. Algorithms tell us (those enthralled by digital media) what we (should) like and what people like us like. Libidinal desires have ´become a major force in the organization of consumption; they are the major energy source of the success of “technofeudalism”. Technofeudalism is the subordination of both sellers and buyers to a restricted market, governed by algorithms, and  controlled by only a handful of platforms. It connects buyers and sellers and guides them, it can generate mimetic desires, create and prevent trends, and destroy or elevate small business.

Being famous is an indication of high investments of mimetic desire and digital media can not only transform that into data and process it, they can steer it, redirect it, corrupt and embellish it, expand it or destroy it. This is because the associations between mimetic desires and existential needs have become extremely long, diffused and hypermediated and these media are now controlled by only a few entities that can thereby direct the three core motives of the political: wealth, power and admiration.

The trading in attention (Yves Citton) is a major feature of politics on technofeudalism. In the 2024 US elections, for example, it became very clear that it is much easier to win if you have the social media platforms controlled by people who have a direct financial interest in your victory. Having very little chance of success in the realm of arguments and facts, right wing populism has been able to benefit from social media because they operate with mimetic desires rather than logic or evidence. For social media platform algorithms, assertions that ”trigger the libs” are much more profitable than reasoned deliberation. This “coincidence” of interests ensures that right wing populist assertions dominate the content generation on social media platforms: “triggering the libs” is a low threshold form of entertainment that is pornographically self referential.