Risk and Extortion XLIV The Libidinal Economy of Kakistocracy

The USA has now officially become a kakistocracy. Its political culture is immersed in anxiety, neurosis and cowardice, personified by its Leader, King Donald I. The kakistocrat-in-chief may be nothing more than a bag of excrement, he is surrounded by enough stooges to make this work. ICE has taken on the role of the GeStaPo, Fox News is the institutionalized form of Joseph Göbbels, and the rule of law now means nothing except of it can be used to support whatever the king wants. For Kakistocracy to be able to dump on millions of people, the iron fist has to be substantial and the velvet glove around it has to be thin.

The USA has provided the global justification for the hegemonic rule of kakistocracy. It seems that the only way to retain some semblance of sovereignty is to become as kakistocratic as they are. Nietzscheans may want to explain the turn to kakistocracy to be a logical unfolding of democracy as the will-to-power of the latter (e.g. the striving for autonomy by “the people”) was already marked by the ressentiment of slave-morality. Cheap Nietzscheanism would then suggest that the admiration for “obscene masters” is a mere expression of human nature.

The main problem with this kind of misanthropic reductionism is that it suggests that this admiration for obscene masters is a generic force that characterizes all human beings, whereas in actual fact it only surfaces on specific occasions and not even among the majority of people. Even the electoral victory of Trump in 2024 was not because the majority of those eligible to vote actually wanted Trump (his tally was below 49.8% of the all ballots cast and only 31.6% of all eligible voters). Many simply did not vote at all, many were also disenfranchised by voter suppression, and we do not need to even open the can of worms of the organized rigging and manipulation.  In a similar vein, the German NSDAP never won a majority of the vote, even with voter suppression.

This is the problem with every argument that wants to explain human psychology with reference to human nature. If be bracket off this reductionist element, what remains is a mode of thought that deploys vectors, variations, quantities, tendencies, movements. The will to power is part of a libidinal economy, it manifest itself in a plethora of desiring machines. Not all of these are attached to neurotic self-valorization.

Libidinal economy also enables us to invoke a conception of culture that is pragmatic – as collectivized modalities of problem-solving. Nietzsche’s concept of will to power suggests that overcoming obstacles is one way by which we can understand its operations (avoiding them would be another). Being immersed in both malice and cowardice, Kakistocracy is cultivated in slave moralities of self-victimization combined with sadistic fantasies of revenge. This is obviously more likely if people experience anxiety in relation to alienation.  For example, those whose “beliefs” are derived from a gospel of entitlement will identify obstacles to that entitlement as “evil”. Various combinations of religions and nationalisms (e.g. Christianity in the USA and Russia; Hinduism in India, Zionism (e.g. secular-Judaism) in Israel have also experienced the greatest receptiveness to kakistocracy. Libidinal economies of victimhood/sadism have embraced the fundamental condition of alienation as forms of institutionalized capitalism within the nation state, which not only engendered consumerism as individuation but also ethno-nationalism as collectivization.

We now have the contours of a logical framework: Every libidinal economy with a plethora of desiring machines as expressions of a will to power is always embedded in a distinctive historical-material web of life. Imperial, patriarchal capitalism has engendered forms of alienation which have been mobilized in two different dimensions: consumerism and ethno-nationalism. Both are not oppositional, but whereas the first requires affluence, the second only requires a real or imagined enemy. In Gospels of Entitlement, both are combined. The cultivation of risk and anxiety – as means to attune modes of existence to the needs to the establishment – then often favours a kakistocratic political culture as it calls for the need to force extraordinary solutions for supposedly extraordinary challenges.