The Pleasure of Madness: Narcissistic Power and Political Theater

Rastinews — We live in strange times. In his book Die Stunde der Raubtiere (The Hour of Predators, 2025, 3rd edition), Giuliano da Empoli notes that chaos was once mostly the work of bandits, rebels or non-state actors. Restoring order and suppressing chaos, by contrast, was seen as the ruler's job. Today that line is blurring. The very people meant to contain chaos sometimes produce it themselves. Building order, one of politics' core functions, can turn into the deliberate manufacture of instability. This is not just a political strategy — it carries a psychological dimension too. Constant crisis-mongering, inflammatory statements, provocative decisions, stoking polarization: for some styles of power, these become governing techniques. Chaos here is not a byproduct. It is a tool for generating attention and making power visible. In a climate of chaos, the leader looks more central, more indispensable. Breaking order becomes, paradoxically, a way of presenting oneself as the only one capable of restoring it.

This is where the "bandit side" of power comes in. Historically, the bandit figure wields force outside the law, breaks the rules, and rules through fear. The state, in theory, exists to eliminate that arbitrary violence. But in some forms of power, an odd kinship emerges between the two. The ruler becomes less an enforcer of law than a figure who bends or suspends it at will. Power then stops being an order-building institution and turns into a structure that draws its strength from uncertainty and fear. Empoli's "hour of predators" is therefore more than a rhetorical flourish — it captures how politics can, at certain moments, become a stage for a power struggle rather than a forum for civil negotiation.

When Madness Meets Power

The Titanic offers a familiar modern metaphor: as the ship (the country) sinks, the people (the rulers) keep dancing on deck, the orchestra keeps playing, and everyone works to preserve the appearance of splendor on board. Keeping the show running even as disaster closes in describes a refusal to face reality in favor of sustaining a performance. This is not just individual denial — it has become a symbol used to understand how ruling classes and centers of power behave.

The story of Nero offers a similar image. Whether or not it is historically accurate, the picture of the emperor posing on stage like a performer while the city burned has become a powerful symbol of power's disconnection from reality. Nero's story is therefore more than a footnote to Roman history — it also reads as a symbolic tale of power turning into narcissistic spectacle. What stands out here is the gap between the disaster and the ruler's own perception of it. A sovereign staging himself as a performer while the city burns shows how far the world of the governed can drift from the world of the governing.

Major disasters — earthquakes, wildfires, floods — make that gap even more visible. These moments become critical tests of how much contact rulers still have with reality. When political power's reflex, in the face of disaster, is to protect its own visibility and grandeur rather than share the public's pain and produce solutions, we get what might symbolically be called "Neroization." Neroization is when a ruler starts thinking about his own stage, his own show, his own image rather than the destruction his people are living through. It marks a leader, amid a national crisis, dwelling on his own splendor and visibility instead. In such moments, politics turns into spectacle rather than the practice of governing. The leader becomes less a problem-solver than a figure engaged in constant self-representation. Speeches, ceremonies, grand imagery and dramatic rhetoric move to the center of politics. When power degenerates into this kind of crude display, it also signals a weakening grip on reality.

Nobody knows the real price of Trump's private jet. It is only estimated. Modern political history offers its own share of such examples. Even in periods of economic hardship and rising poverty, some leaders keep flaunting their power through vast palaces, opulent structures, private jets or grand symbols. This recalls what might be called "Neroizing": power inflating its own splendor while society lives through crisis. In such moments, the distance between the ruler's world and the public's reality keeps widening. Politics stops being the practice of solving problems and increasingly becomes a stage for displays of power. On that stage, real suffering fades into the background while power's need to represent itself takes center stage.

Madness is usually a burden. Nobody wants it. That is why we never see marches of people demanding to go mad, and no one prays for it. A person in the grip of madness loses their connection to the world, fractures internally, and usually suffers for it. Throughout history, madness has therefore been seen as a tragedy.

But there is another form of madness. When madness merges with power and stops causing pain, instead producing pleasure, it stops being a private tragedy and becomes a public danger. History is full of such figures. Roman emperors Caligula and Nero are remembered above all for their excess and extravagance. What stands out in their stories is not just what they did, but how they turned what they did into spectacle. They strip madness of its madness. Rather than restraining their behavior, power puts it on stage. Madness then stops being a hidden pain and becomes a public performance.

A similar dynamic can be found in modern politics. When some leaders make decisions that look provocative, excessive or irrational, the public's shock, paradoxically, can feed those very behaviors. People watch in disbelief and keep asking, "How can this be possible?" But that disbelief also generates attention. Every move the leader makes lands at the center of the agenda. Shock and outrage, however unintentionally, can end up amplifying the leader's visibility and influence.

Caligula. It seems Caligulization has become the norm…

When we first encounter certain figures in history, what we feel is rarely horror — it is, more often, a strange urge to laugh. What is described so exceeds the bounds of reality that the mind first registers it as absurd theatre. Caligula's attempt to make his horse a senator, or Nero cast as a performer on stage while Rome burned, can for that reason look at first not like tragedy but like grotesque comedy. This is, in fact, a defence mechanism of the human mind. When reality grows too extreme, when it breaches the limits of logic, the mind struggles to file it under "real." In such moments, the absurd reads as funny — because accepting the tragedy is far heavier. That is why Caligula's horse, or Nero's Rome, registers first not as atrocity but as something close to a joke. An emperor wanting to make his horse a senator looks less like a political decision than a piece of theatre. Reality and the spectacle of power blur into one. But the key point is this: history shows again and again that what looks ridiculous is sometimes the opening act of genuine political practice.

Hannah Arendt's observation on the banality of evil points to something similar. Great evils rarely emerge from a demonic darkness — they often surface inside behaviour that looks absurd, ordinary, even comic. People's first thought is "this must be a joke," because it is hard to accept that reality could be this absurd.

Epstein…

Pleasure gets politicised… In her recent book The New Fascist Body (Der neue faschistische Körper, 2025), Dagmar Herzog makes a striking point: in the modern age, the body increasingly sits at the centre of politics. Drawing on Judith Butler, the book argues the body is never merely biological — it is also the site of hunger, thirst, fear, illness, injury, sexuality and violence. In this sense the body is not just an organism; it is also the terrain of sexual fears, social norms and cultural prohibitions. The body has therefore always been a target of power's attention. So has privacy.

This is not hard to trace historically. Look at the Code of Hammurabi: a large share of its clauses concern family, sexuality, marriage and private life. The rest deal mostly with trade and commerce. From the earliest periods of human history, power and religion — kings, laws and gods — have taken an interest in the most private sphere of the person and sought to regulate it. The private sphere, then, has never been purely "private." It is political too.

Power also politicises pleasure. Pleasure is an experience that runs through the body; control the body, and you can control society. That is why states, religions and other forms of power have, throughout history, tried to regulate whom people may be with, how, and within what limits. Michel Foucault, too, gave a detailed account of the link between control of the body and relations of power. Constant surveillance of the private sphere is one of power's oldest reflexes.

Seen this way, the ancient accounts of Caligula and Nero are more than historical anecdotes. In these narratives, power's refusal to recognise limits becomes visible. Over time these figures stopped being merely historical persons and became symbols of power's tendency to display itself through the violation of boundaries. That is why people's first instinct is: "No, that can't be." What is described sits outside everyday morality and ordinary common sense. But history shows something else too: where power concentrates, violations of the norm occur more often.

There is a strong link between power and sexuality: once a person begins to feel above the law, the inner brakes on impulse weaken. That is why, throughout history, sexual excess and scandal have so often surrounded courts, aristocratic circles and seats of absolute power. Certain modern-day scandals have revived this discussion. The documents and network of relationships that surfaced around Epstein, for instance, expose the connection between power, elite networks and sexual exploitation. Some commentators for that reason read such episodes as part of a historical continuity: for the powerful, limits are not limits. Limits are for everyone else. The accounts of ancient Rome, of course, are not identical to modern politics or today's scandals — their historical contexts differ sharply. Power is not only a political position; it is also a powerful psychological experience. Once a person begins to feel exempt from the law, boundaries become steadily easier to cross. Perhaps that is why the things societies call "impossible" — whether political extremism or sexual transgression — sometimes become possible precisely in the places where power concentrates most.

The most radical impossible… War…

War is a state in which evil and depravity organise themselves almost like a festival. It represents the outermost threshold at which the humane values built up over thousands of years, and the laws meant to enforce them, are suddenly suspended. It is radical because it violates the most fundamental limit humanity has set: the prohibition on killing. Acts that count as crimes under everyday moral order are presented, in wartime, as legitimate — sometimes even virtuous. War, then, is not only a political conflict; it is also a state of exception in which the ethical order humans have built is suspended. The depravities of rulers are not only sexual. Perhaps the most depraved form of organisation of all is war itself.

Recent history shows this plainly: the slave and concubine markets set up for Yazidi women and children; the uprooting and removal of olive trees during the plunder in Syria. These are not mere "side effects" of war — they are direct manifestations of its structural violence.

Retired US Marine Corps general Smedley D. Butler, after a long and highly successful military career, spoke plainly about the true face of war. To him, war was not an epic of heroism but a racket, a corrupt arrangement. In his text War Is a Racket (1935; German: Krieg ist ein Schwindel, 2019), Butler wrote that war serves a very small circle of interests, while its cost is paid, in lives, by the broad masses. In the same text he stressed that the millions of men put under arms are not taught to dance, to live or to produce — they are taught to kill and to be ready to be killed. He noted, too, that the opportunities and riches generated at war's end flow right back to those same privileged circles. Butler specifically recorded that at least 21,000 new millionaires emerged in the United States during the First World War. What this exposes is that behind a war glorified through the language of homeland, nation, heroism and martyrdom lies, in reality, a bloody arrangement that swells the fortunes of a small elite. War's ideological narrative rests on sacrifice and honour; its economic reality, more often than not, lies somewhere else entirely. In short, the price paid is, more often than not, human life spent not for land or honour but for someone else's wealth. War is the most organised lie there is — one in which humans are made to see killing as legitimate, and power profits from it.

The career of the impossible…

The impossible… And how the presumed-impossible becomes possible… A similar dynamic can be seen in modern politics. Some of what certain leaders say sounds, at first, like a stand-up line: unbelievable, surreal, funny. People laugh first. Because the mind's first response is "this can't be." But there is an interesting mechanism at work here: the very thing we call "impossible" sometimes becomes possible for exactly that reason. Because society does not take it seriously at first. It goes unheeded… The absurd gets treated, for a while, as political performance. The line between the ridiculous and the dangerous blurs at this point. That is why the accounts of Caligula and Nero became such powerful metaphors. They are not merely historical figures; they are also symbols of power's occasional ability to turn reality into a stage. Making a horse a senator, or turning burning Rome into a song, both carry the same message from power: "Reality is now my stage." And perhaps that is why people laugh first. Because sometimes the most frightening things look, at first glance, like a joke. Some of Trump's statements, on first hearing, genuinely call to mind the stories of Nero and Caligula. What he says often carries a register of exaggeration and spectacle that exceeds the accustomed limits of political reality. That is why many people's first reaction is not to take it seriously, but to laugh, or to say: "that can't be."

Some traits of today's dictators and fascist leaders recall Caligula. This could be called, in short, the "Caligula complex." Its core features include the fusion of sadism with pleasure, the conversion of a fragile sense of self-worth into fantasies of grandeur and magnificence, and the gradual normalisation of escalating madness. I am not a historian; I am only touching on stories that have caught my eye and left a mark on me. Caligula, Roman emperor from AD 37 to 41, is described in historiography as one of the most extreme, unstable and cruel rulers. Rome had many emperors; but Caligula wanted to set himself apart from them, to place himself higher still. He did this through madness. He declared himself a god, for instance. Unlike most Roman emperors, he wanted to be worshipped as a god while still alive, and had his own statues placed in temples. Gods demand sacrifice; Caligula began demanding for himself everything that belonged to the gods. Sacrifice was included.

Today, too, sacrifices are all but offered to honour the powerful. What appears to be offered to a god is in fact offered to the ruler. It looks as though the ruler accepts these sacrifices in the god's name; but there is no god in the picture. It is the ruler himself who accepts the sacrifice, directly. In Roman tradition, emperors were deified after death. Caligula's demand for this while still alive was considered a great scandal.

Today, too, power holders posing in front of their own posters is rarely seen as funny. Yet it is funny. A leader posing in front of his own statue... Politicians overly sure of their own power sometimes say so openly: "Even my hat would win the election." "We can get anyone elected we want." These statements actually point to a political abnormality. But they are repeated so often that they become normal over time. As if they were a political inheritance left behind by Caligula.

The Erosion of Reality

Some of today's Caligulas produce similarly absurd claims, and these claims can come to be accepted as absolute truth. A government might say, for instance: "If we said we'd built a road to the Moon, a highway there, people would believe it." At first glance, this looks like an irrational claim. But if people genuinely believe it, the issue is no longer the accuracy of the information. The issue is that the utterance itself becomes a power that determines reality. At this point, the line between truth and fiction starts to dissolve. People no longer debate whether what is said is possible; they look at who said it. The ruler's word takes the place of reality. When a society reaches this point, its sense of reality has been seriously eroded. Where reality erodes, hope, humanism and common sense weaken too. Because humanism and hope rest on a world in which people can debate reality together. When a bewitched obedience takes the place of reality, society gradually loses its critical subjecthood.

The Return to Fairy-Tale Thinking

The human mind is, at the outset, open by nature to fairy tale and magic. Children believe in giants, genies, animals that talk with fairies. In the world of fairy tales, the limits of nature are transcended; the dead come back to life, people turn into birds and fly. Psychoanalysis calls this primary process thinking. In this mode of thought, the reality principle has not yet been established. The boundaries between desire and reality are fluid. As a person develops, they come to know the reality principle. An adult knows that fairy tales are fairy tales; they may love them, but they also accept that real life is different from them. The problem is that in certain political situations, this boundary can be eroded once again. When a government comes out and openly puts forward an untrue

claim, and people accept it without question, the issue is not merely false information. This points to a regression — a reversion — in the way society thinks. Fascistic politics works exactly at this point: it summons people back to childhood thinking instead of having them confront complex reality.

The Pleasure Economy of Political Madness

Freud's thinking on mass psychology is illuminating here. According to Freud, crowds often form a powerful emotional identification with their leader. The leader is not merely a political figure; he is also a figure of desire and authority. For this reason, a leader's aggressive or excessive behaviour can be perceived by some followers as a sign of strength and freedom.

Political extremity does not only produce fear; it also produces a pleasure of spectacle. People watch it in horror even as they cannot tear themselves away from this dramatic scene. The political sphere increasingly turns into a shock economy. Every new provocation has to be bigger than the last one. Because attention must constantly be regenerated. Astonishment, anger and a sense of crisis become the fuel of this spectacle. At this point, madness is no longer an individual tragedy. Madness has turned into a political strategy. And if madness begins to produce pleasure, and this pleasure merges with power, madness keeps multiplying. Because every excess has to surpass the one before it. Madness thus ceases to be one person's tragedy alone. It turns into a collective catastrophe growing on the stage of power. It is very hard to believe that Trump is an intelligent person… God's most fundamental trait is not merely being powerful; it is the ability to create reality. There is no distance between God's will and reality: a thing comes to be because God wills it. In the modern world, rulers do not openly declare themselves gods. But when even their most blatant lie stops being a lie and comes to be accepted as reality, the word is no longer a tool for expressing the truth; it has begun to take the place of truth itself. In other words, an era in which strongmen create reality itself… At this point, power ceases to be merely a force that makes decisions; it turns into an authority that constructs reality. In such a situation, the very category of truth loses its meaning; what determines the difference between right and wrong is no longer facts, but the word of power. In the mythological world, the gods lived on Olympus. Even though they had passions similar to those of humans, they existed apart from them, in a place set high above. This spatial distance made divine power visible. Some rulers today living in palaces carries a similar symbolic meaning. A palace is not merely a residence; it is the architectural expression of the distance between ruler and ruled. Power thus does not merely govern; it positions itself in a place apart, elevated and untouchable. And if, in a society, the ruler's word begins to take the place of reality, then the issue there is not merely bad governance. What emerges on the stage there is politics turning into a fantasy of divine power.