Talking Kakistocracy

Kakistocracy is a hell of a word with ancient Greek origins - it combines kákistos meaning worst, with krátos, meaning rule.

We have a word that serendipitously shades our most childlike colloquialism for shit - Kaka - and conveys that the poop (metaphorically speaking), the dregs of humanity, the rotten, degraded, greedy, corrupted, incapable, predatory and morally vacuous elites of a society have been given total hegemony. We might also call this a “psychopathocracy,” or “banalocracy” to borrow from Hannah Arendt. This word, Kakistocracy, is comic and yet ironic - we have made a joke of the most painful nightmare possible. We grin fatalistically at our mutual plight, all of us residing in an inverted culture run by criminals, thieves, murderers, con-artists, organized pedophiles, extortionists, cretins and narcissists.

It is as if we concocted a thought experiment that asked experts to design a society which inflicts the worst possible suffering. However, the end result of war, disease, starvation and injustice does not suffice to define Kakistocracy - there is also an aesthetic quality, the flaunting of idiocy and bad taste, unleashed upon the hypnotized public. Kakistocratic functionaries are never merely satisfied when they torture and kill - they have to look awkward, ridiculous and inept in their day to day administration of racist intolerance, and embezzlement. They erect a culture of pratfalls, self-humiliation – a continuous celebration of dull-witted menace, the bonding of clown-car stupidity and sadistic cruelty.

Thus we have a frantic rush to glorify gagging fools - Tulsi Gabbard, Mike Johnson, Pete Hegseth, Russell Vought and Linda McMahan - and parade them before the zombified masses. What transcendent genius came up with the idea of obliterating a half million years of multicellular evolution by finalizing global extinction with the inspired plans of a man whose face has melted into a beige puddle of incomprehension? Should we not, before the nuclear, climate roasting deluge, first set all of humanity to the task of erecting an ancient, Egyptian style monument in which to immortalize the bloated, Big Mac infested remains (embalmed with orange tanning spray) of the author who wrote the epitaph to sentient life - “Drill Baby Drill!?” Will Trump’s great pyramid, gleaming in Gold halfway to the moon, be cordoned off with a mile high concrete wall topped with broken glass and razor wire? If Pharoah Khufu Cheops has a trillion ton rock monstrosity to cradle his mummy for all eternity, shouldn’t all of humanity labor under the whip to build a Trump crypt as the swan song for once thriving protoplasm? The man who takes personal credit for peace on earth while exterminating an entire planet ought to be memorialized with a mausoleum that makes the Great Pyramid look like a tool shed. Should our species - every species - go out with a bang, or should we exit with a punch line? What would inspire more mirth than a Himalayan sized tomb emblazoned with a neon scream - T-R-U-M-P - shining forever to light up a dead planet? Is a joke still funny if there is no audience left to laugh?

We normally think of our species in self-inflated ways – we are destined to suffer the malice of evil geniuses and mad scientists. Don’t we, the most brilliant species in the entire galaxy, deserve a better apocalypse than the one being cooked up by an orange imposter, history’s most ludicrous buffoon? And it isn’t simply Trump, but an astonishing community of misshapen, broken, human refuse – where do they all come from? (apologies to Lennon and McCartney)

Kristi Noem, for example, brags about shooting her dog and goat. She prances and poses in front of half-naked men being tortured to death in crowded cells that resemble crates at a poultry slaughterhouse. RFK Jr.’s daughter tells a tale about riding about with the chain-sawed head from a dismembered whale affixed to her father’s vehicle – an incident of spontaneous corpse defilement performed by a once privileged child who delighted in murdering mice and chicks with the blades of his blender, and proudly displaying the bloody mixture to his horrified cousins. How many Trump luminaries did childhood internships as prodigy animal torturers? When you are born into billionaire privilege, the dark triad does not express itself in a rampage of chain saw gore, but in the far bloodier crusade of high office. Trump’s own child, a nepotistic extension of the death cult, has been known to gun down endangered species - creatures that have been tethered to a stake to be blasted away in a risk-free act of faux masculine courage. Dull-witted narcissists like Noem and RFK Jr. affix their steroided, plastic surgery contrived images to fetishized violence. The aesthetics of Kakistocracy feature the violent demise of captive beings as a form of mass entertainment.

Donald Trump, the Kakistocratic master of all time, rambles meaninglessly about sharks or windmills, spewing malapropisms, drooling out a general patter of loose associations, but his words end up unfailingly meandering toward a threat to bomb and eviscerate some vastly weaker country - a place with valuable minerals or oil.

Kakistocrats invariably argue that everything is exactly as it seems on the surface. Any examination of the substrate, thus becomes seditious, heretical, or even worse - “woke.” A single cold day disproves climate change - anecdotal data, the sine qua non of the Kakistocratic mindset, offers that reality consists of the most readily available truth, the impulsive observations of the average guy. Undergirding this reverence for “flat earth” truths we discover the barely opaque shadow of capitalism. When corporate aspirations and simple anecdotes align, the two beget doctrine. If a few cold days and Chevron profits converge, what is “not to like?” Drill baby drill becomes state policy - who needs to view the “hockey stick” graph when a single February morning falls below zero?

The paring down of all knowledge, science, research, imagination and nuance, to pithy slogans, anecdotes and popular wisdom suggests that Kakistocracy shares a “weltanshauung” with religious fundamentalism. If one no longer has to worry about physics, geology and chemistry to describe a world governed by supreme whims, why not just fold your hand and surrender your agency to “his will?” A biblical world has no evolution, no history of mass extinctions, no environmental intricacies, no foundation of knowledge for environmental regulation. The act of deferring to god conceals a more insidious deference to corporate and political authority - the surrender to profits.

One might view Kakistocracy as a sort of bastardized “Occam’s Razor” in which the explanation most easily digestible to morons achieves the status of truth. It requires a certain level of hard thinking and discipline to understand the economic, political and social contingencies that have left the working masses precariously facing the threat of financial ruin. Kakistocrats know that people conversant with such topics as US colonial history, redlining, Citizens United, private equity and venture capitalism comprise a barrier for capitalist political control. The US Kakistocracy labors tirelessly to destroy education, and to substitute intricate explanations for US economic collapse with a single, simpleminded lie – immigrants cause all the suffering endured by the US masses.

Illegal immigrants create housing shortages, illegal immigrants cause medical care to become costly and unavailable, illegal immigrants vote illegally for Democrats, and illegal immigrants rampage on a crime spree that we mistakenly blame on guns. This has become the entire platform of the Republican Kakistocracy.

The Kakistocracy draws strength from five contingencies: 1) A weak opposition party controlled by corporate cash, 2) A discouraged segment of the population who have cynically withdrawn from political involvement, 3) A brainwashed, uneducated, dominating party base eager to swallow nonsensical explanations, 4) A corporately controlled media that spews jingoistic propaganda, 5) Massive, widespread brain damage from unregulated environmental pollutants.

The last factor is widely acknowledged, but never even discussed as a contributor to our political degradation. We know that we are besieged by lead, glyphosates, micro-plastics and hundreds of neurotoxins, without imagining that political gullibility might be a consequence.

An obvious question presents itself – is Kakistocracy synonymous with fascism? If it were not for Trump I would probably answer yes. Fascist governance, by definition, requires the leadership of violent, sociopaths, but Trump injects a level of stupidity that is historically unprecedented. If we guess that Trump’s IQ is somewhere between 75 and 85, how do we square that with his mass deification? We might also consider the likelihood that Trump’s status is merely decorative – that evil but capable deep statists employ him as a figurehead. Trump might be seen as a sort of poetic justice affixed to US empire collapse. Centuries of crimes against humanity have come to a head with an imbecile driving the so called greatest nation toward its terrible fate.

Kakistocracy creates one particular problem - if an entire government is overrun with slobbering morons, won’t they simply bungle themselves out of power? That fantasy, as I wrote last week, should be avoided like the plague. Trump will live forever - in either his current, appalling state, or as an embalmed icon for an ongoing succession of Kakistocrats. The whole absurd situation gathers as a single question - will the US population continue to put up with life under Kakistocratic rule?