The Return of the Fathers of the Primitive Hordes, Trump, Putin…

Notes from the Ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

In these late‑modern times, when drive and violence run freely across the world, an uncomfortable question slides into view:
how can a human being cause so much harm to another?

These are times in which the ideological and semantic framework that once sustained our public life has collapsed—times in which, like a kind of prayer, we repeated endlessly that “we live in the best of all possible worlds”; that we had built supranational organisms through which, using dialogue and reason, we would resolve conflicts between peoples; that the Kantian man of the light of reason would remain forever happy, illuminated by that eternal light; and even that our place in the evolutionary pyramid must be at the summit, since no other animal possessed reason or wisdom.

Although the history of humankind has been the history of its internal and external wars—and although that reality has spat in our face for more than 2,000 years—we naively clung to the bars of ephemeral reason in order to remain proud and swift in demonstrating that it was indeed so, that our in‑crescendo path had been a correct and exact evolution.

But in our present age, that reality has collapsed. It no longer merely spits in our faces: it places us in danger of death and extinction. And still, ingenuously, we listen to the declarations of UN bureaucrats, summoning meetings among the deaf in order to stop the irrational wars perpetrated by empires—wars that leave behind trails of corpses, many of them, regrettably, children (the genocide perpetrated against Palestinian children). All this merely shows that reason ceased long ago to guide our spirits and our lives.

It is the eternal return of the original entropy, which forces us to repeat our sad history as barbarians, where the death drive accompanies ephemeral men.

And it would seem that this question is now superfluous. That it has already been answered by both Nietzsche and Freud. And that even though we might explain again and again that man is imprisoned by his aggressive and savage drives, that human beings are cruel and take pleasure in causing suffering—homo homini lupus—we nonetheless find ourselves, once more, astonished before any violent event, asking:
how can a human being cause so much harm to another?

On the one hand, we react by refusing to recognize ourselves in the violent person. We hastily assert our unfamiliarity with him, raise our arms to the sky, and ask that such a thing never happen again.

When we are told that guilt constitutes a device of subjugation, a mode of administering both sexual and aggressive impulses used by culture and society, we assert our conviction that there is a relationship of interdependence between guilt and violence: the more guilt, the less violence.

Yet what is happening is the opposite: there is less guilt, and therefore more violence. So we insist that what is needed is to make human beings feel more guilty—to increase guilt, to make man more culpable. That, we say, is the solution.

But what if guilt has never served such a purpose? What if it is even an accomplice of humanity’s savage nature? Or so naïve that it believed it could truly domesticate man—but failed? For instinct emerges whenever it wishes. We are not deceived beings: there is a cunning in unreason, a cunning of instinct, and even the drive has taught reflection to reflect, taught thinking to think.

Analytic theory leads us to conclude that there is no restitution of lack, no annihilation of the drive; only substitutions and displacements, metaphors and metonymies. Desire is always partially fulfilled. Thus, guilt itself is merely a fulfillment of desire—nothing more.

And in that same line of thought, Freud explains how we began to build our societies, our social cohesion, our mutual tolerance. To do so, he uses a Darwinian model of the primitive horde dominated by a powerful male—a kind of Eden. As Freud writes:
“(…) a violent, jealous father who reserves all the females for himself and expels the sons when they grow up.”

Later, in Totem and Taboo, he continues:
“(…) one day, the expelled brothers joined together, killed and devoured the father, thereby putting an end to the paternal horde. United, they dared to do and accomplished what would have been impossible individually.”

There is an important detail: this dead father was both admired and feared. Freud identifies the totemic banquet as the act that repeats that primordial murder, in which the elements contained in the response to the killing—hate and love, introjection (of the ideal) and expulsion (aggressiveness)—are reenacted.

A reminder of that memorable and criminal deed with which so many things began: social organizations, ethical limitations, religion.

One can perceive that the father of the primitive horde was always there, waiting for the moment to reappear, to seize total power, even if it meant destroying everything civilization had built. And this is precisely what the fathers of today’s primitive hordes are doing.

Only in this way can we explain how, suddenly and violently, they dismantle agreements and institutions, the rule of law, equality, civility—everything that cost us blood and suffering to construct—and how they make us believe in these structures as our only epistemic narrative for organizing social life.

There are political phenomena that seem impossible to explain solely through economic, electoral, or institutional categories. Donald Trump’s rise belongs to that class of events that force us to look more deeply, to the place where politics touches the most archaic structures of collective psychic life.
Perhaps that is why it is best to begin not in Washington nor in Mar‑a‑Lago, but in a much more remote place: the anthropological myth that Freud elaborated in Totem and Taboo to explain the origin of human society.

The second half of the 20th century was marked by a systematic erosion of traditional authority figures. Cultural critique, radical individualism, and distrust toward institutions produced a phenomenon that Lacanian psychoanalysis describes as the “decline of the Name‑of‑the‑Father.”

Jacques Lacan stated this clearly:
“The Name‑of‑the‑Father is what structures the symbolic order.”

The paternal function does not simply refer to the biological father, but to the symbolic principle that organizes law, authority, and limit within a society.
When that function weakens, the symbolic order loses stability.

Late modernity celebrated for decades the emancipation from all figures of authority. It proclaimed the triumph of the autonomous individual, the liberation from traditional hierarchies, and the dissolution of the rigid structures of the past.

Now, they do not even bother to justify their barbaric acts rationally. They present themselves as representatives of reason and truth, even though stupidity and fallacy spill out of their mouths.
Who granted Trump the authority to decide who should rule the countries he has attacked with lethal weapons?
Who granted Putin the right to declare Ukraine Russian territory?
Who gave Zelensky the authority to sacrifice generations of young Ukrainians in a war shaped by his fascistoid behavior?

What shall we tell a student of political science or international relations? Our sons and daughters?
That law does not exist?
That Michel Foucault was right?
That humanity lives in a relation of power?
That reason serves to justify, through democracy, the power of one man to subjugate another with weapons in defense of economic and territorial interests?

And we still witness how the revolt of the economic class led by Trump finds its identical copy in territories occupied militarily or economically. We see “leaders” rejoice at being invited to a meeting in which they are told to their faces: America is for Americans, meaning the United States, and that Latin America and the Caribbean are the backyard of the North American empire.

And most lamentable of all is the complicit silence before the crushing of the Western narrative that once allowed us to speak of civility. Those who dedicate themselves to thinking—intellectuals and academics—search the ashes for fragments of Enlightenment concepts, scraps to chew and recycle in order to continue saying, “we live in the best of all possible worlds.”

How can these paper intellectuals continue speaking of human rights, international law, democracy, gender equality, freedom, etc., when all of it has been demolished?
To rethink the Enlightenment means to construct “the other way out of the Enlightenment”, if we do not want to continue feigning madness, like Ulysses upon returning to his beloved Ithaca.

May our Western civilization rest in peace.

March 2026

https://ejemplomx.com/hacernos-los-locos/
Freud, S. (1998), Totem and Taboo (1912–13), vol. 13, Complete Works, Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires.