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

 

Notes from the Ground

Dr. Lenin Torres Antonio

In these late modern times, where drive and violence roam freely throughout the world, an uncomfortable question slips in: how can a human being do so much harm to others?

These times in which the ideological and semantic framework that sustained our public life made us repeat, almost like a prayer, without ceasing, that “we live in the best of all possible worlds,” that we built supranational organizations so that through dialogue and by using reason we would resolve conflicts between peoples, and that the man illuminated by the Kantian light of reason would remain eternally happy, illuminated by that eternal light, and even that our position in the evolutionary pyramid would have to be at the summit, since no animal enjoyed reason and wisdom.

Although the history of man has been the history of his internal and external wars, and that reality has been spitting in our face for more than 2000 years, we innocently clung to the bars of ephemeral reason to keep ourselves exclusive and quick to demonstrate that this was indeed so, that our path in crescendo had been toward a correct and exact evolution.

But that reality in these times collapsed, and it not only spits in our face, it puts us in danger of death and extinction, and we still naively watch the statements of the bureaucrats of the UN, calling meetings among the deaf to stop the irrational wars carried out by the empires, wars that are leaving a trail of the dead, and many unfortunately children (the genocide perpetrated against Palestinian children) that only demonstrate that reason long ago ceased to guide our spirits and our lives.

The eternal return of the original entropy, which made us repeat our sad history of barbarians, where the death drive accompanies ephemeral men.

And it would seem that this question is unnecessary. That it already obtained an answer, both from Nietzsche and from Freud, and that despite the fact that we could explain again and again that man is imprisoned by his aggressive, savage drive nature, that the human being is cruel, that he enjoys making others suffer — homo homini lupus (man is the wolf of man) — nevertheless, again and again we would ask ourselves, surprised before any violent act that might be witnessed: how can a human being do so much harm to another?

There is, on the one hand, the reaction of not recognizing ourselves in the violent one, and quickly we express our unfamiliarity with him, we raise our arms to the sky and ask that this never happen again.

When we are told that guilt constitutes a device of taming, of administration of both sexual and aggressive impulses, used by culture and society, we express our conviction that there will be a relationship of interdependence between guilt and violence, thus the more guilt the less violence.

And what happens is that there is less guilt, and because of that violence has increased, therefore what is lacking is to make man have more guilt, therefore guilt must be increased, let us seek that man be more guilty, that is the solution.

But could it not be that guilt has never served such purposes, and perhaps it may even be an accomplice of the savage nature of man, or it was so naive that it thought it could truly domesticate man and failed. For instinct appears when it wishes, that we are not deceived beings, that there exists a cunning of unreason, of instinct, and even the drive taught reflection to reflect, taught thinking to think.

Analytical theory leads us to the conclusion that there is no restitution of lack, that there is no annihilation of the drive, that there are only substitutions and displacements, metaphors and metonymies, that there is always partial fulfillment of desire. Thus guilt itself is a fulfillment of desire and nothing more.

And in that same order of ideas Freud explains how we began to build our societies, our social cohesion, our mutual tolerance, for this he uses a Darwinian formulation about the primitive horde governed by powerful males. A kind of Eden. There is, as Freud writes, “(...) a violent, jealous father who reserves all the females for himself and expels the sons when they grow up.”

Later he continues in his book Totem and Taboo, (...) one day the expelled brothers allied themselves, killed and devoured the father, and thus put an end to the paternal horde. United they dared to do and carried out what individually would have been impossible.

There is a fact: this dead father was admired and at the same time feared. Freud places the totemic banquet as the act of repetition of that primordial murder, where the elements contained as reaction in the murder are re-enacted: hatred and love, introjection (of the ideal) and expulsion (aggressiveness).

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

It can be perceived that the father of the primitive horde was always there, waiting for the moment to appear, to seize total power, even destroying everything that civilization had built, and exactly that is what the fathers of the primitive hordes have done at this moment.

Only in this way can we explain how suddenly agreements and institutions, rule of law, equality, civility, etc., which cost us blood and suffering to build, are dismantled, and how we were made to believe in them as our only epistemic narrative to organize our life in society.

There are political phenomena that seem impossible to explain solely through economic, electoral or institutional categories. The rise of Donald Trump belongs to that class of events that force us to look more deeply, where politics touches the most archaic structures of collective psychic life.

Perhaps for that reason it is convenient to begin not in Washington nor in Mar-a-Lago, but in a much more remote place: in the anthropological myth that Sigmund Freud elaborated in Totem and Taboo to explain the origin of human society.

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

Jacques Lacan formulated this idea clearly: “The Name-of-the-Father is what structures the symbolic order.”

The paternal function does not refer simply to the biological figure of the 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. The triumph of the autonomous individual was proclaimed, the liberation from traditional hierarchies, the dissolution of the rigid structures of the past.

Now they do not even bother to justify rationally their acts of barbarism, and they present themselves as if they were the representatives of reason and truth, although from their mouths come stupidity and fallacies: who granted Trump the authority to decide who should govern the countries he has attacked with lethal weapons, who attributed to Putin that Ukraine is Russian territory, who gave Zelensky the authority to sacrifice generations of young Ukrainians dead in war because of his fascist-like behavior, what shall we say to a student of politics or international relations, to our sons and daughters, that law does not exist, that Michel Foucault was right, that man lives in a relation of power, that reason serves to justify through democracy the power of one man to subdue through weapons those who represent his economic and territorial interests, and still see how that revolt of the economic class led by Trump has its exact copy in the occupied territories whether militarily or virtual-economically, see “leaders” rejoicing in being invited to a meeting where they are told to their face: America is for the Americans, that is, the United States, and Latin America and the Caribbean the backyard of the North American empire.

And, most lamentable, the complicit silence before the crushing of the Western narrative that sustained us to speak of civility, from those who dedicate themselves to thinking, the intellectuals and the university scholars, searching in the ashes for fragments of concepts of the Enlightenment, leftovers to chew and recycle in order to continue saying, “that we live in the best of all possible worlds,” how can those paper intellectuals continue speaking of human rights, international law, democracy, gender equality, freedom, etc., if everything has been demolished, and rethinking the Enlightenment represents constructing “the other exit from the Enlightenment,” if we do not want to continue pretending 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), volume 13, Complete Works, Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires.