Dear readers, in this piece I offer a metaphoric framework for thinking about the mindset and actions of US president Donald Trump, but it can be applied to other world leaders too. I don’t see it as perfect, but I invite you to extend upon, or nuance, the metaphor in the comments. I hope you enjoy!

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In 1995 a moody anime series called Neon Genesis Evangelion was released, and it quickly became a cult classic. It revolved around an alienated boy - Shinji Ikari - who is recruited to pilot a huge robot warrior called Eva Unit 1. The fighting machine has been designed by his cold and estranged father for the Japanese government, in order to battle a mysterious race of monsters called the Angels.

The series follows Shinji as he struggles with the emotional and physical strain of controlling this giant appendage. That strain is particularly acute because the Eva only works if it’s harmoniously synced with Shinji’s own nervous system. Any panic attacks he might have in the cockpit can send it reeling into a berserk frenzy, and any damage done to it by an Angel can wreak havoc on his own body.

Evangelion is a classic in the mecha genre, a branch of anime and manga that focuses on human pilots manning robot bodies. The genre extends beyond Japan - for example, the American series Power Rangers featured teens controlling mechas called Zords. Evangelion, however, is unparalleled in exploring just how dark and emotional this fusing of human and robot can be. The creation of a cyborg taxes both sides.

In sci-fi culture, the cyborg is a melding of human and machine. The combined entity has both greater reach and greater power than its human component. In this sense it represents extension and amplification of human capacity. As Shinji flexes his puny chest to thrust his arm forward 40cm in the cockpit, Eva Unit 1 delivers a 40 metre power-punch with the force of a freight train.

The mecha extends and amplifies the will of its pilot, and in many ways this a broader metaphor for technology more generally. The axe, for example, is an extension of the human arm. It amplifies and focuses a muscle’s energy to leave a gouge in a tree. Likewise, a Caterpillar excavator uses fossil fuels to turn the hand of its pilot into a powerful robot claw that can gouge whole chunks out of the earth. The excavator is, basically, a small mecha.

The figure of the cyborg in sci-fi culture doesn’t merely represent an extended and amplified human, but also a human that has become dependent upon external appendages, and therefore enmeshed with the machine. In the case of Evangelion, humanity’s survival is dependent upon the fusion of Shinji’s nervous system with the Eva, but this same phenomenon occurs in our lives. We cannot make it through a day without recourse to our technology, for we have lost the ability to survive without it. In many ways, we already are cyborgs.

A simple machine is an assemblage of components linked together under some common system of management, and powered by some energy source. We can, however, extend that concept to refer to larger and more complex assemblages, which may be held together under more sprawling management systems. For example, a corporation can be pictured as a globe-spanning assemblage of subsidiaries which collectively own an even vaster assemblage of assets, all tied together under some management structure.

Think, for example, about an agricultural corporation. It might own tens of thousands of combine harvesters - each a small mecha - tethered together through a common management system that’s presided over by a big boss somewhere. At some abstract level, we have here a mecha-of-mechas, a sprawling legal machine tethered to an army of smaller physical machines.

The CEO of a corporation - like the controller of an excavator - can try to make the corporation do things by sending out executive orders from a boardroom. The boss of an oil firm, for example, can instruct the entity to gouge out a thousand kilometre long trench in the earth to lay a pipeline.

These orders, though, have to filter through many layers of sub-management. By the time the message reaches the frontlines of the entity it might be bogged down by all manner of glitches, short-circuitings, unresponsive parts and unintended feedbacks.

We see a contradiction here. While it’s true that the theoretical power of the controller goes up with the scale of the assemblage, it’s also true that greater scale brings greater unpredictability, with the orders holding less direct purchase over the actions of the entity. While I can be pretty confident in swinging an axe towards a precise target, a CEO of a multi-national corporation cannot guarantee that their instructions will translate into a precise outcome.

One of the main reasons for this is not only the complexity of interlinkages, but the fact that a corporation isn’t merely an assemblage of mechanical parts. Rather, it’s also an assemblage of human beings, who all have their own sense of agency. They do not like being treated as mere ‘cogs in the machine’. They wish for their humanity to be recognised.

Most modern corporations are explicitly hierarchical and often authoritarian, in the sense that they have supreme leaders who have the ability to simply cut loose anyone who disobeys their orders. Most CEOs, however, understand that they cannot simply treat their staff as appendages of a supreme controller, because it creates bad morale and rebellion, and stifles feedback from the frontlines which is needed for good management.

So, while it is possible for us to metaphorically attempt to imagine a corporation as a kind of ‘mecha’ that’s fused into the will of its supreme leader, most CEOs cannot afford to think of themselves as a mecha pilot. They cannot walk around the offices as if they were the only agent, as if their entire staff were simply there to extend and amplify the body and mind of the CEO.

In fact, by the time you’re at the helm of a large corporation, you’re supposed to see yourself as being a team leader in a human organisational structure that involves tens of thousands of others, and you’re supposed to be taking in their feedback and recognising their humanity.

This applies even more when we go up another level to the modern nation state. The person at the helm of a government does have a theoretical ‘mecha’ that they can manipulate via a whole range of mechanisms - policy, law, violence, soft power etc - but the average democratic leader isn’t supposed to think of themselves like that. They’re supposed to see the State as being an entity above-and-beyond themselves that they serve. They’re supposed to see themselves as a temporary caretaker granted power by a body-politic who is the true ‘agent’, and they are supposed to subordinate themselves to that body-politic.

That’s the theory at least, but of course it’s a helluva lot more complex than that in practice. Executive power always justifies itself as being enacted on behalf of a body-politic - all presidents claim to be acting as instruments of their voters - but this can never be separated from the private and personal interests of the person wielding the power. That’s why checks-and-balances are supposed to exist: they are designed to reign in any rogue pilot who is riding the state machinery too hard.

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In the case of the US, however, the state machinery extends far beyond its own borders. The US is an empire, and its power is embedded in a gigantic assemblage of murky connections throughout the world. The US state acts not only through networks of proxies, and alliances, and foreign military bases, but also through its corporate sector, media and cultural influence. If you zoom out, the US ‘mecha’ extends across the globe, with the capacity to strike directly through missiles or indirectly through films and music.

The sheer scale of this assemblage means that most US presidents cannot picture themselves as a mecha pilot. It’s simply untenable to imagine that this complex is a mere extension of its leader. Indeed, for a president to imagine that the US state simply exists to reflect his personal desires and dreams would be the deepest form of narcissism. It would be to imagine that other consciousnesses are simply mechanical parts that have no purpose beyond enacting his own desires. It would be to imagine that voters are not primarily instructors granting a task, but rather loyal devotees recognising a supreme divine power.

I’m not going to come out and say that Trump overtly thinks of himself as a divine mecha pilot. I’m not going to claim that he is unable to process the fact that other people have wills and consciousnesses that do not reflect his own. I will, however, say that he does use a lot of rhetoric, and display a lot of behaviour, that suggests that he might view himself like this.

Certainly we can say that, compared to other US presidents, he’s coming a lot closer to seeing the state as an extension of his own body, as if he has only a hazy sense of a distinction between himself and its powers. A defining feature of his presidency has been to centralise power into a ‘unitary executive’. It often does seem that he sees the White House and Mar-a-Lago as cockpits of a planetary scale mecha fused with his own nervous system, a colossal exoskeleton that he controls through executive orders, which turn his small thoughts into giant globe-spanning punches.

This attitude applies beyond immediate state institutions. For example, he sometimes seems to imagine that US corporations exist to enact his broader plan for the world, and that allies are subordinated appendages. This is reflected in the casual language of his speeches, in which complex, interdependent systems that have billions of connections - like the global economy, or the bond market - are spoken of as if they were easily manipulatable limbs, as if shifting the future of the world could be done through a phone call to a few mates.

He doesn’t seem to treat tariffs, military strikes, and sanctions as complex actions involving tens of millions of players that have wide-ranging and unpredictable consequences. Rather, it often appears as if he sees these and other mechanisms as fists that he can use to deliver precise blows across the globe from his desk.

If he does have this mentality though, he will also find himself with a problem, which is that this mecha wasn’t actually designed to fuse with him. He’ll often experience it as faulty, as it frequently fails to obey orders. It will seem to have components designed to frustrate his intentions. He might think the interface between his nervous system and the machinery of state has been infiltrated by a virus he calls the ‘deep state’, which is severing the connection between himself and the fists, weakening them. He might have tantrums, trying to shake pieces off the mecha that are not aligned with his being. Maybe he’ll feel an impulse to discard the soft power mechanisms because their connection to his body is just too diffuse. Maybe that’s why he will jettison USAID and try to shut down Hollywood and so on.

But, even if he was able to shake off those components that don’t sync up with him, he still finds himself at the helm of an extended imperial body that has - de facto - many decentralised centres of power. Regardless of what he imagines, he’s not in control of the stock market. He cannot push a button and make the Chinese - or the Iranians - do what he wants. He cannot simply subsume the interests of Big Tech, Big Oil and Big Finance under himself. He cannot simply ignore the fact that the mecha itself has a nervous system in the form of the US dollar - and petrodollar - and that such a system is constantly being affected by outside ‘pilots’. He doesn’t have nearly as much control of the machine than he imagines.

In fact, it may be the case that he himself is simply a reflection of the fact that the mecha has already gone berserk, unable to process the grief and angst of its own imperial decline.

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Dear readers,

In this essay I’d like to introduce you to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins’ work on kings, and how it can help us to understand not only the relationship of Venezuelans to Trump, but also the relationship between US Americans and Trump. Sahlins was the doctoral supervisor of the late David Graeber, who is one of my inspirations. Let’s begin with a review of one of Sahlins’ core concepts.

The Stranger King Myth

Reach back into history, and you’ll find mythological tales of the Stranger King repeated across different cultures.

These Stranger King stories have a common structure. They are generally set in some troubled ancient regime in which a local despot rules, surrounded by bickering elites. The despot finds himself challenged by a foreign stranger with mysterious, even supernatural, origins. The stranger is often young, handsome and violent, and has a willingness to bend societal norms (or step outside of them). The despot tries to outwit or outfight the newcomer, but is defeated by their trickery or sheer force. The outsider usurps the power and founds a new kingdom.

There are many examples of the Stranger King myth. Anthropologists have found them in Polynesia, Melanesia, Sulawesi and the East African Rift Valley, and Classicists can find many examples in Greek and Roman mytho-histories. See, for example, this overview by Olaf Almqvist in which he demonstrates the stranger-king credentials of rulers like Aeneas, Pelops, Cyrus the Great, and Sargon of Akkad (even the mythical founder of Rome - Romulus - has a Stranger King vibe).

In fact, dynasties will often seek to trace their origins back to an ancient Stranger King. For example, the 16th century Mexica ruler Moctezuma reportedly said that he descended from a lineage of “strangers who immigrated hither from a very distant land”1.

If we talk about Stranger Kings, however, we also have to talk about the legendary anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1930-2021), who took time to analyse them. His writing on Stranger Kings began in 1982, but his last work on the topic was a collaboration with the late David Graeber in 2017, in a book called On Kings (you can find an open access version of it here). In it, Sahlins and Graeber note some key features of the Stranger King:

On his way to the kingdom, the dynastic founder is notorious for exploits of incest, fratricide, patricide, or other crimes against kinship and common morality; he may also be famous for defeating dangerous natural or human foes. The hero manifests a nature above, beyond, and greater than the people he is destined to rule—hence his power to do so…. (T)he monstrous and violent nature of the king remains an essential condition of his sovereignty. Indeed, as a sign of the metahuman sources of royal power, force can function politically as a positive means of attraction as well as a physical means of domination.2

In some ways this is a more sophisticated take on the ‘might is right’ concept. The stranger king might be monstrous, but by stepping outside of normal rules, he creates a mystique, a sense that he has access to powers beyond the ordinary world, and this can become a source of legitimacy.

Equally important, however, according to Sahlins, is that the Stranger King enters into some kind of social contract with the conquered people.

…there is invariably a tradition of contract: notably in the form of a marriage between the stranger-prince and a marked woman of the indigenous people—most often, a daughter of the native leader. Sovereignty is embodied and transmitted in the native woman, who constitutes the bond between the foreign intruders and the local people. The offspring of the original union… thereby combines and encompasses… the essential native and foreign components of the kingdom.3

Not only will the woman domesticate the otherwise dangerous outsider, but local elites see opportunities to reform themselves around the Stranger King, seeing in this external power the potential to overcome their own internal divisions or turmoil.

So, while Stranger King myths might involve heroic, violent, or otherworldly power grabs, they aren’t necessarily stories of straightforward conquest. In fact, they are often stories of usurpation, and Sahlins notes that this pattern actually occurs in various, fairly recent, historical situations.

Given their own circumstances—including the internal and external conflicts of the historical field—the indigenous people often have their own reasons for demanding a “king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Samuel 8:20). Even in the case of major kingdoms, such as Benin or the Mexica, the initiative may indeed come from the indigenous people, who solicit a prince from a powerful outside realm. Some of what passes for “conquest” in tradition or the scholarly literature consists of usurpation of the previous regime rather than violence against the native population.4

This framing of Stranger Kings gives us a more multi-faceted lens through which to view colonisation, because, in the words of Sahlins:

European colonization is often in significant aspects a late historical form of indigenous stranger-kingship traditions… besides Captain Cook in Hawai‘i… there was James Brooke, “the White Rajah of Sarawak,” whom local Iban considered the son or lover of their primordial goddess Keling; and Cortés, greeted by Moctezuma as Quetzalcoatl, the returning king and culture hero of the legendary Toltec city of Tollan.5

The take-away point is that colonists are seldom experienced in black-and-white terms, precisely because they often arrive into the already grey context of pre-colonial politics, with different sections of an indigenous population - with different agendas - seeing in them different things.

At this point it’s important to flag up that colonists always have a vested interest in claiming that they are warmly welcomed by the local population. European colonists, for example, imagined themselves as ‘bringers of light’ on a mission to ‘civilize savages’ living in a ‘primitive’ state of turmoil and godlessness. That said, anti-colonial narratives face the opposite problem, in that they can overemphasise the lack of agency in a colonised population. Sahlins’ discussion of Stranger Kings highlights the ambiguity in foreign takeovers, because the arrival of the violent outside ‘King’ might present opportunities for local elites, who may be prepared to collaborate with, or take a chance on the external power. They may see certain uses in the distant, aloof, strangers, who don’t seem to be subject to the same rules of engagement as the locals are.

This approach was applied by David Henley, for example, when he found evidence that the indigenous Minahasa on Indonesia found a certain usefulness in the 17th century Dutch East India Company, in particular because Stranger Kings tend to have “aloofness from local rivalries” and an “ability to provide relatively impartial conflict resolution”. The Dutch East India Company was unambiguously self-interested, colonial and extractive, but the point is that, rather than being mere meek bystanders to its history, local people had ambiguous entanglements with the corporate giant. They experience the coercive violence of the colonist, but may still take a gamble on a Stranger King.

King Donald the Strange

On January 12th 2026, Donald Trump posted a picture of himself on Truth Social, with the tag ‘acting president of Venezuela’. His takeover of the country is unambiguously colonial. Like all colonial ventures, however, there are many who will find ways to justify it.

For example, the conservative press has predictably fixated on the pre-existing dictator - the figure of Maduro - and his spectacular humiliation and overthrow at the hands of a cunning outsider brimming with almost supernatural vitality. There are stories about the jubilation of exiled Venezuelans, weeping with joy and thanking Trump.

Then we have all the stories about the blatant geopolitics of this. Unlike George W. Bush during the Iraq War, Trump has made almost no effort to disguise the fact that the regime change is all about THE OIL. In fact, he’s loudly proclaimed that it’s about the oil. He’s gone out of his way to talk about how US multinationals will literally take over the country. This makes it very easy for the left wing press to point out the very obvious imperial dynamics of this resource grab. Hell, even the centrist and conservative press are struggling to ignore that.

Let’s forget about the global press response, though. Through the eyes of many Venezuelans, we have here all the elements of a potential Stranger King situation. Ok, Trump isn’t a young, handsome challenger, but he certainly is a foreigner who doesn’t feel encumbered by traditional rules. In fact, the blatant impunity of his oil grab adds to the sense of awe and mystique around him, and he has certainly deposed a local despot.

At the risk of pushing the framework too far, we even find strange echoes of the mythological ‘marriage to the daughter’ element of the traditional Stranger King story: the female power players of Venezuela, like Delcy Rodríguez and Maria Corina Machado, must now domesticate the irascible outsider by entering into deals with him.

Crucially, while it’s true that the US actions have thrown the Venezuelan establishment into turmoil through violence, there already was turmoil in the pre-colonial situation, so this new incursion has simultaneously opened up new opportunities for local elites (and exiled elites), some of whom have long been seeking some way out of the situation. This could be a usurpation, rather than conquest, with potential for elites to strike a new ‘social contract’ with the foreign power.

Let’s take a moment, however, to unpack that loaded phrase, and how it relates to the Stranger King concept.

Social contract theory vs. social contract reality

The term ‘social contract’ is heavily associated with classic liberal theory, and classic liberal theory is a heavily abstract way of thinking about the world. When I say ‘liberal’ here, I don’t mean it in the modern US political sense, but rather in the original philosophical sense: early liberal philosophers - like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke - basically started from the assumption that humans are:

1. Individuals

2. Rational

3. Possessing of some kind of natural ‘individual rights’

From that opening position they then describe social formations as collections of individuals who have rationally come together. This sets the scene for mainstream economics, which basically says exactly the same thing, but applies it to economic interactions.

In the case of standard economists, they imagine individuals ‘choosing’ to ‘come together’ to ‘form markets’, but in the case of our 17th century Hobbes, he imagines rational individuals choosing to come together to form… well… a kind of absolutist monarchy to rule over them (which is partly why Hobbes is often misinterpreted as being ‘illiberal’).

In his Leviathan (1651) he explains that a monarch is a creation of individuals, who have chosen to give up part of their freewheeling-but-chaotic freedom (which they would have in a ‘state of nature’) in order to enter into a more constraining social contract with a monarch, in which the monarch will provide some structure - like property rights, law and order - so that the individuals can pursue their self-interest without being disrupted by disputes, theft, instability or in-fighting.

In it’s own context, Hobbes’ Leviathan was an attack on the idea that monarchs derive their power from a god (hence him being accused of atheism), but by describing kings as the secular creation of individuals, he also implied that individuals could dissolve the social contract if necessary, and return to being in a ‘state of nature’.

This was a politically radical statement to make in the context of 17th century England, but as a generalised account of actual human history it is kinda bullshit, precisely because - like all classic liberal theory - it starts from the ahistorical assumption that humans are individuals and that social formations are ‘chosen’. In reality, every person in history has always been born into an existing social context (aka. societal enmeshment always precedes any perception of being an individual, rather than the other way around) and it’s only in edge cases that we find a random collection of fully-grown adults who are somehow untethered and able to explicitly make some new ‘social contract’ with each other (for example, the only time I’ve ever experienced a ‘social contract’ was when I became naturalized as a British citizen, and - in the ceremony - was given a literal list of my rights and obligations, but of course no British-born person has ever seen this, and none of them ever ‘chose’ to ‘enter into’ the contract).

Still, the edge cases are important, and in many ways Stranger King myths describe one type of edge case. In a pre-existing society in a state of turmoil, it is possible for a foreign ruler to appear as a type of ‘Leviathan’ figure that can be ‘contracted’ with by allowing them to usurp. This might make some kind of rational sense to people entangled in an otherwise intractable conflict, who can dissolve some previous entanglement by jumping ship to the new one.

This is not to say that this will work out for the people involved, but this does help us to move past binary perspectives on the current Venezuela situation. On the one hand, I find Trump to be an obnoxious narcissist - and he’s now upping the stakes to being an unapologetic coloniser too - but I can still understand the gamble being taken by, for example, a Venezuelan exile who agrees to grant some leeway to him.

The Returning Stranger King

Let’s conclude by going one layer deeper. Perhaps the Stranger King myth is crucial to the entire Trump show, beyond his current Venezuelan adventures.

Think about it. In the run-up to his political campaigns, Trump has always presented himself as some kind of heroic outcast - a prodigal son in exile, shunned by The Establishment. The twist here is that he’s not technically a foreigner in the US, but he fashions himself as a local son that’s estranged from his true home, unfairly misrepresented by the New York Times, mocked by Hollywood, disrespected by Time Magazine.

From this starting point, the mythology unfolds. The estranged son returns as a Stranger King with a celestial mandate, on a mission to form a ‘contract with the people’ against the despotic ‘deep state’. This justifies overriding all pre-existing norms, checks and balances.

In Making Capitalism Bad Again, I noted that at least part of the euphoria that surrounds Trump comes from the fact that he gave permission to people to ignore the cognitive dissonance that characterises liberal versions of capitalism - the sense that you’re supposed to be a Good Boy and a Bad Boy at the same time - and, by taking on the ‘bad boy’ mantle, he indeed appeared as a monstrous outsider not subject to the niceties of the society.

In presenting himself as above and beyond existing norms, he could take on that Stranger King immunity. Through this lens, actions previously considered reprehensible - like attacking the press, centralizing power into the executive, threatening the judiciary, defunding the universities, sending in the National Guard to quell protests etc - can all be framed as signs that the Stranger King isn’t subject to the rules of the realm, and thereby draws his power from some distant, mystical source. That becomes a sign of his legitimacy in the eyes of his followers.

Returning the Sahlins, the Stranger King often comes to power not through conquest, but by usurpation aided and abetted by a local population who see in them a certain usefulness. There are many people who voted for Trump not because they particularly like him, but simply because they took a chance on him, seeing him as the proverbial Stranger, and ignoring his obvious inconsistencies, hypocrisies and flaws, while focusing on his outsider status, which gives him a quasi-supernatural vibe that may be worth taking a gamble on.

Given that Trump is heavily narcissistic, however, this Stranger King story probably plays out in his own head. He is now triumphant, yet remains deeply vulnerable, incredibly thin-skinned and increasingly maniacal. The Trump show might fly in 2024, but as time goes by, and as he gets increasingly lost in his own mythology about himself, he loses sight of those that brought him to power.

As he screws over the US shale gas industry by flooding the US with Venezuelan oil in an attempt to deal with inflation caused by tariffs, or sides with the Big Tech barons who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the rust belt, or disses the CEO of Exxon Mobil, he makes more and more enemies of those who took that gamble on him. Everyone smiles deferentially at the Stranger King, but it’s entirely possible that they’re all waiting for that moment when a newer, younger, and more handsome stranger sets foot in the land.

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When I left the financial sector in 2011, I began working on activist campaigns fighting for social and ecological justice. Upon seeing this, some people would call me a ‘reformed banker’. The phrase suggested that I once did ‘bad’, but was now trying to do ‘good’, having reformed myself.

This goodies-versus-baddies morality irritated me. In fact, rather than thinking of myself as a reformed banker, I thought of myself as a corrupted activist, a person who’d started out with a more black-and-white worldview, but who’d been shaded a mottled grey through deliberate exposure to the dark side (see my 2015 piece on Dark Side Anthropology).

I did, however, come to know people who thought of themselves as reformed bankers. Often they were individuals who’d grown up with conventional notions of professional success, and who’d gone into finance believing it was a respectable career path, but who’d later become disillusioned. Seeking something more meaningful, they’d pivoted to fields where they could use their skills for good.

The obvious path for many of them was to switch into the ‘finance for good’ space. This included the responsible investment sector, which used ESG (environmental, social and governance) metrics to make investment nicer. It included the natural capital community, who were trying to put prices onto the ‘ecosystem services’ offered by nature, so that those could be more readily valued within financial models that otherwise ignored them. There was also much buzz around climate finance, with innovations like ‘green bonds’ to steer money into low-carbon activities.

The field of social finance was also an option, with ‘social-impact bonds’ being pioneered to bring private sector investment into social work with teenage delinquents, or homelessness reduction, areas that traditionally yielded no profit for hard-nosed investors. Social finance got a boost in the UK around 2011 via the ‘Big Society’ agenda of the Conservative government, which wanted a reduction of state involvement in areas like community work and education, by replacing it with ‘social enterprise’ businesses who’d seek profit while doing good.

These scenes, however, were all politically coded as centrist. People involved in social and environmental finance were not anti-capitalists calling for the downfall of markets, or communists calling for state ownership of corporations, but they also weren’t cartoon banksters who’d smoke massive cigars and adorn themselves with gold-plated Rolexes and strippers.

Rather, like all centrist crews, they exuded a certain progressive sophistication, with clean modern venues for their events, and an assumption that you’d drink wine at dinner afterwards in an upmarket restaurant. This wasn’t the anarchist left, who’d gather in grungy squats, and it also wasn’t the old labour left, who’d gather in austere community halls. These were people who believed that capitalism could be good, if only we innovated it in that way.

This was, for want of a better term, the liberal world.

The nice face of capitalism

It’s common in the US for right-wingers to use the term ‘liberal’ to refer to anyone with any vague tendency towards anything that could be considered leftist, from hardcore Marxists who call for the overthrow of capitalism, to softcore entrepreneurs who call for gender-neutral bathrooms.

Actual liberalism, however, is a philosophy with multiple sides, because it originally just referred to a belief in the priority of the individual over the collective - otherwise known as ‘individual rights’ - along with an appeal to enlightened rationality.

In very crude terms, if old kings believed in traditional hierarchical conservativism, and the peasants were heading towards a belief in collectivist socialism, the urban capitalist classes might take on a liberal orientation.

Nowadays that orientation has a conservative version in libertarianism, which believes an individual capitalist should never be hounded by a mob of socialists, but it also has a left-ish ‘cultural liberalism’ version that believes an individual member of a minority should never be hounded by mobs of traditionalists (who’d otherwise beat up or bully people considered to be outsiders or weirdos).

These varied uses of the term make it particularly hard to use in argument, which is why people add prefixes to differentiate between versions of it - hence terms like ‘classical liberalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’, both of which are nowadays coded conservative, and ‘social liberalism’, which is considered more left wing (if you’d like to dive into the weeds of all this ambiguity, I’d encourage people to read Grace Blakeley’s recent piece Is Liberalism Really Dead).

That said, what ‘liberalism’ often now refers to at the level of vibes, is a kind of surface-level niceness that most readily takes root in sub-sections of wealthier socio-economic classes. If you want to get a feel for this, watch the classic UK series Downton Abbey. In it, Lady Sybil Crawley is one of the daughters of the conservative lord of the manor. She’s a liberal reformer who wants to extend more rights to the early 20th century working man. That’s the kind of man that her father is happy to lord himself over. The first minute of this captures that family tension…

There’s a long tradition of such liberal reformism. For example, during the racist apartheid regime in my home country of South Africa, the figure of the white liberal tried to stand up for exploited black workers during the 1970s and 80s. White liberals, however, were often viewed with suspicion by black radicals, who saw their well-meaning niceness as cosmetic. After all, was the white liberal truly going to give up their nice house and swimming pool for the dispossessed masses? (For an amazing exploration of this, see Rian Malan’s 1990 book My Traitor’s Heart).

Indeed, in true hard left circles, liberals are generally considered to be a distraction that dilutes the power of working class movements. More militant radicals aren’t interested in Lady Sybil being nice. They’re interested in confiscating her family’s property to break their hold over society.

This is one reason why proper lefties often see liberalism as a component, or outcome, of capitalism, a kind of ideological facade that can take root within it. Political strategist James Schneider puts it neatly when he describes liberalism as capitalism when it’s feeling relaxed and secure. It’s the ‘nice’ face of capitalism that will entertain the idea of alleviating things, and which grants greater status to those capitalists who make gestures towards being philanthropic.

A quintessential marker of capitalism’s liberal face then, is that it often makes strong appeals to good intentions, and when this face is in vogue, the heroes are capitalists with a heart. The ultimate liberal business hero is someone like Bill Gates. He’s a billionaire, so he must have played capitalism hard, but he also perceives himself as moral and responsible, and wants to ‘give back’.

In many ways, though, Bill Gates is the essence of that airline safety mantra - put on your own mask before helping others. He gets rich through exploiting the rules of the market - scaling up and dominating - and then seeks to ‘do good’ afterwards. His model is ‘do well for yourself, and then do good’, but a variant of this is to do well by doing good. Here, for example, is MasterCard imagining itself as a ‘good corporate citizen’.

The ‘doing well by doing good’ mantra is loved by corporate social responsibility officers, even if it’s always been marginal within capitalism itself. This ethos of trying to harmonise profit-seeking with areas traditionally neglected or screwed by profit-seekers turns up in phrases like ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘inclusive capitalism’, ‘compassionate capitalism’, and ‘sustainable capitalism’.

The dissonance of niceness in a harsh world

The liberal face of capitalism is inherently confusing. That’s because - when push comes to shove - capitalism isn’t inclusive, compassionate or sustainable.

I don’t say this sanctimoniously. It’s just a reality that we live in a fundamentally insecure economic structure, and that fundamental insecurity simply isn’t compatible with fundamental inclusion, compassion and sustainability.

For example, as a child grows up in a capitalist economy, they’ll become aware that, sometime in the future, they’ll have to fight for a place within a vast, fluid job market that’s almost impossible to predict or understand. They see giant firms, and realise that they’ll have to suck up to people in positions of hierarchy to try to get in.

Even if they, and you, get a place, it’s never secure or guaranteed. You’re probably going to spend an entire life in a state of constant competition against others, during which time you may or may not have secure housing or healthcare. You’ll be told to constantly upgrade as new waves of technology come swooping in like hurricanes, and you’ll be told that you’ll be ‘left behind’ if you fail to keep up.

In fact, the only way to secure yourself is to try to beat others down and accumulate ownership of stuff, and then use that power and ownership to get more power and ownership. That’s what ‘winning market share’ means.

We don’t call our economic system ‘marketism’, or ‘tradeism’. We call it capitalism, in reference to that process of capitalizing on previous power to get more. This is the reason we have god-like billionaires and transnational corporations that are more powerful than entire countries. It’s not really because these players are hard-working or skilled - there are many hard-working and skilled people who struggle in our system - but rather because they know how to play the capitalist game, how to exploit their position, and how to work the financial sector. Rather than pushing hard work and skill into caring for the sick, they’ve pushed their entire selves into the competitive struggle for power.

This scramble is presented as a virtue in standard capitalist ideology. You’re supposed to take life by the balls, compete your way to the top, tread on other people, take advantage of gaps where others are too slow, and so on. The biggest official heroes in our society are those who have done that. We fawn over a class of people who have leaned into somewhat sociopathic traits, but they are seen as inspiring and innovative go-getters.

In the end, the message is always the same: elbow other people out of the way, forget the long-term meaninglessness of this, and focus on accumulation. Scale it up. Outcompete. Monopolise control. Secure your legacy into eternity.

Unlike a hunter-gatherer group, where an individual member starving would be seen as a collective failure, official capitalist ideology tells you that a person struggling on the street has got nothing directly to do with you, because you don’t really live in ‘a society’. You’re just an individual, free of attachment.

In fact, in the harshest versions of the ideology, it’s assumed that everyone who gets ‘left behind’ deserves it, because they’re lazy, or weak, or stupid, or an inferior race, or not good at playing the game. The struggling person is someone who refuses to take responsibility for their life, and so deserves to live in poverty.

That’s the deep message in capitalism, but this harsh story coexists with the liberal alleviation narrative, which tries to say that this fundamentally extractive and competitive system can somehow also be a fundamentally life-sustaining and cooperative one.

Liberalism is like capitalism with a left-tinted mask on. Rather than shunning the ‘losers’ of society, it prefers to cast these unfortunates as not being on a level playing field, or needing certain forms of assistance or compassion. If we can have a fair market, everyone will get a fair chance and capitalism will be inclusive.

I totally understand why this story is appealing to people who are working corporate jobs that otherwise might feel soul-destroying, but in trying to merge ‘doing well’ with ‘doing good’, capitalism’s liberal mask sends out a contradictory message.

On the one hand, it keeps that basic capitalist story. You’re still supposed to do well for yourself, pursuing your desires over others, competing against them in the market, and growing your empire. In other words, you’re still supposed to behave like an arsehole.

On the other hand, you’re told to be a good person. You’re supposed to care about those you compete against. You’re supposed to care about the unemployed, the homeless, the environment, and the climate.

Projecting those two messages simultaneously into society causes cognitive dissonance. It’s like telling a young child that they’re loved, but only if they perform contradictory tasks, like being a good boy and a bad boy at the same time. That would leave a child with a pervasive sense of confusion, and a constant sense that they might actually lose the love by failing to complete the incompatible tasks. In this case they’re haunted by a constant sense of impending guilt.

This feeling is very common in liberal circles. For example, a middle-class person in London is well aware that our economy is eating the world’s resources, and that they - like everyone else - is complicit in that as they stand in the supermarket with their plastic-wrapped meal. So, they go through the motions of recycling their rubbish, believing that their failure to do that might somehow be the cause of our system’s unsustainability.

Perhaps they also feel that individual acts of buying ethically-sourced fair trade clothing will override the much more powerful systemic imperative to cut costs - which inherently favours sweatshop labour (or automation) - even as they’re constantly surrounded by messaging that tells them that cutting costs and getting cheap goods is great.

This feeling of being told to be a dickhead and not a dickhead at the same time makes you feel like a guilty failure. So, in situations where the liberal face of capitalism gets mainstreamed, and projected widely, more people are exposed to this sense of guilt. Get the cheap goods from Amazon, and also care about struggling workers. Go on this cut-price holiday, but make sure to offset your carbon. Undercut your business opponents so that they have to fire their staff, but also donate to charity.

It’s a dissonance that can get projected at the highest levels of society. For example, the government promotes its plans to boost competition and growth, while unveiling a separate plan to reduce carbon emissions that naturally emerge from such growth. The minister turns up at the World Economic Forum in Davos to have cocktails with business moguls enriched by exploitation of workers, and then sits down to speak on that panel about inclusive capitalism.

Square, or circle

When I occasionally used to hang around the responsible investment, natural capital, and social finance scenes around 2012-2015, they were incredibly marginal. The mainstream financial sector didn’t give a toss about ESG in their actual operations, and were continuing to fund oil, coal and oligarchs that collaborated with violent dictators.

ESG, though, was a talking point among the refined in society. It did seem nice, and it could be displayed by big firms as something they were thinking about. They’d often stick it on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) website page, even though almost none of their revenues came from that.

These alleviation stories always had that appeal to good intentions. It would be nice to have more diversity in our staff. It would be nice to have a non-destructive supply chain. It would be nice to not slowly poison our customers. As Coca Cola’s plastic bottles clogged up the world’s oceans, the company would tell us that it would be nice if we lived in a world of idyllic sustainable greenery.

De facto, ESG has mostly always just been a kind of performative charade, but one that was useful to act out in an age where there was legitimate and growing concern about climate change and inequality. It was the kind of thing that Oprah Winfrey might showcase, a feel good story about how you could carry on living your middle class life while being a good person.

This appeal to good intentions is deeply problematic, because it introduces an impossible ideal into your head. It tells you that we can square a circle, and that doing so is hopeful and progressive. In doing so, however, it also creates a pervasive sense that you’re failing to fulfil that, because - after all - a square isn’t a circle.

This guilt at failure can turn into a simmering, low-level anger at yourself, so how do we deal with this cognitive dissonance?

Well, one common path is to simply disassociate and not think about it. Another is to put on a brave optimistic face, and stick your head in the sand, telling yourself that a world of square circles is totally possible, and totally not magical thinking.

Alternatively, you can take a more meta, quasi-Buddhist path, and accept the fact that we live in a contradictory reality, and that life always calls for square circles no matter what system you live in.

The more obvious impulse, though, is to escape the dissonance. For example, you could try to detach from the situation. This is what people who ‘go off grid’ do. They don’t want to face the contradictions of life under capitalism, so tap out to create small, semi-detached enclaves for themselves in the countryside, or as a nomad in a van.

That’s not a viable path for the vast majority of people though, so another obvious way to escape the dissonance is to simply side with the square and drop the circle, or vice versa. For example, you can become a hard left agitator, rejecting consumerism and dedicating your life to forming authentic counter-power to capitalism, by unionizing workers or fighting privatisation and austerity.

Alternatively, you can lean in hard on your consumer capitalist side, and make a virtue out of being a ‘bad boy’.

Drill, bad boy, drill

In sociology, Labelling Theory notes that if you continually tell someone that they’re bad, one response is for them to co-opt that label as their identity. Rather than denying it, they turn around and say, ‘yes, I am bad’.

This latter path is perhaps best captured by Trump’s now famous use of the phrase ‘drill, baby, drill’. In using it he offered an escape from liberal capitalism’s cognitive dissonance. He was accepting the label of bad boy, and giving an official endorsement that you didn’t have to care about one side of the contradiction any more.

This goes a long way to making sense of that visible euphoria that accompanied the Trump campaign, that elation at putting the middle finger up to ‘liberal’ concerns. We don’t have to care any more.

So, rather than a person being angry with themselves for failing to square the circle, they turn that towards whoever they imagine has set out that impossible requirement. It makes sense then, that rage gets directed towards an imagined ‘liberal elite’, characterised by inconsistency, flip-flopping, masks, and square-circle hypocrisy. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Bill Gates and ESG have been heavily targeted by the new right.

There are of course elite interests at play in that attack - the oil industry, for example, hates ESG, and Big Tech needs shit-tonnes of dirty power to run its AIs - but there’s also a grass-roots desire to step into the badness.

To a person invested into the liberal capitalist worldview, this virulent popular attack comes across as callous. Why does a Trump supporter cheer hysterically at ‘drill baby drill’? Do they hate the environment?

I can’t speak for the deep Trump base, but I’m guessing that for many newcomers to the campaign, the euphoria at badness doesn’t come from hating the environment, so much as it comes from that feeling of release from contradiction, and the simplification of life that it brings.

To people in the ESG community, this attack is quite shocking. Much like the transgender community is a tiny minority that gets outsized levels of hate, ESG (with its ‘reformed bankers’) is a tiny minority in capitalism that has almost no power within the actual financial sector. The imagination of its power comes from the fact that corporations pasted ESG over their websites and PR statements while ignoring it, just like they pasted the rainbow flag over themselves.

Those acts of pasting created that illusion of what the Trump campaign called ‘woke capitalism’, but that’s just normal capitalism with its liberal mask on. Corporations wore that mask for little more than a decade, but in wearing it they told everyone who was subjected to their announcements and adverts (aka. the whole world) that they should be wearing it too.

Now, tearing that mask off is experienced in euphoric terms, with the thrill of transgression, like that child accepting their bad boy persona.

Badness as the ‘warrior ethos’

Here, however, is a complexity. Even if people feel a desire to take on the bad boy label, they still want to believe it’s a good path, rather than a weak cop-out. In psychology, they might call this ‘ego defence’, the processes you go through to tell yourself that you’re in the right.

For example, a person cheering at ‘drill baby drill’ is well aware that their rejection of conservation looks bad. After all, what human group in history would ever believe it to be good to destroy their own environment? That’s just stupid.

So, to escape the liberal capitalist dissonance while protecting their egos, they might be attracted to stories that cast ESG as a vile plot by elites to subjugate humans, rather than something that ‘does good’. This allows them to feel like they’re fighting some greater evil, rather than just being evil themselves.

More generally, they protect the ego by framing the bad-boy persona as a series of positive values, such as strength, competition, vigour, and innovation, all of which are imagined to have been suppressed, or denied, while wearing the mask.

Indeed, the tearing off of the mask is accompanied by an imagination of taking up arms again, or adorning the helmet of the warrior once more.

A good example of this was Marc Andreessen’s 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, in which he - the world’s most powerful venture capitalist - imagines that capitalism has been terribly emasculated by woke pessimists who are holding back the potency of the market, noting that:

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

He goes on to claim that technology and capitalism create an “engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance”, which “never ends” as it “spirals continuously upward”, serving human wants and needs which are “endless”, and that this continues in spite of “continuous howling from Communists and Luddites”.

At the risk of being crude, Marc’s Manifesto is like a thrusting dick, throbbing with excitement at leaving behind stupid concerns about fairness, equality and sustainability. This same impulse circulates within the ‘manosphere’, in which environmentalism is presented as an attack on masculinity, a requirement to care, conserve and hold back when your job is to dominate, thrust and move forward.

This isn’t new. In 2010 I gatecrashed the London launch event of an architectural manifesto called MANTOWNHUMAN. It was a bunch of middle-aged male architects who were complaining that sustainability was emasculating their profession. They were being prevented from digging into the earth with their bold futurist designs. Their complaint foreshadowed Marc Andreessen. They moaned that:

Nowadays 'architecture' and 'design' are regularly prefixed with words like 'inclusive', 'participatory', 'community-centred', 'sustainable', 'ethical', 'ecological', 'efficient', 'carbon-neutral', 'socially-engaging' or 'environmentally-responsible'… Why has the mere act of designing taken on such a moralistic mantle?

Their manifesto, like Marc’s, called for a form of design that was bold and brazen enough to not care about ‘virtue signalling’. In fact, they were going out of their way to do vice signalling, naming themselves as champions of ‘socially irresponsible design’.

The disgruntled men of ‘Mantown’ were, back in 2010, already signalling that the contradiction in capitalism’s liberal face weighed most heavily on men, who might have the greatest desire to escape it. After all, they’re historically the ones most heavily force-fed the competitive side of the capitalist story (and also the ones who stand to lose the most from forms of alleviation).

In fact, such men might look upon people like Sheryl Sandberg, Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris as their nemesis: business-oriented women who also insisted on niceness or other ‘feminine’ values.

This association between liberal capitalism and ‘femininity’ means they might fantasise an escape that involves a turn towards a cliched macho-ness. We see this in the words of US defence secretary Pete Hegseth when, in 2025, he said “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind”, in favour of a “warrior ethos”. As Hegseth seeks to rename the defence department to the Department of War, it’s a metaphor for the economic system too: you’re a soldier in the war of the market, so forget the Geneva Convention, and get out there and fight. Commit atrocities if you have to.

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Conclusion: The contradictions of honesty

It’s a common refrain for people to say that Trump is ‘honest’, but that’s because he’s not attempting to square the circle. He tells you to play hard, eat red meat and drive gas-guzzling cars, because - let’s face it - you’re implicitly told to do that even within liberal capitalism, so just drop the facade.

Nevertheless, in leaning into this ‘honesty’, Trump also creates contradictions of his own. For example, he tells people that capitalism is a system that is supposed to reward the most hard-working and the most innovative, but he also insists that its existing elites are part of a ‘swamp’ that uses a corrupt ‘deep state’ to subvert the fair rules of the market.

This story involves whitewashing the actual historical reality of capitalism, which has always been underpinned by states, law-fare and cronyism. Capitalism developed out of feudalism - the remains of which are showcased in Downton Abbey - and never once in history has it begun with a ‘level playing field’. It’s always been a system that favours people who start off with more capital and political connections, and are able to capitalize on that, just like Trump himself.

What’s fascinating, and kinda horrifying, to outside observers, is that Trump so blatantly follows the cronyistic model that it must surely require a new form of cognitive dissonance on the part of his followers to not see that.

Indeed, there’s something very kludgy in the Trump narrative. It’s like he spotted an opportunity to unite people against a common enemy - the dissonant ‘liberal establishment’ - but cannot fully disentangle himself from accusations that he’s tainted by hypocrisy himself (hence his desperate efforts to distance himself from Epstein).

The bad boy label can, however, help him here again. The ‘establishment’ does bad while claiming to be good - which is ‘swampy’ - which means honesty might entail showcasing the sludge that surrounds yourself. When Trump openly screws his supporters by selling them his memecoin, or enriches his friends and family via nepotism, he’s leading by example - like a general in the war of capitalism - showing his followers that it’s a dickish system that you have to behave like a dick within, and that you’re a weakling loser if you don’t do it.

In fact, at face value it actually looks more like Trump is attempting to ‘democratize’ the swamp, to spread it more widely, rather than draining it.

That, however, would be a generous interpretation. When you push past Trump’s apparent promotion of some populist ‘bottom-up’ capitalism-of-the-people, you’ll see that - in the background - what’s truly emerging is a new picture of Downton Abbey.

In this picture, we have loyal billionaires taking their place as lords. They embrace their position in the hierarchy, having no embarrassment at it, and demanding respect. Such swagger, though, is imagined to be inspiring to the servants downstairs, who imagine that they too can be the lord if only they pursue it hard and dirty enough, and push each other out the way.

One thing everyone can agree upon is that they hate the liberal reformer Lady Sybil. She’s telling the servants that they’re unfortunate, when they want to believe that they too can be Elon, or Larry Ellison, or Andreessen, or the Winkelvoss Twins.

Above all, this is a vision of respect for hierarchy. The populist movement isn’t interested in Bill Gates saying that he feels sorry for the bottom billion. Rather, all that matters is focusing on trying to better your immediate self and your immediate family by staying on the winning team, which rightfully holds a higher place over others.

At the simplest scale you’re supposed to be a hard working entrepreneur fighting for Team You, but you do so because you’re also a family man protecting Team Family, and a proud patriot flying the flag for Team Country, which succeeds by crusading for Team God. Those teams are nested within each other like a Russian doll, and your morality within this framework emerges from how hard you fight for each.

In many ways, this is just a restatement of old school conservativism. We’re back to the 1950s, and all you have to do is be a good unquestioning patriot fighting the godless commies, protecting your family, and winning in the (sorta) ‘free market’, while believing that you too can be a billionaire. You’re free from disloyal thoughts and un-American doubt. You don’t have to be embarrassed about clawing for status by driving your big car and eating your big steak and yelling at homeless people to get a job.

James Schneider notes that people like Bill Gates want to present themselves as champions against the rise of this new gold-plated illiberalism, but in many ways the former is just a different face of the latter.

As James notes, fascisty or thuggish vibes emerge when capitalism is feeling insecure and anxious. That’s when the systemic forces within it will - through thousands of degrees of interconnection - come to favour leaders who batten down the hatches and get people to lean into the more authoritarian parts of their personality. That involves de-prioritizing experimental free-form thought, and making it more rigid.

The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought characterises the ‘authoritarian personality’ as follows:

A personality type characterized by extreme obedience and unquestioning respect for authority. These defining characteristics are usually accompanied by rigidity, conventionality, prejudice and intolerance of weakness or ambiguity

This is the aura of a character like Biff Tannen in the 1985 film Back to the Future. He’s a douchebag bully who insults weirdos on the street while thinking of himself as an alpha man among men who doesn’t like contradiction, or wishy-washy, unpatriotic, deviant liberals.

Good for Biff, but in the end capitalism doesn’t really care about him either. All it cares about is accumulation, and if turning people into Biff is what’s required to do that at the current moment, then so be it.

I personally find Biff inauthentic, unimaginative, underwhelming and un-embracing of the diversity and weirdness of the human spirit. He’s a character full of fear, masking his insecurity with outward brazeness, like a person who puts a straight jacket over their own soul to protect themselves.

I feel sorry for Biff, but - more than that - I feel sorry for everyone he will harm. That’s why I will fight him.

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