The Disease called Politics (1962)

The piece diagnoses modern politics as a pathological pursuit of power that functions as an enemy of life. Politics is portrayed not as the art of sustaining human flourishing but as the organization of control: bending, crushing, and directing life toward ends alien to growth. Contemporary examples - war scares that leave investors calmly buying defense stocks, leaders exulting in threats of annihilation, slogans like “power all the way” - illustrate a morbid relish for domination. Where older political madness remained one sphere among many, now politics claims the whole of life, making its destructiveness total and placing humanity on the brink of self-annihilation.

The response prescribed is clinical and radical: recognize politics as sickness, refuse to legitimize or rationalize its conventions, and withdraw the energies that feed it. Conventional remedies such as deterrence and pragmatic expertise are dismissed as attempts to cure madness from within madness. Instead of romantic engagement in historical maelstroms, the call is for detachment sufficient to see the illness for what it is, to stop venerating power, and to reorient toward life-affirming, noncoercive values. Cultural subversion and naked comic exposure of political morbidities are counted among the few salutary defenses.