DESCRIPTION: Why societies in decline are heading for ruin with their eyes wide open. Part 1: The ideal self of the empire, Nietzsche’s ambivalent concept of ‘chosen-ness’, denial, division and the political utility of nostalgia.

I am well aware of this, but nevertheless

This first part examines the psychological mechanics of an apparent blind spot in structures of power in decline: the ideal self of the empire, the ambivalent figure through which the ‘chosen ones’ survive the loss of power, the collective narcissism, the denial and that division which forges enemy stereotypes out of structural problems. The second part follows the same structure further downwards, to the loosening of mass cohesion and to the denial of grief.

The fig leaf of the decline of power

‘I know full well, but …’ This phrase, in which someone acknowledges a truth whilst, in the same breath, refusing to accept it, is perhaps the most accurate description of how ruling political orders confront their own decline. They are rarely unaware of their difficulties. They produce reports, commission studies, stage debates and declare states of emergency. What they cannot do is allow this knowledge to alter the fantasy upon which their cohesion rests. In such systems, confidence is one of the most reliable defences against fear.

Empires are apparatuses of power and libidinal constructs.

Imperial decline is, of course, first and foremost a matter of military and economic power. These are the indispensable material preconditions. No order survives on faith alone. But neither does a political order sustain itself through material factors alone. Empires are also libidinal constructs. They organise identifications, disseminate ideals, create enemy stereotypes and bind their members to authority through fantasies of collective grandeur. Their power rests not only on coercion but also on their ability to determine what people desire, fear, deny, and consider unthinkable. When we ask why a power structure does not act in accordance with what it obviously knows, we are asking a question about desire.

From the outset, psychoanalysis has provided concepts for this field: identification with the leader, the ego ideal, narcissistic injury, projection, splitting, denial and the return of the repressed. Freud’s account of group psychology does not treat the social bond as a mere collection of individuals who happen to share a territory. It understands collective cohesion as mediated by libidinal bonds: vertical bonds to an authority or an ideal, and horizontal identifications amongst those who share a sense of ‘we’. The two axes hold each other in place. If these bonds weaken, anxiety, hostility and a restless search for new objects of identification to replace the old ones ensue. This does not feature in any assessment.

The Empire as a symbolic structure

In this light, an empire can be understood as a symbolic structure that generalises its own particular power. It makes domination appear as civilisation, hierarchy as merit, expansion as security, and obedience as participation in a shared greatness. It employs an image of collective superiority to which both rulers and the ruled can attach their self-love, so that even the humblest subject feels magnified by the grandeur of the whole. Its crises do not begin only when resources fail or rivals advance. They begin earlier and more subtly, as soon as the fantasies that have organised consent can no longer process the contradiction: when inequality becomes too visible to be justified, when violence relegated to the periphery returns to the centre as insecurity, and when the ruling class can no longer credibly present its own interests as the interests of all.

The historical problem is therefore not whether every empire follows a predetermined life cycle. It does not. Political entities decay, reorganise, break apart, recover and persist, and they do so in fundamentally different ways. Any theory that promises otherwise has substituted a myth of decline for the study of history. But the psychological mechanisms by which ruling orders confront their limitations recur with striking persistence: the denial of dependence, the manic assertion of strength, the projection of weakness onto enemies, the melancholic attachment to a lost grandeur, and the transformation of ordinary social conflicts into fantasies of betrayal. The question worth asking is how an order built upon the fantasy of permanence reacts when that permanence can no longer be believed in, and what it does with the fear that faith has hitherto kept at bay. The question of which present-day power constitutes ‘the new “ ” Rome’ leads nowhere. The past holds no oracle of collapse.

Every community needs an ideal ego.

Every collective identity involves idealisation. Lacan calls the image with which an ego identifies itself the ‘ideal ego’ and distinguishes it from the ‘ego ideal’, that vantage point from which one sees oneself being judged. What an empire says about itself belongs, first and foremost, to the former category: an image to which self-love attaches itself, and not a yardstick by which one is measured. A people tells itself that it stands for a special heritage, a moral calling or a civilisational achievement, and that need not be a lie. Shared ideals can underpin genuine and honourable bonds: to justice, to education, to the rule of law, to solidarity, to the memory of the dead. A community without any idealised image of itself would be a community without a reason to make sacrifices for anything beyond immediate gain. Idealisation only becomes dangerous when the ideal can no longer tolerate contradiction and the gap between image and reality must be denied rather than acknowledged.

How power is rewritten as greatness

The Empire raises the stakes considerably. To rule over vast territories, populations and spheres of influence, a dominant power must view its position as more than a matter of chance, as more than the temporary result of force and fortune. It must translate its superiority in arms, wealth or organisation into a moral narrative about itself. It does not merely conquer; it is civilised. It does not merely secure strategic advantages. It brings peace. It does not merely plunder raw materials. It develops and improves. It does not merely subjugate rivals; it defends order against chaos. Each of these translations carries out the same process. It reframes power as virtue, so that what the empire does becomes what it is rightfully bound to do.

The content of the narrative varies enormously across times and places, whilst its structure remains remarkably stable. Rome described its rule in the language of peace, justice and civilisation. Classical Chinese political thought linked legitimate rule to cosmic harmony and the ruler’s moral suitability. European colonial powers repeatedly portrayed conquest as education, development or salvation. Modern great powers speak in the language of security, freedom, progress and a rules-based order. The vocabulary changes with the century; the underlying desire does not. Power wants to be loved as a virtue. Obedience is not enough for it. It demands admiration for the qualities it attributes to itself, rather than for the violence it exercises.

The ambivalent concept of being the chosen people

This narrative holds even when power wanes. In *The Antichrist*, Nietzsche used a single example to illustrate how this works, thereby describing a mechanism. A people on the rise, he writes, has a god who is nothing more than its own sense of self. What is loved about him are the conditions under which a people is on top. This god is not moral. He is useful, warlike and grateful. In this phase, ‘chosen-ness’ means that power is one’s own, and that it is good. There is no gulf between image and reality, and therefore there is nothing to defend.

With the loss of political hegemony, image and reality diverge. The obvious response would be that of any polytheistic culture: the god has been defeated, so he is worthless. Nietzsche’s narrative emphasises that the priestly caste proceeded differently. It saves the god by shifting the defeat inwards. Happiness becomes a reward; misfortune, a punishment for sin. The moral world order is invented so that the decline remains legible, and it accomplishes three things. It immunises the god against reality. It makes the priest indispensable, because only he administers guilt and atonement. And it transforms an unbearable powerlessness into moral superiority.

Thus the reversal is complete. Both interpretative frameworks rest on the same proposition: ‘We stand in a special relationship to the Supreme Being.’ What changes is solely the question of what the experience is permitted to signify. In its ascent, being chosen justifies the excesses of power. In its decline, powerlessness sustains being chosen, and suffering becomes proof of the covenant. Chosen status is therefore not one half of the framework, but its linchpin, securing its interpretative authority. The claim that assigns superiority to both outcomes in advance can no longer be shaken by experience. Therein lies the tenacity of political exceptionalism. It survives defeats because they are already factored in.

There are two caveats to bear in mind. Nietzsche’s *Genealogy of Israel* is an anti-religious polemic. It is not suitable as a historical account, and research into exilic theology paints a far more nuanced picture. His attack is directed, in any case, at a type – the priest as a function – and the focal point of the entire argument is Christianity. Furthermore, the *Genealogy* itself is structured in the very same way as that which it accuses. It is irrefutable. What is useful, however, is the mechanism underlying the historical situation.

The imperial self-image does not even need God for this. The moral world order itself suffices – that is, the conviction that success indicates merit and failure a transgression that can be identified and punished. This paves the way from greatness to the enemy image long before the first crisis arises.

Collective narcissism, resentment and the fear of the elites

From a psychoanalytical perspective, the self-aggrandisement at work here resembles a form of collective narcissism: an obsession with an idealised self-image that must be constantly validated from outside. The political community begins to demand recognition of its exceptional status. External validation assures it that it truly deserves its place in history. Resistance thus becomes not merely a strategic obstacle to be overcome, but a narcissistic affront that must be avenged. The refusal to grant recognition becomes an attack on the self and therefore provokes a reaction disproportionate to the material stakes involved.

This goes some way towards explaining why ruling orders so often react with astonishing vehemence to relatively minor setbacks. A defeat on a distant frontier, the loss of a single possession, a challenge from a regional rival, a financial panic or an outbreak of domestic dissent are not experienced in proportion to their actual significance, but as evidence of unbearable humiliation. The objective event matters less than its symbolic significance, and the two can diverge considerably. The setback proclaims something that the ruling order cannot bear to hear: that it is not omnipotent, that others do not accept its supremacy as a matter of course, and that its power depends on conditions over which it does not have complete control. A minor loss can therefore trigger a major reaction because the wound primarily destroys an image.

The affront hits hardest those ruling groups whose position is most closely linked to the system’s prestige. Their wealth, their education, their command of a prestigious language, their cultural authority, their institutional standing: all of this arose within an order that promised permanence, and tacitly presupposes that this permanence will endure. To admit to structural decay would be to admit that one’s own position is less secure than it appears, that the justification for one’s own privileges is beginning to crack. That is why the self-assurance of elites can coexist so effortlessly with a fierce yet unacknowledged fear. The two do not even contradict one another. The bombastic propaganda merely glazes over the fear it is meant to drown out, and the confidence of a threatened elite is nothing but an escape from reality.

Denial

The central psychological mechanism of decline is usually not ignorance, but denial. Ignorance is a lack of information and is therefore remedied by information. Denial is not a lack, but a defence mechanism. Its formula, borrowed from Octave Mannoni’s account of Freud, is: ‘I know full well, but.’ Those who deny perceive the truth whilst simultaneously refusing to acknowledge it. They hold the knowledge in their hands yet behave as though it has no validity whatsoever.

The catalogue of denials of a crumbling order is long and internally consistent. I know that public trust is waning, but the institutions will hold. I know that the costs of maintaining influence continue to rise, but retreat would be the true sign of weakness. I know that wealth is becoming concentrated and solidarity is unravelling, but reform would be more dangerous than the inequality it is meant to remedy. I know that environmental and demographic pressures are real, but they can nevertheless be postponed, outsourced, or resolved without anyone having to give anything up. I know that rivals are catching up, but even so, the old hierarchy remains the natural order of things. In any case, the first half of the sentence is sincere. The knowledge is genuine and, at times, even sophisticated. The second half of the sentence does the destructive work by insulating that knowledge from any consequences.

This is, at first, self-deception and hypocrisy. But those who deny the reality are concealing it from others as well as from themselves. The knowledge is permitted within a limited, technical or abstract framework, whilst its emotional and practical consequences are kept at arm’s length. A report is read and filed away. A risk is acknowledged and postponed. A crisis is formally declared and then managed – and no fundamental change follows, because the knowledge must not be allowed to jeopardise the imagination that governs action. The mind imposes a strict quarantine on what it knows.

Administrative competence rather than political change

In political life, this manifests itself tellingly as administrative competence without any genuine will to change. A state can become exceptionally adept at describing its own problems, whilst becoming increasingly less capable of tackling them. Every difficulty is reinterpreted as a technical one: as an efficiency problem, a communication failure, a regulatory loophole, or a lack of the right expertise. Each of these interpretations may capture something real, and that is precisely what makes them so useful as evasive manoeuvres. They allow the more painful question to remain unasked: who stands to lose power, status, wealth or security if the system is genuinely repaired rather than merely optimised? Technical language is not always a lie. Often, it is a space where the truth can be accommodated so that it need not be felt.

This coexistence of complex knowledge and collective paralysis frequently characterises late-imperial situations. The state issues documents, regulations, adjustments and emergency measures, and creates new offices with impressive ease, whilst its underlying ability to coordinate the society it governs is silently eroded. Collapse, when it comes, is rarely the result of a single dramatic event. Fiscal pressures, military overstretch, environmental strain, administrative rigidity and political conflict intertwine and reinforce one another until they shatter the very institutions meant to cushion them. Denial does not create these pressures. It prevents them from being recognised as shared and binding realities that demand a collective response. It keeps each one in its own administrative compartment, where it can be acknowledged without confrontation.

The detachment of the privileged

The denial practised by the elites carries particular weight because privilege provides a shield that prolongs the period during which denial remains subjectively reasonable. Those who possess wealth, mobility, private security and access to exclusive facilities may experience the deterioration of communal life long after everyone else – if at all. The general public’s quality of life may collapse, whilst the lives of the privileged remain protected and may even improve. Public education, public health, public transport, public safety, infrastructure, and environmental stability: all of these become abstractions for those who can buy a private substitute for everything. The decline is real, but from the elite’s perspective it is happening to someone else, elsewhere, in a country one reads or hears about.

This gives rise to a self-reinforcing cycle with an inexorable internal logic. Opting out of the public sphere weakens any personal interest in public services. The decline of public institutions makes further private withdrawal seem even more reasonable, and a vicious circle is complete. A society gradually begins to treat its collective goods as optional luxuries rather than as guarantors of its own survival. The central question shifts. It changes from ‘How can the political order be renewed?’ to ‘How can I – my family, my company, my group – remain safe amidst societal decline?’ The second question obscures the fact that every individual’s survival depends on a functioning community.

The ruling class is highly educated and possesses exclusive knowledge of how to exercise power. It is neither blind nor innocent. It inevitably understands that an order is fragile. And it deceives itself, imagining that this fragility only manifests elsewhere, is borne by others, in a future from which it is itself excluded. This is the most politically dangerous form of denial: the cynical confidence that someone else will have to foot the bill.

Division

The imperial order is based on a division between the centre and the periphery, with a gradient that is as much psychological as it is geographical. The centre privatises wealth, prestige and security, whilst socialising the costs of the entire arrangement, which are shifted outwards: to the provinces, border zones, subordinate classes, minorities, the economically vulnerable, the inhabitants of the Third World, or the generations who will inherit the accumulated debts. The centre can therefore perceive itself as stable because instability has been successfully shifted elsewhere. Its tranquillity stems from the displacement of the upheavals.

Melanie Klein calls this displacement ‘splitting’: the separation of that which is loved and idealised from that which is feared, despised and rejected, so that the two need never be held together in a single glance. The empire presents itself as the upholder of justice, reason, culture and order, whilst violence, irrationality, corruption and dependence are attributed to an ‘Other’—the external rival, the colonised population, the migrant, the provincial dissenter, the internal minority. Everyone becomes a canvas onto which the ruling group projects what it cannot acknowledge in itself. The empire’s own violence is denied and returns as the violence of its enemies; its own dependence is rejected and returns as the parasitism it accuses others of.

Such projection does not presuppose that the other is innocent. Rival states may be aggressive, uprisings brutal, political opponents cynical. Identifying a projection does not excuse any of this. It merely describes how the empire’s encounter with a real adversary is psychologically overdetermined. The adversary bears not only its own threat, but also the full weight of the empire’s repressed internal tensions. Under this burden, complex internal conflicts are radically simplified. Inequality is taken for granted, institutional decay is denied, and economic insecurity is declared to be self-inflicted. Political failure is reinterpreted as a mere lack of national will. Every structural problem is attributed to enemies, for enemies can be fought, whilst structures can only be reformed at the cost of change.

Nostalgia and wounded grandeur

The more an imperial order fears decline, the more tempting such projection becomes, and the temptation is initially emotional before it becomes political. To admit vulnerability would mean confronting limitations, dependencies and the failure of one’s own governance. The search for scapegoats offers a far more satisfying alternative. It individualises the diffuse, formless fear, directs it towards a specific object without removing its controllability, and transforms the unbearable feeling of helplessness into the certainty of moral indignation. The enemy is accused of theft: he is said to have treacherously stolen a former state of wholeness which the community claims to have once possessed.

This is the psychological core of political nostalgia, and it explains why nostalgia so often evokes a sense of decline and loss of prestige. Nostalgia does not, as a rule, recall a real past. It constructs an imagined time before ambiguity: before compromise, before dependence, before humiliation, before the onset of all that the present cannot come to terms with. The past is retouched into an idealised object, stripped of conflict and injustice. Populist movements then promise to restore this past. Yet what they actually promise to restore is not a historical order that ever existed, but the fantasy that the collective was once whole, once undivided, once free from the internal contradictions that have, however, always structured it within relations of exploitation. What is restored is a feeling, not a fact.

In this atmosphere, any aggression becomes emotionally resonant, even if it is strategically ruinous. An attack on an enemy, whether internal or external, promises the restoration of control. It offers clarity in a political life that has become confusing, complex and uncertain. The loss of standing in the world can be experienced, at the level of collective feeling, as a loss of self-worth, and it generates the familiar sequence of humiliation, resentment and the desire to restore what feels like historical justice. A politics driven by wounded grandiosity exacerbates those crises precisely because it ought to be healing. An order gripped by fear of decline overextends its armed forces, rejects negotiations as beneath its dignity, punishes internal dissent that might have corrected its course, and destroys economic interdependence through senseless displays of power. The fear of lost supremacy thus becomes, through the actions it triggers, one of the driving forces behind the very decline it fears.

Key points in brief

•            Declining systems are usually well aware of their predicament. The obstacle is denial: knowledge is permitted yet shielded from any consequences.

•            Empires are held together as much by libidinal bonds as by armies and state revenues. They project an idealised image of collective greatness to which both rulers and the ruled attach their self-love.

•            Collective narcissism turns resistance into an affront. A minor setback can trigger a disproportionate reaction, because what is wounded is an image, not a genuine interest.

•            The notion of being ‘chosen’ is the hinge of the figure, not one of its halves. In its ascent, power confirms it; in its decline, powerlessness confirms it. No defeat can refute it.

•            Elitist confidence and elitist fear are compatible. The louder the assurance, the more likely it is a defence mechanism against reading reality too closely.

•            Politically, denial appears as administrative competence without political change: every problem is reinterpreted in technical terms, so the question of who must give something up goes unasked.

•            Privilege extends the period during which denial remains subjectively reasonable, and the private withdrawal from public goods tightens the spiral.

•            The division shifts instability to the periphery and allows the centre to experience tranquillity as a natural state.

•            Enemies are preferable to structures because enemies can be fought. Nostalgia promises the restoration of a feeling, not of a historical order.

•            The fear of decline gives rise to the very actions that accelerate it.

Sources

·        Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)

·        Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’ (1927) – on denial

·        Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930)

·        Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist (1888/1895), §§ 15 and 24–26 — on the reinterpretation of defeat as guilt

·        Octave Mannoni, ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même…’, in *Clefs pour l’Imaginaire ou l’Autre Scène* (1969)

·        Melanie Klein, ‘Remarks on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’ (1946) – on splitting and projective identification

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• Narcissus and Narcissism: NPS, from a psychiatric and psychoanalytical perspective: Why nobody chooses grandiosity

• The Psychology of the Manosphere: Why the Incel Is a Symptom

• The Loneliness Machine: Social Isolation, Loneliness and Inequality in Neoliberal Capitalism

• Fight Club, psychoanalytically: the split self and male powerlessness