Since governments presuppose that humans are (or have the capacity to do) evil,1 the governed must reciprocate by presupposing all government forms to possess dystopian potentialities. The governed must take this position because those who govern are also human, therefore deserving of the same presupposition. However, even if the government is not run by humans, the governed individual’s position must remain the same. All governments, especially the ones that are run by non-humans (i.e., artificial intelligence), are control, control-optimization, control-maximization systems. All governments have (hidden) utopian tendencies, which are, of course, sublimations of dystopian drives.
Governments, by (their artificial) nature, work to increase order. More externally imposed order means less freedom for the individual, and Absolute Order equals zero freedom. When the needle moves towards Absolute Order, roboticization of humans takes place; when the needle moves towards Absolute Chaos, animalization of humans takes place. In the former, man is treated as a machine; in the latter, as an animal. Both are forms of dehumanization. The good government, therefore, is the one which is able to hold the needle right in the middle; however, governments, being what they are, are built to pull the needle towards Absolute Order. That is why we need something we’ll call ungovernment (for now), which is an institution (or a yet undefined thing) whose role is to remove unnecessary control and restore agency, responsibility, and decision-making to individuals. [Note: the ungovernment is nested within the government like anti-production is nested within production in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus.]
Similar to systems of order (or negentropy) like governments, we need systems of chaos (or entropy) like ungovernments. We can imagine these two systems running simultaneously in every city (or country) against one another, keeping the balance between order (a safe unfreedom) and chaos (an unsafe freedom). Unfortunately, no such thing as ungovernment exists yet; therefore, when order (crosses the red line and) becomes unfreedom, the governed must rebel even if life has become more comfortable under the tyranny of utopian dreams.
The governed, of course, need the government for society to exist, but they also always need a failsafe: they must retain the capability to rebel against and overthrow any government when its governing methods (or results) become unbearable, unbearably comfortable, or simply unacceptable. [How can we forget the opening sentence of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man? “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress.”] Whatever the system, there must be a failsafe, some prospect of (manually initiated) anarchy; otherwise, humanity is doomed.
The ideal government must, in theory, be invincible — at least, aim to be invincible — against law breakers and enemies, yet it must remain vulnerable to the will to freedom of its people. To repeat: The government must have the power to protect its citizens from each other and from others AND provide space for freedom, i.e., chaos. To repeat again: Even though the government is preferably seen (and, in ideal scenarios, even is) invincible against its enemies, it is crucial for it to have that Achilles’ heel: It must be vulnerable to the will to freedom of its citizens. Otherwise, it is an evil government.
All that has been said so far requires an impossible balancing act. It’s an eternal game of tug of war. On one side, we have the government; on the other side, we have the governed (or the ungovernment). If any of the sides loses or gives up pulling on the rope, the game of civilization ends.
Today’s governments will not openly admit that their systems presuppose men are evil, that you, the governed citizen, are evil. At the same time, however, any reasonable person understands that governments cannot operate effectively without taking this reality into consideration. Governments need to presuppose that humans are (or have the capacity to do) evil. To have order, the problematic human nature (codes of entropy) needs to be contained by laws (codes of negentropy); otherwise, there will be chaos. Governments are primarily there, therefore, to bring the (potentially chaotic) freedom in man under control and impede entropy. But even if this is, in general, a good thing, the governed must always keep an eye on the government… because as soon as the governed individuals stop pulling on the rope, as soon as they let the government do what it does best, they will find illusory peace and comfort but gradually (and surely) lose their freedom.
[1] Let us quickly confirm that a majority of political thinkers align on the idea that men carry the seed of ruin in them, that they are wicked when left unchecked.
That is our first step: to prove that, according to governments, man is a body of potential evil deeds (who, if governed properly, can be turned into a productive machine). We can do this swiftly by quoting a few influential political thinkers I happen have on my desk right now (who, in turn, have summarized the views of the greats who came before them).
In The Concept of the Political, Carl Schmitt writes:
What remains is the remarkable and, for many, certainly disquieting diagnosis that all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous and dynamic being. This can be easily documented in the works of every specific political thinker.
In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli writes:
As all those who write about civic matters show and as all history proves by a multitude of examples, whoever organizes a state and establishes its laws must assume that all men are wicked and will act wickedly whenever they have the chance to do so.
And without getting carried away, and to have a little fun, we can also quote the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. In his collection of essays called On Human Nature: Essays in Ethics and Politics, we read:
Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast. We know it, if only in the business of taming and restraining him which we call civilization. Hence it is that we are terrified if now and then his nature breaks out. Wherever and whenever the locks and chains of law and order fall off and give place to anarchy, he shows himself for what he is.
Of course, these aren’t the only quotes found. One can easily quote from Hobbes’s Leviathan, too, where without a common power to keep people “in awe” every man is at war with every man.
That should be enough. But since we’re already here, we can also take a moment to go back further in time and see what Plato had to say in The Republic. In Book II, Glaucon tells the story Gyges to show Socrates that “all men who practice justice do so against their will, of necessity, but not as good.” In the story, Gyges, who was a shepherd, finds a ring that could turn him invisible whenever he wanted. Since, as Glaucon argued, “no man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked,” Gyges goes and slays the king and takes over the kingdom. Glaucon then adds, “If you could imagine anyone obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot.”
Long story short, the idea that man is wicked when left unchecked is as old as civilization.
This piece was first published on my Substack on April 17, 2026.
Bored Absurdist 