Toward a Politics of Beauty — Why Is Modern Polit ics So Ugly? (2026)

Toward a Politics of Beauty — Why Is Modern Politics So Ugly?

Saven Satow

Jun. 19, 2026

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

1. The Anatomy of Idols — We Are More Deeply Diseased Than the Moderns

Behold! There are those who call my name and whisper: a rebel against modern democracy. They say: “Friedrich Nietzsche — he is the physician who discerned that the demand for equality crushes excellence, that the expansion of rights institutionalizes a cattle-like passivity, and that the farce called representation mass-produces the ‘last man’ — that most pitiable, most diminutive creature who has forgotten even how to despise himself.”

Indeed — so it is! The spear I hurled has pierced the centuries; I am set alongside such utterly dissimilar “modern idols” as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and made to preside over the mud-wrestling that goes by the name of twentieth-century thought. Existentialists, post-structuralists — they all bathed in my shadow before they could even begin to weave their words.

— And yet, let me warn you.

You who venerate me as a “patron saint of the anti-modern” — you do nothing but project your own impoverished desires upon me! If you interpret me for your convenience and shelve me as a relic of the past, I shall cast new questions at your very feet.

Hear me well. This age has not overcome me. It has sunk — deeply — into the swamp of an inverted Nietzscheanism! The devaluation of values, the triumph of ressentiment, the exhaustion of the will to life, the idol of the anti-Übermensch — these have merely changed their masks, and now dominate the world.

Therefore I must rise once more — from the grave? No — from the abyss itself. I will not offer objective commentary. I speak always from the heights — or from the depths — passionate, cutting, aphoristic, addressing your souls directly.

— Zarathustra has not yet finished speaking.

2. The Pathology Called “the Weak” — O Slaves of Self-Love!

Behold this decisive سقوط — this fall! In my time, ressentiment was still no more than an “individual pathology,” lurking in the innermost recesses of man. It wore the false masks of religion and morality; insidious, yes — yet somehow still sublimated within the cellar of the spirit.

— But look well upon this grotesque theater called the present age!

Ressentiment has ceased to be an inner sickness. It has risen — it has become the naked infrastructure of the world itself, of society itself!

Look at that strange electronic web to which you cling day and night — above all, at the cattle-stall called “social media,” and at the commercial media of those money-grubbing traders. What is it that is traded there as the highest form of capital?

Anger. Humiliation. And that wretched cry: “I am a victim!”

These most servile, most life-denying affects — these circulate with the greatest efficiency in your informational environment; these are enthroned as “capital” that generates gold. What a comedy! What a pollution of the spirit!

Once, I depicted ressentiment as an inner weakness to be overcome, and called upon man to shed it — to molt from it — into the Übermensch. But what of the present? The pathology to be overcome stands from the very beginning as an “external environment,” awaiting man like a vast web. As though the web itself gave birth to the spider, this distorted structure in turn fashions your inner life into the soul of the weak.

Man has not created the system. The infrastructure of the monster called ressentiment has now begun to remake man into a herd animal!

Listen! When I speak of the “weak,” when I name the “slave,” I do not refer to the hungry or the dispossessed. Such socio-economic bookkeeping is beneath my concern!

What I indicate is a type of human being who has domesticated within the depths of his soul the incurable disease called ressentiment — who can affirm his own existence only by negating and dragging down the other.

They possess no power to create new values. Therefore, they become cunning: they overturn existing ones. They condemn the strong as “evil,” and define themselves — the obedient sufferers under that “evil” — as “good.” What a hideous fraud! The lack of power is renamed “kindness”; passivity is disguised as “virtue” — this is the true face of slave morality.

And astonishingly, what calls itself “psychology” today — the anatomy of man — has at last begun to catch up with my insight.

They name this servile creature “vulnerable narcissism.” Not the loud and boastful grandiose type; rather, this one trembles perpetually with humiliation and envy, cloaks himself in victimhood, and conceals the poisoned stinger of indirect hostility. The success of others is always a threat; one’s own impotence is preserved only by displacing blame outward — “society,” “that one.”

They have even coined such a fitting term as “the tendency for interpersonal victimhood.” Chronic grievance, an obsessive attachment to moral purity, a complete lack of empathy toward those deemed perpetrators, and the elevation of “I am a victim” into the sole proof of the self — behold! Is this not the most refined modern clinical chart of ressentiment?

My philosophy is not a medical text describing why one has fallen ill. It is a tonic of existence that asks: how shall one overcome? Yet when these psychological findings intersect with my scalpel, the most rotten nerve of modern politics is exposed in full daylight. “Vulnerable narcissism” — this is none other than that accursed ressentiment translated into your pedantic scientific jargon!

3. The Infrastructuralization of Ressentiment — Social Media as the Cage of the Herd

Once, in the modern age, ressentiment was still a great “fuel of politics.” Democratic mobilization, revolution, class struggle — all were driven, at their depths, by a magma of resentment and humiliation. And yet, even then, there remained a kind of salvation. Whether in religion, in utopian thought, or in national ideals, there existed a transcendent circuit through which ressentiment could be “sublimated” into a higher vision. The Kingdom of God, the socialist paradise — these functioned as filters, straining raw hatred into something elevated.

— But behold the misery of the present!

The circuits of sublimation have been shattered into fragments!

In their place has arisen that little box you cannot release even for a moment — that vast infrastructure which pours ressentiment, raw and unfiltered, directly into society: “social media.”

The algorithms that govern these platforms are designed to sniff out, with ruthless efficiency, your anger, your fear, your humiliation — and to amplify them, to disseminate them across the world. Why? Because such is the commercial logic of the technocratic capitalists!

Anger binds most strongly. It addicts. It nails you to the screen. And the time thus captured is converted into revenue — into the swelling coffers of those who rule these systems. In other words: the media economy of the present is a planetary apparatus for fattening livestock — one that profits by reproducing and amplifying the ugliest ressentiment of mankind!

Now, ressentiment has become the very interface of political participation. People engage in politics only through anger; they form herds only through shared humiliation; they acquire moral authority only through the competition of victimhood.

What a dreadful inversion! That “who suffers most” should become the ground of political legitimacy — this is the culmination of slave morality. And it has now settled itself as the grammar of all political language, regardless of right or left.

Here, my diagnosis pierces beyond the modern into the peculiar despair of the present. Once, the slave still labored inwardly; he kneaded his resentment within himself, required depth of spirit, required sublimation. But in this infrastructuralized world, even that necessity has been cast aside. Ressentiment circulates raw, unrefined, stinking — instantly transformed into digital content.

The pathology I once commanded man to overcome within himself has now become the external environment that determines him in return. This inversion casts my prescription — the creation of new values through the will to power — into unprecedented difficulty. The path to the Übermensch is not closed. But the very steps toward it are ceaselessly smeared over by the mud called technology.

4. The Rise of the Anti-Übermensch — Buffoons Performing Strength

Behold! Upon this wasteland of the present, where the infrastructure of ressentiment has been completed, there strut about figures who seem — at first glance — to bear the stern visage of the Übermensch. Fix your gaze upon that man called Donald Trump. He mocks established morality, hurls mud at inherited values, bellows forth an overwhelming self-affirmation — and the fools prostrate themselves, mistaking this for the ظهور of the Übermensch!

— But be not deceived! That is but a counterfeit of the Übermensch — no, a cheap papier-mâché tiger!

There is but one decisive criterion that separates the Übermensch from these anti-Übermenschen — these false Übermenschen: aesthetics.

The Übermensch, as I conceive him — as the goal — is one who creates his life, his values, out of nothing. This act of creation is essentially beautiful, essentially noble. Even should the Übermensch move toward ruin, like the tragic hero who confronts the absurdity of the world without bending his will, the elevation of his posture radiates a beauty that shakes the soul of the beholder.

And what of this blond anti-Übermensch? He has created nothing! He merely defines an “enemy,” and sustains himself by cursing it. “Make America Great Again”? Spare me! This is no creation of values directed toward the future; it is mere nostalgia — driven by resentment and longing for a lost past.

Examine the grammar of his speech. It is woven, consistently and entirely, from negation and attack. There is not even a fragment of beauty within it — only naked ugliness, swelling like a gutter thick with filth!

Dissect the inner life of this anti-Übermensch, and you will find deeply engraved within it the mark of what modern psychology calls “vulnerable narcissism.” Peel away the hard shell of that arrogant grandiosity — what lies beneath? An abnormal fear of being wounded, an infantile incapacity to admit defeat, and a compulsive dependence on the recognition of others!

This is not the expression of strength. It is the performance of strength. In my language: they do not embody the will to power; they imitate it. Beneath the costume of this clownish display, they conceal their ressentiment with desperate cunning.

Why, then, does this pitiable anti-Übermensch achieve political success?

Because he has been engineered — precisely — as a gigantic mirror of ressentiment!

Here we encounter that strange phenomenon which psychologists might call a “collective runaway of mirror transference.” The inflated outer shell of the leader reflects, with perfect fidelity, the distorted self-image of his followers — those who harbor ressentiment within. “We, who ought to be noble and great, have been degraded by cunning enemies” — this victim narrative of the weak meshes seamlessly with the populist grammar of the anti-Übermensch.

His success is not the result of his greatness. It is the result of a base technique: how precisely he can resonate with the ressentiment of the masses.

What the politics of the anti-Übermensch disseminates is ugliness — soul-corroding ugliness. And this ugliness spreads like a contagion. When the political stage is dominated by ugliness, the very sensitivity to beauty within the citizen is castrated, and the reproduction of ressentiment accelerates ever further. The anti-Übermensch inflames the disappointment of the masses into despair — and that despair becomes the richest fertilizer for yet more ressentiment.

Behold! This is the monstrous rotation of the perpetual machine of ressentiment now being perfected in the present age.

5. A Politics of Beauty — Cast Away the Poisoned Chalice of “Righteousness” and Become Noble Again

But listen! At the edge of this abyss, I refuse — utterly — to sink into the mire of nihilism. For I am not merely a physician who dissects the world; I am one who demands the overcoming beyond illness — the dawn of a new life!

This hideous fact — that in the present, ressentiment has been institutionalized, and that profane anti-Übermenschen have ascended the throne — behold, this is paradoxically the beginning of hope.

Where the desert spreads, a single drop of water shines with life. When ugliness engulfs the stage of politics, the appearance of beauty strikes the eye with an intensity never before seen.

Do you remember? In 2025, when Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, alone openly defied the military intimidation of the arrogant Trump administration — that moment! The world stood astonished; it erupted in applause. That was no mere political calculation. It was the cry of a humanity, parched in the desert of ressentiment, suddenly encountering beauty and drinking from it.

— This is the manifestation of the will to power!

That a middle power should bare its fangs against a great power like the United States — seen through the cold calculus of interests, it may appear “irrational,” even “folly.” And yet, fidelity to principle beyond calculation, an absolute devotion to one’s own values, a posture that exists as its own end — in such unreason resides the highest beauty.

The Übermensch is not beautiful because he displays power. He is beautiful because he leaps beyond the fear of consequence and carries his will through in purity. That is what is divine.

Do you hesitate? Do you ask: “How can modern man, surrounded by the infrastructure of ressentiment, still have his soul shaken by such beauty?”

I shall tell you. No matter how deeply the sickness of self-love — vulnerable narcissism — invades the spirit, nothing can completely strip man of his thirst for beauty, his capacity to respond to the noble. Systems may numb this sensitivity — but they cannot kill it. Indeed, the more the ugliness of the anti-Übermensch fills the world, the more frenzied becomes the hunger of the human soul for beauty.

— How, then, shall we fight?

The pitiable scholars still attempt to battle with the worn-out weapons of “justice” and “rationality.” But I tell you: these belong entirely to the arena of ressentiment! Whoever seeks to strike down the anti-Übermensch with “rightness” is already ensnared in the same grammar of negation.

We must pose an altogether different question:

Is your politics beautiful? Is the life of your leader beautiful?

This question alone shatters the prison of ressentiment at its root. For beauty is never born from the negation that drags others down; it is born only from the creation of one’s own inner energy!

Walter Benjamin once warned that the aestheticization of politics leads to fascism. But what he saw was a counterfeit. Fascism organized not beauty, but the institutionalization of ugliness — the crushing of the individual.

My “beauty” — ah, that is the affirmation of life! It does not create herds of cattle; it unleashes the excellence of the individual, the dancing multiplicity of life itself!

Look to history. The moments that truly transformed the world were always pregnant with this aesthetic. Why do the words of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg strike the human heart? Not for their logic alone — but for the beauty of mourning and hope they contain. Why does Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” shake the world? Not for the correctness of its demands — but for the sublime beauty that seizes the soul!

They did not mobilize the masses by inflaming ressentiment. They carried humanity toward something higher, something more beautiful.

Come, then — tear apart the infrastructure of ressentiment. Abandon the mud-fight of “rightness.” Raise, at last, the banner of beauty!

6. Conclusion — Beyond the Abyss: Raise the Banner of Beauty!

Come — let us now gather together the trajectory of our struggle.

Modern politics inherits the bloodline of that accursed “politics of the weak” which I once diagnosed — and yet, it harbors a qualitative despair that surpasses even my own age. Ressentiment is no longer a damp pathology hidden within the individual soul. Through the electronic capillaries of digital media, it has become infrastructure itself; it reigns as the fundamental grammar by which human beings participate in society.

Behold those anti-Übermenschen who have crawled forth from this rotten soil! They have stolen the mask of my Übermensch, performing strength while, in truth, they are slaves to the servile self-love of the masses — that is, to vulnerable narcissism — spreading an unbearable ugliness across the stage of politics.

— And yet, precisely at the height of this ugliness, as the darkness deepens, a single ray of light stands out with a frenzy all its own!

That noble political posture which casts aside calculations of interest, which wagers its very life on fidelity to principle and ideal — its beauty now shines like a drop of water in the desert.

Hear me once more: it is neither the “language of justice” so beloved by the new classes, nor the “language of rationality” manipulated by scholars, that will overcome this politics possessed by the sickness of self-love! Such things are nothing but the howling of the weak, already kneeling upon the same ground of ressentiment.

Overcoming is achieved only in the aesthetic dimension!

A pure will that leaps beyond calculation, a noble fidelity to principles one has set for oneself, the creation of values out of nothing — this politics of beauty alone is the tonic capable of shattering the base grammar of ressentiment at its root, and of awakening within the withering soul of humanity a fierce hunger for beauty.

— Return, then, once more to my fundamental question:

Does your politics serve the greatness of man? Or does it serve his diminishment?

There can be no doubt: the muddy torrent of modern politics flows toward the diminishment of man, reducing him to the stature of cattle. But do not despair! When I once showed you the figure of the “last man,” wallowing in comfort, it was not to counsel resignation. It was to command you: use him as a stepping stone — leap beyond, toward immeasurable heights!

The desert grows. The desert grows — and woe to him who harbors deserts within himself!

And precisely for that reason, here in the very midst of this hideous desert, the politics of beauty now rises before us with an urgency never before seen, bearing within it the revolutionary power to overturn the world itself.

— Do not fear. Cast aside the petty righteousness of the mud-fight. Stake the beauty of your soul — and fight!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

〈End〉

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