The Void and the Strongman

I was twenty-eight years old in February 1992 when I watched my country applaud a man who had just tried to overthrow its democracy by force of arms. The coup failed in the streets and triumphed in the kitchens. A lieutenant colonel appeared before the cameras, defeated, his red beret pulled low, and spoke two words that entered Venezuelan mythology that same afternoon: por ahora. For now. Something passed through millions of people that neither the economists nor the political scientists knew how to name. It was not an argument; it was a recognition. People did not think, this man is right. Something deeper whispered to them: this man says what I feel.

I did not understand it either. It took me years to see that what happened that afternoon was much larger than Hugo Chávez. A people disappointed in its institutions, wounded by inequality, sick of corruption and increasingly estranged from the political order had found a body into which it could pour its accumulated rage, its humiliation and its unlived power. The man on television mattered, of course. But the energy that made him possible was larger than the man, and it was there before he appeared.

That distinction decides everything. If authoritarianism were merely the work of unusually dangerous men, democracy would face a simple problem: spot them early, defeat them at the polls, defend the institutions. History suggests something more unsettling. The strongman returns again and again because something in us never stops summoning him. A people loses its bearings, the center no longer holds, and then someone appears who speaks not to its interests but to its wound.

Carl Jung saw something similar in the Europe of the 1930s. In a strange and disturbing essay titled Wotan he argued that what was happening in Germany could not be understood through economics, strategy or rational persuasion alone. Something archetypal had awakened. Jung went looking for the old Germanic god of storm and frenzy because political language was too small for what he was witnessing. A people had not adopted a program. It had been seized by an image.

I have said this many times out loud, at dinners where nobody wanted to hear it, and I write it now without softening. Take that essay of 1936, cross out the word Germans and write Venezuelans, cross out Germany and write Venezuela, cross out Führer and write Chávez, and you hold in your hands the best essay ever written about my country. No political scientist has surpassed it. A Swiss psychiatrist who never set foot in Caracas described, almost sixty years in advance, the afternoon of the beret and the por ahora: the god of the storm and the wrath of the collective looking for a body, and a humiliated people offering him one.

Jung called the central mechanism projection. Whatever we cannot recognize or carry in ourselves appears outside us, charged with disproportionate power. The person we project onto becomes larger than life because we are no longer seeing them: we are seeing something of our own deposited there. And power works exactly this way. A man who experiences himself as powerless does not stop possessing energy merely because he does not know how to use it; it accumulates in him as rage. Until someone appears who seems able to carry what he cannot. He speaks without doubt. He humiliates the people the follower secretly wants humiliated. He breaks the rules the follower feels were used against him. He promises vengeance without guilt. The leader becomes the screen onto which millions project the power they never learned to inhabit.

This is why megalomania and mass politics fit together like lock and key. The megalomaniac arrives convinced that history has chosen him; the disempowered collective arrives searching for someone large enough to carry its unlived magnitude. One supplies the grandiosity, the other the worship. The transaction has something erotic in it.

Chávez said it with a precision that chills: that he was no longer himself, that he was a people.

And here I have to say what I have seen, because keeping quiet would be cowardice dressed as prudence. I have lived and studied in the United States, and I have gone back many times. What I have seen there over the last decade resembles this too closely. Donald Trump announced at his first convention that he alone could fix what was broken, and years later, with the veil gone, that he was the retribution of his people. The ideology differs, the systems differ, the consequences differ; nobody who knows history confuses Caracas with Washington. But I return to the crossing-out, because it is the only honest test I know. Cross out Germans and write Americans. Cross out Germany and write the United States. Cross out Führer and write Trump. What remains is the best essay ever written about what is happening in that country today, and it was written by neither a Democrat nor a Republican: it was written by a man who in 1936 was looking at Germany in horror. The grammar is the same: the leader offers himself as the body through which everyone’s frustration will finally become effective. The invitation is extraordinarily seductive. Stop carrying the unbearable weight of your own power. Give it to me.

And here the political problem becomes inseparable from a far deeper spiritual one. Nietzsche announced it more than a century ago with the three most famous words in modern philosophy: God is dead. The sentence has been trivialized into a declaration of atheism, but Nietzsche was describing something else. The architecture that had organized European civilization for centuries was losing its authority, and with it the entire edifice through which human beings understood meaning, morality, suffering and destiny. Nietzsche saw the catastrophe hidden inside that apparent liberation: we had killed the old source of meaning before learning to create it for ourselves. That is nihilism.

Nihilism does not consist in proclaiming that nothing matters. Most nihilists never pronounce the word. Nihilism can wear an expensive suit, raise children, run companies and vote every four years. From the outside it looks perfectly functional. Its condition is more intimate: the absence of a sufficiently deep answer to the question of what my life is for.

For centuries religion answered that question before the individual had to ask it. It gave him cosmology, ritual, community, suffering with meaning and a death inside a larger drama. It also oppressed and persecuted, but one of its functions is hard to deny: it placed the individual inside a meaningful cosmos. When that cosmos collapsed, the need it served did not collapse with it. The religious instinct survived the death of religion.

This may be Jung’s most important contribution to modern politics. The psyche does not become secular because the culture does. The need for transcendence, for ritual, for sacrifice, for contact with something greater than the isolated ego does not disappear because the churches empty. Those energies go somewhere. The sacred migrates: toward the nation, the revolution, the race, money, celebrity, the charismatic leader. What once pointed vertically toward God is projected horizontally onto the world. And when politics receives enough of that displaced energy, it stops behaving like politics and becomes theology.

The party becomes a church; the rally, a liturgy; the slogan, a prayer; the leader, a prophet. Opponents cease to be people one disagrees with and become enemies who embody evil. Electoral defeat is apocalypse; victory, redemption. Facts recede because faith was never a matter of facts: the believer no longer asks whether the leader is right, he asks whether the leader is one of us. And every institution capable of constraining him ends up an enemy of the faith, because the sacred figure cannot be contained by ordinary rules. To call these movements parties is to miss what matters. In their most intense form they are pseudo-religions.

And like every religion, they need a miracle. On July 13, 2024, in a field in Pennsylvania, a bullet grazed Donald Trump’s ear. He went down among his agents and rose with blood on his face and his fist in the air, shouting at the crowd to fight. Millions watched it live, and in that instant something was completed that no strategist could have designed: death and resurrection in a single act, before the cameras, with real blood. Days later he supplied the missing word himself: God had spared him for a reason. From then on he was no longer a candidate. He was a chosen one, and you do not debate a chosen one’s program, you follow him. A people that had spent years looking for a body in which to deposit the sacred had just watched that body fall and stand up again. Any Venezuelan recognizes the liturgy. We too had a man who said God had chosen him, and when he died we buried him like a saint.

And they offer something no true religion, no philosophy and no psychological development offers: salvation without transformation. That is their narcotic. The mature traditions always demand something of the believer: pray, fast, confess, forgive, face your sin, submit the ego to something greater. Buddhism asks you to examine desire; Christianity, to repent; depth psychology, to face your shadow. The authoritarian pseudo-religion reverses the direction of the work. You need not transform yourself; someone else must be defeated. Your suffering has a culprit, your humiliation has an author, your anger is proof of your righteousness, and redemption will arrive when the enemy is punished. It is meaning without individuation. It is hard to imagine a more seductive bargain.

The nihilist is its natural prey, because a life without meaning discovered from within weighs too much. If I do not know who I am, the movement will tell me. If I am alone, thousands of throats chanting the same words will be my brothers. If I feel powerless, the leader’s power becomes mine by identification. The movement gives the disoriented a myth. And a bad myth is infinitely more powerful than no myth at all.

That is the political danger the death of God left behind. When inherited values lose their authority, people do not become enlightened creators; many become frightened. Erich Fromm understood it: we do not only struggle to be free, we also struggle to escape from freedom, because freedom removes the chains but also removes the instructions. The authoritarian leader offers exactly that relief. He says: I know. I know who you are. I know who betrayed you. I know what must be done. Follow me.

Perhaps this is why arguments have proved so useless against these movements. We answer an existential hunger with policy papers. We fact-check myths as though they were errors in a spreadsheet. We assume the man standing in the crowd weighed the alternatives, when perhaps he came because for the first time in years he feels visible and part of something larger than himself. You cannot defeat a god with a white paper. You have to understand why the god was needed.

This does not mean abandoning institutions; anyone who has watched them fall knows their worth. But institutions are inhabited by human beings, and no constitution can permanently protect a society whose citizens secretly long to hand over their sovereignty. Democracy demands a psychological achievement we almost never discuss: it demands individuals. Not consumers, not demographics, not identities assembled by algorithms and mobilized every election, but beings capable of standing within themselves, with a center firm enough that belonging does not require dissolving. Whoever has it can admire without worshipping, oppose without demonizing, suffer without immediately needing someone to blame. And a person who experiences meaning in his own life is far harder to recruit into somebody else’s apocalypse.

That is why the crisis of democracy is, at bottom, inseparable from the crisis of meaning. We have spent enormous energy asking how institutions resist authoritarianism, and very little asking what kind of people authoritarianism needs. Beneath poverty, inequality and misinformation lies something more elemental: millions of human beings who do not know what their lives are for, and a person without meaning becomes available to anyone willing to turn a private void into a collective destiny. Nobody prepared them for that. We teach mathematics, coding, economics; we train people to compete for a job and build a personal brand. But where do we teach them to face solitude, to tell desire from vocation, to endure suffering without hunting for a culprit. Who initiates a young person into responsibility for his own soul and asks him the terrible and magnificent question: what is the life that only I can live.

For nearly all of human history the culture had the answer. Today each of us has to discover it. That is not a tragedy; it may be an opportunity. Nietzsche demanded that human beings become creators of values. Jung went further inward: meaning is not invented by the ego like a slogan, it is discovered in a difficult dialogue with suffering, limits, gifts and shadow. Call it vocation, genius, daimon, calling. The word matters less than the experience: the intuition that my life is not a container into which I pour whatever society rewards, but a singular possibility asking to be realized.

A culture able to nurture that discovery would be protecting democracy, because the opposite of authoritarianism is not another ideology. At its deepest level, the opposite of authoritarianism is an individual capable of carrying his own soul: someone with something to serve and nothing he needs to worship blindly, who needs no politician to tell him who he is and no enemy to explain every wound, and no human god to carry the power he is slowly learning to exercise himself. Someone able to say: this is my work, this is the fragment of reality entrusted to me. That modest sentence holds more political power than any slogan.

I began to understand this by watching my own country give itself to a man. For years I believed Venezuela’s tragedy had taught me something about politics. Today I suspect the lesson runs deeper. Before the institutions collapsed outside, something had already weakened inside: the capacity of enough individuals to experience themselves as authors and custodians of their own lives. The strongman stepped into that vacancy. He always does. Which means the question of our age is not how to prevent the next caudillo from appearing. It is whether enough people will still need him. And that question is not answered in parliament. It is answered in those private hours when a human being stops asking what the world owes him and begins asking what his one life is asking of him.

Perhaps democracy depends, in the end, on something we have treated as a private luxury: the discovery of meaning. And the future turns on a question far more intimate than whom you vote for. What are you living for that no leader can give you or take away?

Gil Carrasquero — Author, The Religion of Genius (Forthcoming)