Kakistos

Cacocracy, or the moment when the worst ceases to disqualify

There are moments in history when the usual words are no longer enough.

We speak of populism, authoritarianism, democratic crisis, and the brutalization of public debate. All these terms describe part of reality. Yet none of them fully captures the specific mechanism we are witnessing today. For that, there is a rarer, older, almost forgotten word that has suddenly become strikingly relevant again: cacocracy.

The word comes from the Greek kakistos, “the worst.” It means government by the worst.

It is not simply a mediocre government, still less a passing clumsiness on the part of leaders overwhelmed by events. Cacocracy begins when incompetence, coarseness, cynicism, contempt for institutions, indifference to truth, and moral vulgarity cease to be disqualifying flaws and become, on the contrary, means of ascent, domination, and loyalty-building.

In other words, cacocracy is not just a decline in standards. It is an inversion of values.

In such a configuration, vulgarity becomes frankness. Ignorance dresses itself in the clothes of sincerity. Aggressiveness passes for courage. Attacks on judges, the press, academics, diplomats, scientists, or experienced public servants become acts of “liberation.” Competence, by contrast, becomes suspect. Nuance is mocked. Restraint is seen as weakness. Politeness itself almost comes to be treated as an admission of social betrayal.

And this is how the worst advances.

It advances not because it always convinces intellectually, but because it exhausts, stuns, occupies all available space, flatters resentments, replaces reflection with reflexes, and gives those who doubt, suffer, or drift away the illusion of symbolic revenge. Cacocracy thrives on collective exhaustion. It offers less a project than an outlet, less a direction than a discharge, less a politics than a permission to despise.

This is where precision matters: cacocracy does not destroy first through brute force. It destroys by lowering the standards of what a society is willing to accept at the top.

A democracy enters a zone of great danger when it stops asking those who aspire to lead it: What do you know how to do? What do you understand? What limits do you respect? and begins to prefer vindictive questions: Whom can you humiliate? Whom can you silence? Whom can you scandalize on our behalf?

The gravest symptom is not even the lie. A lie still acknowledges, in a way, that there is a truth to be disguised. The more alarming stage is indifference to truth.

When the absurd no longer discredits.

When the grotesque no longer shocks.

When a statement that is objectively false, incoherent, or obscene is no longer a liability but a strength, because it gives its supporters the feeling of living in permanent rebellion against a hated order.

At that point, cacocracy is no longer a theoretical risk. It is already beginning to settle into minds and then into institutions.

This word seems necessary to me today precisely because it is missing from so much commentary on our time. We see the symptoms, but we hesitate to name the mechanism. We speak of this or that verbal excess, this or that provocation, this or that institutional drift, this or that attack on checks and balances, this or that exhaustion of truth. But we less often see that these phenomena are not scattered. They form a logic.

That logic is one in which power turns brutality into energy, transgression into method, blind loyalty into a supreme virtue, noise into argument, and simplification into a worldview.

History, of course, never repeats itself in exactly the same way. But it leaves us landmarks. And those landmarks are precious, because they help us recognize what might otherwise seem unprecedented and therefore incomprehensible.

Emperor Commodus, for example, is not merely a decadent figure of imperial Rome. He is one of the clearest symbols of the moment when power slides from government into narcissistic spectacle. Heir to Marcus Aurelius, he gradually turns imperial dignity into a staging of himself, humiliates institutions, governs through arbitrariness and theatricality, and ends up strangled by a man from his entourage. The detail is spectacular, almost too perfect for history, but it contains a lasting political truth: when power becomes the representation of itself, it sooner or later yields to the disorder it has itself nurtured.

Rasputin, in a very different register, embodies another facet of the same malady. No longer the leader who turns himself into a spectacle, but the intrusion of irrationality, opaque fascination, personal belief, and influence without responsibility into the very heart of power. His role in the final discrediting of the tsarist regime had less to do with genuine omnipotence than with the symbol he became: that of a power preferring murky loyalties and obscure forces to competence, clarity, and rational authority.

Idi Amin Dada, for his part, represents an almost chemically pure form of cacocracy: cruelty mixed with the grotesque, arbitrariness staged, the state turned into a delirious theater of force. Through him, one sees that ridicule in power is never harmless. When it joins violence, it becomes one of the most dangerous forms of political destruction.

These figures belong neither to the same century, nor the same culture, nor the same system. And yet they share something essential: in all these cases, the problem is not only moral. It is structural. Power stops selecting the most capable and begins promoting the most servile, the loudest, the most unpredictable, the most cynical, or the most skilled at flattering the lowest passions.

That is precisely what makes our historical moment so worrying.

Before our eyes, in several parts of the Western world and beyond, we are seeing not only the rise of aggressive or demagogic leaders, but the normalization of a culture of power in which being more brutal, more crude, more provocative, more ignorant of real constraints, more contemptuous of democratic forms, and more hostile to contradiction becomes a competitive advantage.

The American scene makes this phenomenon especially visible today, because the United States gives its disturbances a planetary reach. But it would be too simple, and even too reassuring, to see in it only an American pathology. The problem is broader. It touches a general fatigue of democratic civilization, a wearing away of public trust, an impatience with complexity, and a growing desire for leaders who “break everything,” even when that “everything” includes the most necessary safeguards.

This is where perhaps the most essential point appears: cacocracy is not simply a regime. It is a political culture.

It knows perfectly how to use what works.

It knows that provocation captures attention.

It knows that humiliation binds a camp together.

It knows that a spectacular detail leaves a deeper mark than a subtle demonstration.

It knows that excess generates commentary, and therefore centrality.

It knows that the citizen saturated with information, anxieties, and contradictions may end up preferring a brutal simplifier to a responsible leader.

In short, it knows how to feed on the very weaknesses of the contemporary public sphere.

That is why it is not enough to denounce cacocracy. It must be understood. It must be named. Its mechanism must be described precisely enough to move beyond a merely moral reflex. For if we limit ourselves to saying that all this is “unworthy,” “shocking,” or “scandalous,” we still miss part of the problem. What is at stake is deeper: an entire society can begin to find normal what should have alarmed it.

And the critical threshold lies there.

The ultimate danger is not merely the arrival of the mediocre in power.

The ultimate danger is also the moment when the worst ceases to be disqualifying.

The moment when vulgarity governs without shame.

The moment when ignorance decides without restraint.

The moment when provocation takes the place of politics.

The moment when the weakening of institutions passes for strength.

The moment when the destruction of common reference points is applauded as a victory over elites, even though it actually delivers societies over to forms of domination that are more arbitrary, more brutal, and above all emptier.

There remains, then, one question: how do we fight cacocracy?

There is obviously no universal remedy. A society does not emerge from such a moment through a magic formula, still less through a providential man. But there are at least a few solid paths.

The first is to rehabilitate the very criteria that cacocracy works to destroy: competence, integrity, responsibility, accountability, fidelity to facts, and respect for institutional limits. Where the worst prospers, the better must once again be made desirable - and above all, once again demandable.

The second path is to protect real counter-powers without weakness. For a democracy does not survive by elections alone, but also by everything that prevents an electoral victor from believing himself the owner of the state: an independent judiciary, oversight bodies, a professional administration, a free press, and a living civil society. That is often where cacocracy attacks first, precisely because it knows that the concentration of power always begins with the degradation of whatever resists it.

The third path concerns information. Cacocracy will not be defeated if we accept that the public sphere remains surrendered to confusion, emotional saturation, and the permanent equivalence between the true, the false, and the spectacular. We need to defend a healthier information ecosystem: independent media, greater legibility of facts, public speech grounded in verifiable evidence, and a much more serious effort in critical literacy against disinformation.

Finally, ordinary citizens must be given a firmer hold again. Cacocracy thrives on humiliation, powerlessness, and the feeling of abandonment. It recedes when institutions become legible again, when civic speech is not merely tolerated but structured, when decisions are better explained, and when public services are more reliable, fairer, and more responsive. In other words, it is not fought only through grand principles, but also through a democracy that is more concrete, closer, and more credible.

Cacocracy is therefore not a fatality. But it will not be defeated by more noise, nor by imitating its methods. It will recede only if entire societies once again come to believe that truth matters, that competence matters, that the dignity of forms matters, and that liberty does not survive for long when everything that protects it is mocked, hollowed out, or methodically weakened.

This is the moment we are living through. But no historical moment is condemned to last by nature.

And if the word cacocracy seems unusual, it is only because it names with uncommon precision something many people already sense without yet clearly identifying it: we are not simply confronted with questionable leaders; we are living in an age in which the worst is learning to pass itself off as the norm.