The Saturday Exhale Episode 21: What Racoons Teach Us About Power

Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.

VG: In a reading from your upcoming book The Stone Wall, you discuss power…and racoons. Indeed, you illuminate the nature of power using an allegory about backyard animals. It is a very strong piece and I recommend people watch the video and pick up The Stone Wall.

I don’t want to give away what was said there (so click the link!), but I do want to talk about power, which occupies a whole section of your 614 page tome. In your discussion of power, you reference Thomas Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, among others. I would like to add a contention by another thinker who built off all of these influences, namely Giorgio Agamben. In his Homo Sacer, he poses a question related to the “state of exception” that is characteristic of Schmitt’s thinking, that the “sovereign decides the state of exception.” Here is what Agamben says (note the Schmitt quotation):

The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order. If the sovereign is truly the one to whom the juridical order grants the power of proclaiming a state of exception and, therefore, of suspending the orders own validity, then “the sovereign stands outside the juridical order and, nevertheless, belongs to it, since it is up to him to decide if the constitution is to be suspended in toto” (Schmitt, Politische Theologie, p. 13). The specification that the sovereign is “at the same time outside and inside the juridical order” is not insignificant: the sovereign, having the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, legally places himself outside the law. This means that the paradox can also be formulated this way: “the law is outside itself,” or: “I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law [che non ce unfiiori legge].”

There is truth to this in the sense that power appears “occult,” at least to many people. You don’t know where it comes from, but you do know the effect it has upon you. It can be a devastating effect. And, you know what your power looks like when you extend it, such as on another person. Power looks different for different people, and different animals, as you allude to in your allegory. But what is true about power is that it is relational: it represents some sort of metaphysical distance from one actor to the other. No one is just “strong” or “weak”; we are stronger than someone else or weaker than someone else.

What Agamben goes on to argue is that the Zoē, what Greeks called biological and animal life, has replaced the bios, or political life that characterized Aristotle’s vision of man as a political animal. To put it another way, by virtue of having a body you have power in a system where a vote gives the ability to influence authority. Next, there is the inward power: the personal power of constitution and competence. And, lastly, while Zoē isn’t bad, for Agamben or anyone else—it’s simply savagery—Zoē is bad when it meets the crushing boot of the state and multinational corporations. Then Zoē becomes bare life—life stripped of innocence—the kind of existence one finds in a refugee or a concentration camp. It seems to me that democracy and bare life existence are perfectly compatible. Agamben agrees to some degree, stating,

The fact is that one and the same affirmation of bare life leads, in bourgeois democracy, to a primacy of the private over the public and of individual liberties over collective obligations and yet becomes, in totalitarian states, the decisive political criterion and the exemplary realm of sovereign decisions. And only because biological life and its needs bad become the politically decisive fact is it possible to understand the otherwise incomprehensible rapidity with which twentieth-century parliamentary democracies were able to turn into totalitarian states and with which this century’s totalitarian states were able to be converted, almost without interruption, into parliamentary democracies. In both cases, these transformations were produced in a context in which for quite some time politics had already turned into biopolitics, and in which the only real question to be decided was which form of organization would be best suited to the task of assuring the care, control, and use of bare life. Once their fundamental referent becomes bare life, traditional political distinctions (such as those between Right and Left, liberalism and totalitarianism, private and public) lose their clarity and intelligibility and enter into a zone of indistinction.

Alex, do you see—as Foucault and Agamben do—that there has been a transition of politics from 1) processes oriented towards ideals and traditions to 2) the threat of the mobilization of a giant mass of people (biopolitics)? That is: democracy increasingly looks like who can bring the most bodies to a voting booth but also a demonstration, with all of the menace that that entails. The 20th century saw massive strikes when workers used their biopolitics to engender the welfare state, for instance. This trend has only continued, except the demands of the masses are only more crude and less sensible. So, how does power relate to politics, and what do you see as the future of democracy?

AT: These concepts represent the human philosophical equivalence of Schrödinger’s cat. Power exists so long as we don’t open the box and realize it died long ago. Likewise, our checks and balances, the supposed power of the people, paradoxically works to strip away said power from said people. By creating an illusion of choice, that the average person is “in charge,” which they always have been throughout all of history, provided they decide to take action, their very desire to take action when needed has been subverted, rendered inert.

Under dictatorship, the people silently vote with their actions to support, or rise against, the dictatorship. They have the power, but it is unspoken. The dictator retains the power so long as the people allow their power to go unquestioned. Democracy is the supposition that the people ought to routinely, in a structured and theatrical manner, demonstrate that they do, in fact, have the power in which they always had. This cosplay of protest diminishes the drive individuals have for real change, like some perverse form of masturbation, this act of self gratification in our autonomous desires leading to a reality in which we never seek the real thing.

Moreover, for those familiar with unitary executive theory, the argument has been made, and held prominently by certain former Supreme Court Justices (for instance Antonin Scalia), that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, has complete executive power. Some, like Richard Nixon, have argued that nothing is illegal if it is done or acted on by the President, in their executive capacity. Of course, this interpretation of unitary executive theory is not the popular one, but the fact that something this critical is even debated, that the constitution requires an exegesis to interpret it, means that if it is not currently true, it could one day become true so long as the majority interpret it as such. This legal theory, which as I mentioned is called unitary executive theory, first gained prominence under Ronald Reagan, before further utilized and pushed by George W. Bush, and now seemingly adopted by Donald Trump.

This is what is hysterical about the “No Kings” protests. Under this legal interpretation, we have had a rotating crop of kings as US Presidents, with the very act of being allowed to protest, and then encouraged to do so by “voting,” ensuring that the people will never rid themselves of these Monarchs by a different name. Moreover, the act of our theatrical portrayal of protest via democratic vote primes us for manipulation. As I will go on to argue in Manufacturing Minds, my next book coming out Q4 of 2026, all tools hold the capacity to increase our competence, or diminish it, but most frequently they diminish us by their utilization as a crutch. Democracy is largely a crutch. It gives us nothing we didn’t already possess, in the process stealing our motivation to exercise our true power. It simultaneously primes us to take action from within a limited set of approved courses, ensuring that the power dynamic in charge remains in charge.

So, I ask you Vadim, and dear reader, what does democracy mean? What does power mean? Have we ever truly understood either?

VG: Politics, I would argue, is downstream from economics. As such, we can view democracy and its inverses (e.g., hereditary monarchy, totalitarianism, etc.) in economic terms, and these terms would then relate to the time-preference of the consumption of capital. Hans-Hermann Hoppe puts it like this,

As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this “property.” Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage. He owns its current use—usufruct—but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.

To put it more colorfully, Nick Land has this to say (emphasis mine),

Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future).Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

Democracy is simply a way of organizing the exploitation of capital that is different from the exploitation of capital wherein it is held by one man or woman: the king/queen or dictator. It might be that democracy is “better” in some metaphysical sense because the exploitation of capital is now engaged in by a vast majority of the population, who feel they have some stake in the exploitation of capital being done on their behalf. Here is where I disagree with Alex: I don’t think the average person was “in charge” throughout history, and democracy is simply a formalization of this fact (though he adds that the exercise of democracy involves a diminishment of one’s true power). I agree with Thomas Carlyle to some extent that history is made by Great Men, that

Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain; all things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result, the practical realisation and embodiment, of Thoughts that dwelt in the Great Men sent into the world: the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.

As for power, power is the ability to enchant someone else into your own will-to-power, which seems redundant but let me explain. Power is to make others work for you. “Making others work for you” has always been going on but usually such directives to make others work were in the hands of a few men. Democracy is a new phenomenon wherein there is a far greater number of people who are “making others work for them” and said workers have many options about whose will-to-power to extend, though it’s usually not their own (the counter-example of the slave-state of Athens does not apply here, in my opinion). It’s not just the king you work for, now. It can be Tracy, the small business owner, or Terrell, the CEO.

Based on the Land quotation I shared, and to answer the question I posed to you originally, I don’t see democracy going in a good place, and neither do you (I believe). My solution to the democracy question is libertarian, but I don’t wish to go into that now. All in all, democracy is a consequence of some excess of comfort in the population, which is where the slave-state of Athens does apply as an example of ‘democracy.’ As times get harder, the defense of democracy will get weaker and weaker. I view this as a bad thing, but I also think it’s inevitable.

AT:Politics is only downstream of economics in the sense that our perception of economics, and to be certain this means every area of economics and not just monetary, is intertwined with how we accept or reject various campaigns of propaganda, which is politics. Historically, this propaganda had limited ability to be manipulated from truth, as economics was a tangible concept. Manipulators, of which we all are to various capacities, necessarily had to bend the rules without breaking them in order to achieve victory with their story. However, this has changed as of recent; with the transition from our economy being one of real, tangible wealth, to one of manipulated illusions, those in power are able to manipulate the economy, removing tangible wealth, subsequently utilizing propaganda to further distort what already is absent of truth and reality. To be certain, we used to vote with our actions based on who would tell the best story manipulating the truth, but today we vote based on who can invent the best lies, manipulating a reality based upon lies. This tragic reality is leading to the implosion of our function, at an accelerating rate.

The people have always been in charge based on their complacency, at least collectively. Without giving away too much from The Stone Wall, real power is the ability to alter the objective reality for someone else. However, once we transcend from personal power to group dynamics, power is predicated on the illusion of said power and authority, for it is the ability of those seizing power to enlist others to act on their behalf. Under a regime, dictator or democracy alike, if all silently reject the right of power, yet do not act, they are voting for the continuation of the current power dynamic through said inaction. Not choosing is a choice, and in that sense we have always been democratic, the masses always having the true power—at least when they choose to act upon it.

This takes us to the few great men argument. Again, more on this in The Stone Wall, but to briefly outline my stance: changing course requires both. It requires the few to act, and inspire the rest, but the rest are necessary for the execution. Perhaps many agree with, support, and have the same thoughts as the “few,” those we call “great,” but were those great men simply broken in some way? Or perhaps, not broken? For they risk everything in the hope that others may follow. They take a leap of faith, prepared to sacrifice themselves for a chance at something more, either oblivious or indifferent to the reality that in most instances their actions will not be appreciated, others will not reciprocate, and they’ll have lost all for nought. This is, simply, the act of insanity. But, it is also an act of sincerity, a truth most are afraid to confront.

As for democracy, you know my thoughts. You also know my proposed solutions, at least those that have cohered. However, those will be withheld for another day, the topic of another, perhaps my final, book.