Abstract

This essay argues that tyranny and idiocy reinforce one another through shared paranoid delusions. By means of the entertainment industry, of the mass media and consumer and political propaganda, this paranoia reaches its most comprehensive form: that of surveillance capitalism. Under the pretext of creating uniformity, the imposition of this spectacle of surveillance actually serves to fragment, isolate and alienate people, both individually and collectively. This culture of the fragment explains the destruction of participatory democracy. In order to break free from this paranoid tyranny of idiocy, intellectuals must abandon representative democracy and instead promote a participatory and non-sovereign concept of democracy: a democracy, that is, where the division between rulers and governed, between tyrants and idiots, becomes incomprehensible.