Political elites are servants who launder citizens’ own disavowed desires back to them.

Evidence

Withdrawal from the capital matrix entails an unplugging that will seem painful to nervous systems commensurated to the Reality-Pleasure Principle. Partly it means giving up the reassuring comforter of the Bad Father Figure and facing the fact that the G8 leaders are not capable of legislating away all planetary misery, but are “old men at the crossroads”, capital’s meat puppets not its masters. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us. If anyone is in charge in Kapital it is Oedipus Rex, i.e. us. … The political “reality” that Bush and the others will no doubt blame their failure to act upon is not just an ideological smokescreen. It is the reality constituted by the desires of that selfsame Live 8 crowd who, when push comes to shove, will not pay extra taxes, will not give up cheap flights or car use, will not make a stand against inequity and stupidity at work if it means compromising their interests and those of their famileeeee and yet who expect global crises to be magically solved by eight stooges in a room. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1422

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The idea that political reality is literally constituted by the electorate’s own secret desires — the ruler as psychic laundering service — could ground a dystopian satire of liberal democracy.
• XREF: Echoes ch34’s hauntology and the family-as-repetition read, plus the democracy-as-fantasy-service idea Fisher develops in ch84. — connects to: Political leaders merely launder citizens’ own disavowed desires rather than ruling them — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1422