This text begins from the lived experience of life under a political authority that occupies the position of a primary object: one that should protect, contain, and represent, yet is experienced as deceptive, violent, and persecutory. The situation, however, is more complex than overt repression. Alongside violence, the state speaks in the language of care and moral intimacy—addressing citizens as “brother” and “sister,” presenting itself as divinely sanctioned, and promising goodness, salvation, and paradise. This coexistence of benevolence and terror produces a psychic confusion that delays recognition. It takes time to grasp that beneath a moralised surface, destructive forces govern—demons ruling under the skin of angels.

Within such a context, political trust does not gradually erode, nor is it simply withdrawn; it never becomes structurally possible. The distance between state and people is not merely political but penetrates deeply into individual and collective psychic organisation, shaping relations to reality, truth, and authority.

Double lives, everyday concealment, and what have come to be called “quiet freedoms” become central modes of survival in a space where truth is systematically distorted and violence denied. Initially, mistrust functions as a reality-based form of critical awareness and psychic survival. Over time, sustained deception and repression transform mistrust into a pervasive condition of distrust, in which no institution, authority, or symbolic order can be relied upon.

This condition produces a profound sense of powerlessness rooted not only in repression, but in the collapse of meaningful agency. Action is displaced into underground and fragmented forms. This text asks where the boundary lies between mistrust as critical thinking and distrust as a paralysing condition, how agency is reconfigured under chronic powerlessness, and whether trust can begin again after the collapse of authoritative reference points.

Aristotle described Ethos as the appeal to character, goodwill, and trustworthiness. With Pathos and Logos, Ethos composed the central trinity of persuasion in democratic life. For milennia, Ethos has been said to depend on propriety, a sense of what words, connections, themes, and behaviors are appropriate for an audience. However, various autocrats, both actual and aspiring have broken the standards of propriety in their public communication, including Putin, Zeman, Berlusconi, Farage, and many others. This behavior sometimes extends to open contempt for their own ostensible constituents. And yet, each of these politicians built support among their followers not in spite of this, but precisely because of it. Understanding how requires moving beyond the rhetorical canon into the realms of desire, identity, and the primordial appeal of filth. This is an area for which psychoanalysis is uniquely suited.

To explore the paradoxical ability of vulgarity to energize political following, I examine an AI-generated video shared by Donald Trump in which he seemingly defecates on a crowd of protestors, all while wearing a golden crown and flying a fighter jet. Through Freud's comments on the link between gold and feces, Dominique Laporte's work on feces, gold, and language, Lacan's discussion of anal control and anxiety, George Bataille's scatalogical theory, and a broad range of literature on perversion, I argue that Trump's appeal rests on a paradoxical relationship to propriety. Trump (and by extension other autocratic participants in this discourse) soils public speech and violates standards of decency, but in doing so must reinvest in propriety as the source of enjoyment necessary for such transgression to occur. This points towards a new undertstanding of ethos from a psychoanalytic perspective and potentially a more complete account of the function of desire in maintaining reactionary, anti-democratic fantasies.

By all appearances, the notion of trust is oversaturating the most diverse contemporary hegemonic discourses. The ways in which we are being thought to reflect about our subjective, social, political, economic, institutional and even scientific spheres, most often consider trust as fundamental and necessary, or at least greatly beneficial element of the latter categories. At the same time, paradoxically, we seem to live in an era of mistrust: in science, in media, in institutions or in democracy, are all integral parts of our contemporary social and political lives. Caught between trust and mistrust – entangled in a situation that recalls the Hegelian spurious infinity – thinking is gradually condemned to perish, obedience is transformed into a well camouflaged yet fundamental virtue, and the doors are left wide-open for an almost unrestricted social domination.

This presentation will put into question some of the most ossified common-sense presuppositions related to various forms of trust, revealing its underlying and substantive role in social domination. It will thematise trust as a philosophical and psychosocial concept, only to deconstruct it right away. On this very task of deconstructing trust, we will open the space for reinventing distrust – invoking a wholly other instance that comes to counter and resist the dominant logic of trust.

This invocation raises many questions, including: How could we rethink distrust beyond trust/mistrust opposition? How could we reconceptualise distrust as a Derridean double affirmation and an emancipatory tertium quid? What would be the psychological, and what the social challenges of embracing the undecidability of distrust? And finally, what would our communities look like if we were to reformulate our social contracts based on distrust, instead of trust (and mistrust)?

This article offers a cybernetic interpretation of the role the imagination

plays in fascism. First, I address Deleuze and Guattari’s response to

Reich, who according to them adequately poses the problem of fascism

by asking how the masses came to desire their own repression, but who

supposes two distinct realities — the rational socio-economic reality and

the irrational sexual or psychic reality of desire — thus reintroducing the

idea of deception into his explanation. Then I discuss how, in contrast

to this, Deleuze and Guattari, and later Theweleit, focus on fantasies

and on groups in order to account for fascist desire. Drawing on Bion’s

group dynamics, I discuss Guattari’s distinction between the subjected

group and the subject-group, which he associates with two different group

fantasy functions, and I show that in the subjected group, group fantasies

take on a repressive function of cybernetic totalisation, which can be

considered as microfascist and proto-totalitarian. The relation between

microfascism and molar fascism remaining somewhat unclear in Deleuze

and Guattari’s writings as well as in Theweleit, I end by suggesting that

we can account for this relation by looking at it as a runaway process,

where existing, segregative and homogenising microfascist tendencies

are reinforced through positive feedback originating from cultural

productions like speeches, propaganda, popular songs and literature, etc.,

which produce redundancies and resonance with the existing system.

When this kind of aberrant process goes together with and exacerbates a

culture of repression, which blocks out many of the pathways for desire,

it tends to develop into a violent line of abolition, where the only possible

desire left is the desire for death and destruction.