The war narcissists
More than a new world order, what we have before our eyes is a new law: that of the strongest, which interrupts that universal principle approved by the United Nations more than eighty years ago by which every State is equally sovereign of its own land and people. I am interested in the fundamental question that, in the name of the human condition, we must ask ourselves today: what kind of mind orders this new policy of cruelty, which is activated without dialogue or responsibility, and which spreads across the map like an avoidable epidemic, from Latin America to Northern Europe, from Eastern Europe to the Middle East?
It is the mind of the narcissists who govern our world and our land: intervening in countries, plundering their resources, and with logic of sabotage. But above all, they govern our lives, because our shopping basket or the price of energy in this hyper-technological world depends on them. These narcissists have only one thing in common: the non-negotiable destiny of permanent victory, whether through the force of violence or that of extractive blackmail, through the seduction of the promise of freedom or through the longing of peoples to rise from their own ashes. They are proactive figures: they act by authoritarian decision, because they are driven by a self-perception of superiority and non-dependence. They collapse the right to certainty: they install us in a time when we know what the latest violation of international law is, but not the next one.
They are the techno-oligarchs who govern both our way of life and the governments of war, such as Israel and the United States. They believe in the dehumanizing automation of death: the result is the latest boom in war technology sustained by companies like Nvidia, OpenAI, Palantir, Google, or Anthropic. Contrary to what Hannah Arendt defined, in the wake of the Nazi trials, as the main act of human responsibility —denaturalizing violence—, the narcissist's cruelty in wartime is based on making the victim an anonymous, indifferent body. Chaining wars is the last step in this dehumanization of conflict.
But it is not an exclusive characteristic of the new Silicon Valley millionaires. The duo that has led this war, Trump-Netanyahu, embodies the enjoyment of violence. It is no coincidence that the operation of this 2026 is carried out in the name of rage —Epic Fury—, when the operation that justified the war in Iraq from 2001 to Iraq was carried out in the name of freedom —Lasting Freedom—. We cannot speak of a political pattern nor of an ideology or academic tradition. The only thing that repeats itself is an impulsive, vengeful hypermasculinity that rejoices in the pain of others.
In his modus operandi, Netanyahu's hatred for the Islamic way of life is not so different from what the ayatollah Ali Khamenei had towards that people turned into a state: Israel. Trump's impulsiveness in falling into the trap of a war with serious global consequences, as his own party and advisors remind him, is not far from the irrationality of Hezbollah leaders, plunging an entire people into unnecessary suffering and displacement ordered by the totalitarian policy of Israel —paradoxically a state founded by the most persecuted people in history: the Jews.
The vengeful impulse of Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the great supreme leader, is typical of the spoiled child, educated in the West and enriched at the expense of the vices of a First World he hates. It is the rage of the ungrateful, as is Trump's when he infers threats he cannot fulfill to an infamous regime —behind which there is a millennia-old faith and culture. All of them are chimeras of the ego of men born into privilege.
It is a contradiction that the land of cultural mixing, of hippie utopias and of the most uninhibited liberalism that was California, is today the den of the sadistic narcissists of Silicon Valley. The new gurus of the West Coast, led by Peter Thiel, are spearheading a profoundly anti-humanist project that they themselves call dark enlightenment. It is a euphemism to describe, with culturalist pretensions, the anti-democratic neo-reactionism they spread around the world. They deeply distrust the human being, but they equally despise the States they finance today —Israel, the United States, and other users of war intelligence—, but not in the near future. The State is the origin of evil, according to this new narcissistic individualism.
This race of contempt for the human condition is not new. If a century ago Arendt questioned, in the name of the human condition, the reason for Aryan supremacism towards the Jews, today the new archetype of the irresponsible narcissist does not assign a color to the skin of the victim nor a name to the wounded nation. It reduces us all to the anonymity of the universal helpless. We are all potential victims without a face, without a voice, and without a record, as we have seen in Gaza and in the enormous minefield that is the Persian Gulf region, where we only see recreations of evil as if it were a video game.
For today's narcissistic tyrant, the reason for unlimited pain is to guarantee their own superiority. How? By belittling every form of difference to their own identity, which is not national but class, gender, race, and cultural. Often formed in North American universities —like Netanyahu, educated at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts, or Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir and a law graduate from Stanford—, the technoscientific orientation of this new economy is on its way to installing an unprecedented antihumanist spirit since the original sin of Hiroshima.
Every misfortune is always announced as worse than the last. What imminent event must occur for us to awaken from the insidious nature of this automated cruelty that Mauthausen rehearsed a century ago? It is time for continental solidarity, born in our streets but empathetic with our neighbors, because the fantasy of the American friend has been liquidated. It must be clear which side of history we want to be on.