Why Autocracy Needs Spectacle — with M Gessen

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is “autocracy”: which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own the sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don’t claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for “the people” — but “the people” politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns “us”/“we”. Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against “they”/“them”, who have no part or place in the nation’s life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is “corrupt” in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some “emergency” which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in “The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy”: “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one’s legitimacy could be extrinsic to one’s own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland’s “Dialogues Across Difference” event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

The Minefield helps negotiate the ethical dilemmas, contradictions and complicities of modern life.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is "autocracy": which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don't claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for "the people" — but "the people" politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns "us"/"we". Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against "they"/"them", who have no part or place in the nation's life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is "corrupt" in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some "emergency" which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in "The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy": “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one's legitimacy could be extrinsic to one's own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland's "Dialogues Across Difference" event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

One of the words we use to describe political authority gone wrong is “autocracy”: which is to say, the concentration of power in a unitary figure who then exercises that power without countervailing constraints and for its own the sake. To borrow an expression of St Augustine, autocracy is a form of political authority that curves in on itself.Because most citizens have a clear sense that governance ought to be for something beyond political self-interest or naked self-enrichment, we rightly take a dim view of politicians who are unmoved by the interests and opinions of their constituents. But, of course, only tyrants are prepared to present themselves as wholly disinterested in the lives of those over whom they rule.Autocrats don’t claim to be in it for themselves; they typically insist that they represent, serve and fight for “the people” — but “the people” politically defined as those who truly belong to the nation, those who build and contribute, those who are loyal and patriotic. In short, those who can be encompassed by the political pronouns “us”/“we”. Accordingly, autocrats also claim to be defending the nation and its interests against “they”/“them”, who have no part or place in the nation’s life and are therefore no voice in the conversation of politics.What is corrupting about autocratic rule, then, is not simply that it is “corrupt” in the conventional sense of using the affordances of political office for private gain. Rather, it is the way autocracy throws off the basic constraints that define political authority in a representative democracy, and thereby betrays its character.In democratic life, we are constantly being reminded of the contingency of political authority and its fundamental accountability. When autocratic power lays claim to the necessity of an unconstrainted mode of executive decision-making — most often in the face of some “emergency” which suspends the normal functioning of democratic scrutiny — it corrodes the conditions of democratic life, precisely because representative democracy reveals what political authority really is: contingent, correctable and inherently contestable.As George Kateb writes in “The Moral Distinctiveness of Representative Democracy”: “political authority is suspect when undivided and thus untroubled by antithetical voices … when it moves too easily or takes shortcuts to accomplish its ends, or when it prevents appeals and second thoughts, or when it closes itself off in secrecy or unapproachability.”It is no stretch, then, to say that autocracy is a politics of contempt. It is contemptuous of deliberation and mutual accountability; it is contemptuous of expertise and the constraints of precedent; it is contemptuous of any notion that the source of one’s legitimacy could be extrinsic to one’s own self. Which is why, ultimately, autocracy is a form of contempt for the people.It is for this reason, perhaps, that autocracy depends so much on the aesthetics of power: spectacular performances of force mask the lack of substance beneath, designed as they to eliminate accountability and overwhelm deliberation.This episode of The Minefield was recorded in front of a live audience at Customs House in Brisbane as part of the University of Queensland’s “Dialogues Across Difference” event series.Guest: M Gessen is an acclaimed and multi-award winning Russian-American journalist, author and activist, known for their influential writing on authoritarianism, human rights and LGBTQ+ issues — most notably in their columns for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and their books Surviving Autocracy and The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. Gessen is a Distinguished Professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

It’s like déjà vu all over again. After launching a devastating but limited series of strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities and against the nation’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists in June last year, the United States and Israel recommenced hostilities against Iran at the end of February.The objectives of this ‘war’ are similar — to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities and remove the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic regime — but its implementation is more thoroughgoing, more open-ended, more uncontainable, and more problematic in terms of its basis in international law.There is near consensus among international law experts that the US-Israeli attacks on Iran come in violation Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. And yet neither the United States nor Israel seem interested in justifying their actions in terms of their legality (unlike their “middle power” allies, who are intent on using the language of “collective self-defence”). In its place are assertions of power, of unassailable might, of moral legitimacy, of “good and evil”, of an “intolerable threat” posed by Iran.The casual way that international law has been cast off in the conflict that is spreading across the Middle East raises pressing and pertinent questions about the moral considerations that undergird international law itself.Guest: Tamer Morris is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney, where he focusses on international law, United Nations peacekeeping and international humanitarian law. You can read his penetrating article on the illegality and (il)legitimacy of the Iran war on ABC Religion and Ethics.

If there is something inherently suspicious about political appeals to “the heart” — which is to say, attempts to exploit unreflective prejudices and reactive emotions — then it is also true that a form of politics that is unresponsive to heart-felt appeals to a common humanity, to compassion, to decency, is dangerous.How can we maintain the precarious balance between a politics that trades cheaply on emotion, and one that both comes from and appeals to the heart?Guest: Christos Tsiolkas is the author of eight novels — Loaded, The Jesus Man, Dead Europe, The Slap, Barracuda, Damascus, 7 ½, The In-Between — and the short story collection, Merciless Gods. He is a playwright, screen writer, essayist, radio host and currently a film critic for The Saturday Paper. In September last year, he delivered the 2025 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, on the topic “Fence-Sitting”.

Over the course of this Ramadan series, we are exploring the contours of a cardiocentric conception of the moral life. The notion of the primacy of the heart goes back three millennia: it finds expression in the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, and in the philosophy of Aristotle; it pervades the pages of the sacred texts and subsequent traditions of Judaism and Islam — and even now, its remnants persist in our everyday speech, as if to remind us of an older wisdom.In this broader conception, the heart is a kind of physio-spiritual organ which, at once, coordinates the body’s movements by providing its orientation within and opens the person to moral realities without. A central feature of “the heart”, then, is its capacity for moral responsiveness. The heart is not all there is to the moral life — there is moral reasoning, and there are moral obligations — but it may not be a stretch to say that “the heart” is the moral life’s indispensable element. In a hadith, Muhammad is reported to have said: “There is a piece of flesh in the body if it becomes good the whole body becomes good but if it gets spoilt the whole body gets spoilt and that is the heart.”Last week, we touched briefly on the fear that is often expressed in Islam of the heart being “sealed off”, rendered impervious to divine wisdom or moral appeal. Within the Jewish tradition, this fear is expressed in terms of the heart being “hardened” (literally “toughened” or “strengthened”). In both traditions, this condition is most particularly associated with the figure of the Pharaoh of Egypt (see, for instance, Exodus 7:13, 22; 8:16; 9:24; Qurʾān 10:88). He is not, and cannot be, responsive to the divine appeal — and for that reason, he is damned.Because the worst thing that can happen to a heart is for it become hardened, Pharaoh acts as a cautionary figure (see Deuteronomy 15:7). Through his repeated refusals, his heart toughens to the point that it grows impervious — at which point, his heart is given over to what is called in the rabbinic tradition “the evil impulse”. As Rav Assi puts it in the Talmud (Sukka 52a): “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope.”It is unsurprising, then, that in the we often find prayers in the Jewish tradition (which characterises prayers themselves as “work of the heart”) asking to be kept from having a “hard heart” and to be granted “an understanding heart” — literally, a listening or responsive heart).In a time like ours, when the temptation to refuse or fail to see others as fully human — as making some claim on our sympathy, our compassion, as requiring from us some hesitation — is everywhere apparent, what would it mean to cultivate an “understanding/responsive heart”? What can we do to avoid a “hardened heart”?Guest: Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney.

Sometimes the language we use every day, often unthinkingly, contains within it traces of a much older wisdom. Consider the phrases “I’ve changed my mind” and “I’ve had a change of heart”.The first thing to notice is activity described by the verbs: one is something that we do — as the result of learning new information, or having experiences that alter our values or view of the world; the other is something we undergo, something that happens to us — we see something we couldn’t see before (as though the light shines differently upon it, as Wittgenstein would say), or the same person or phenomenon evokes a different feeling from us.Perhaps it’s accurate to say that changing one’s mind is like taking a different path or going in a different direction, whereas having a change of heart is more like changing one’s compass bearings. But does that mean we are simply passive when it comes to such a reorientation of heart?In this Ramadan series, we are examining what we’re calling the cardiocentrism of the moral life — which is to say, the vital importance of cultivating the inner disposition of what we most often call “the heart”: the faculty which stands for both our inner-most selves, and that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves.The heart can act as a kind of moral compass which responds to moral realities we’d prefer to evade or avoid. Consider the pivotal moment in J M Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, when the eponymous character responds to demands for reasons or “principles” that would ground her horror in response to the mass killing of animals for food: “I was hoping not to have to enunciate principles”, she says. “If principles are what you want … I would have to respond, open your heart and listen to what your heart says.”So perhaps we can’t change our hearts, but does this suggest it is incumbent on us to maintain a certain “openness” or sustained “exposure” to moral realities we’d rather ignore — and that such openness is a precondition for undergoing a change of heart?Guest: Claire Zorn is the multi-award-winning author of five novels and the author/illustrator of two picture books. Her most recent book is Better Days.—UPCOMING LIVE RECORDINGWhen: Tuesday, 10 March 2026, from 1:45 pm to 3 pmWhere: Customs House, The Long Room, Brisbane City, QLD“The Aesthetics of Power: Why Authoritarianism Needs Spectacle”As democratic norms erode around the world, the performance of political power has become increasingly theatrical. From militarised displays to orchestrated media moments, authoritarian movements rely on spectacle to project stability, legitimacy and inevitability.In partnership with the Brisbane Writers Festival and as part of the University of Queensland’s Dialogues Across Difference series, this special live recording of ABC Radio National’s The Minefield brings together acclaimed journalist and New York Times columnist M Gessen with co‑hosts Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens. Together, they will explore why modern authoritarianism depends on spectacle — and how aesthetics shape the public imagination and the conditions of democratic life.Attendance is free, but registration on Eventbrite is essential.

Judging by the way we use the word in everyday speech, we intuitively know what we mean when we refer to “the heart”. We are most often gesturing toward the essence of a thing, its core, what you reach once you strip everything non-essential away.That idea is very much in keeping with what we do each year during the month of Ramadan: we try to put wider concerns and contentious debates in politics, society and culture to the side in order to focus on some of the more fundamental dispositions and practices that sustain and deepen the moral life — essential things that we frequently neglect in our haste and agitation.But, of course, that’s not the only way we use the word “heart”. It’s also a reference to what is truest about us, our interior orientation, what we want and value, sometimes despite our attempts to present ourselves otherwise or dissemble what secretly resides within. When we use terms like “heartfelt” or “heart-to-heart”, aren’t we talking about a deeper kind of emotion or a more sincere or authentic kind of conversation, one in which certain conventions or forms of conventionalised self-presentation have been set aside?The idea of the centrality of the heart is a very old one, stretching back to the ancient cultures of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China. But it was Aristotle in the fourth century BCE who gave the concept of ‘cardiocentrism’ its most thoroughgoing articulation. He considered the heart to be the organising principle of the body — its primary organ, its ‘archē’. The heart is the location of the soul and the source of the body’s heat; it is the organ that receives sensory stimuli from without and directs the body’s movements from within. He thus conceived of the heart as constituting, at once, the seat of intelligence, emotion, will, desire and sensation, and the inherent (or efficient) cause of the body’s unity, integrity and coordination.This cardiocentric conception would eventually be taken up in the High Middle Ages by theologians and philosophers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn Rushd (Averröes), Al-Ghazālī, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and even in the seventeenth century by English physician William Harvey.While it is no longer credible as a psycho-physiological theory, it is nonetheless striking how the centrality of the heart continues to pervade our language and moral sensibilities. Even now, “the heart” seems to possess a kind of double-aspect, it faces simultaneously in two directions: it stands for our inner-most selves (consider the term “heart of hearts”); it is also that which makes us receptive to moral realities or truths outside of ourselves. As Stephen Darwall puts it, “the heart” refers to: “the cluster of emotional capabilities and susceptibilities that fit one for emotional connection: dispositions to feel joy, grief, sadness, fear and distress for others, gratitude, trust, love …”.Perhaps it is not a stretch to say that the moral life is cardiocentric, even though our physiology is not. Doesn’t this suggest that the health of our “hearts” should be a matter of moral, not just physical, concern?Guest: Stephen Darwall is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He is the author of a number of landmark works of modern moral philosophy — including, chiefly, The Second-Person Standpoint and, more recently, The Heart and Its Attitudes.