Anti-Dignified: Why Human Dignity Is Their Kryptonite

How the Trump regime and the broligarchy are undignifying America. And why it matters more than you think.

In the wake of a World War she barely escaped, German-American political philosopher Hannah Arendt said this:

“Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can only be found in a new political principle.”
—The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

The guarantee Arendt wanted never came—although the world briefly tried. The ability to retain one’s dignity as a human being has always been, and still remains, someone else’s bargaining chip. It has never been an unalienable right.

Dignity is more complex and plays a more important role than it may appear. Human dignity is the state of feeling worthy as a person without the need to dominate others. A dignified person projects: I am worthy of your notice, but I do not require it.

As an example of an undignified act—as I argue, an anti-dignified act—Donald Trump still insists on an extended dance to “YMCA”—a song about homeless gay men turning tricks to get by—at the end of many of his speeches. He does this precisely because it is undignified; he boasts that Melania says it’s “unpresidential.”

Trump forces his followers to bury their own dignity just to see themselves as part of the in-group. He requires that they drop their own boundaries.

For Trump, and for the malignant narcissist broligarchs that support him, human dignity is anathema. It is Kryptonite.

The reasons for this are both psychological and darkly practical.

First, when you look into the backgrounds of the main characters in our collective nightmare, they were all raised to believe they are superior to other people, but also suffer from deep childhood insecurities. Trump, Musk, and Thiel, arguably the three chief architects of the current chaos, never developed the capacity for empathy—which is a pre-requisite for dignity. Unless you see others as worthy beings like yourself, you can never be truly dignified.

Dignity is being able to be bound to others without being owned by them—or owning them.

Human dignity creates a psychological boundary that reads: “I don’t have to dominate you to be of value.” But if your only route to feeling valuable is dominating others, as is the case for malignant narcissists like those in power, dignity becomes the enemy. That’s why Trump and Musk’s degenerating behavior is not just undignified; it is anti-dignified. They prey on dignity, portray it as weakness, and replace it with displays of dominance.

As a stomach-churning example of, to coin a term, the anti-dignification of America, on Friday, Donald Trump, who is still deeply embroiled in the Epstein scandal, gave a nearly two-hour speech in front of hand-picked New York police officers which included this passage:

“And every day, I come to the White House people are thanking me. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Now, these young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls. These young, beautiful girls in the White House. They come in. Now, I’m not supposed to say beautiful, but what the hell.

These young, these gorgeous, beautiful girls that they want to be safe. And they come-- Mr. President, I speak to you, yes. Thank you, sir. Thank you… Thank you, sir.

Now, I get it all the time. Men, women, older men, younger men, and older women, and younger women. They’re all saying thank you… We represent the whole universe, frankly, because there’s nothing like the United States. Look at what we’ve done.”

To say this is undignified is inadequate. It is undignifying. It actively removes dignity from the room, from his followers, and from the cameras, and converts it into his own narcissistic supply. This is both a sign of Donald Trump’s worsening disorders and another example of how he steals the dignity of others—in this case law enforcement—and replaces it with his own (false) displays of dominance.

Anti-dignification is the process of stripping people of their status as worthy human beings with relationships of their own, and reorganizing them into objects controlled through dominance and submission.

Human dignity is not about glory, dominance, or victory. It is the state of not needing those things in order to feel worthy. This is the greatest threat to authoritarians who require that you need them—or, equally valuably—that you hate them. Either is fine, as long as you don’t ignore them.

Dignity is unique in that it both acknowledges the value of human connection and preserves the liberty of the individual—by definition. This gives it a powerful role in the complex order of liberal democracy. Human dignity provides the foundation upon which successful institutions and societies are built.

But if you are a personalist autocrat like Trump—or his broligarch patrons—it is exactly those kinds of institutions and societal norms you wish to break down.

In the model of complex adaptive systems I’ve been developing, you never go straight from complex order—like a liberal democracy—to simple order—like a personalist dictatorship. You have to break down the bindings between people and institutions—you have to destroy their human dignity—by adding chaos.

Trump and his cohort have been waging a furious war on dignity for over a decade. From his very first speech in Trump Tower when he broke all the rules—“they’re criminals; they’re rapists”—he made it clear that in order to be part of his world you must surrender your personal dignity and help extinguish the dignity of everyone else. In his second term, the war on dignity has become an existential battle. Every day is a new low. Even the “dignified transfer” became a circus.

In a dictatorship, there is no dignity. There is compliance and there is punishment. People who are dignified are seen as a threat, not an asset.

Dignity preserves the self.
Empathy preserves connection to others.
Liberty protects those connections from domination.

Democracy requires all three—which is why they are all under assault.

In my view, the most important long-term project of the human race, one which will likely require generations, is to create a civilization which puts human dignity first. Without it, we are no longer the subjects of our own stories; we are the objects of someone else’s extraction.

“When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.” —Elie Wiesel

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