Fwd: The Useless Man in Current Politics
Chandana Liyanapatabendy
The Useless Man in Current Politics
The “useless man” remains one of the defining metaphors of our age. He wanders through modern geopolitics as citizen, worker, consumer, voter, and digital subject — informed yet powerless, connected yet isolated, visible yet unseen. He survives rather than lives. He adapts rather than acts.
by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
May 19, 2026
10 mins read
A Representational Artwork
This fear is what is the ruin of us all. And some dominate us; they take advantage of our fear and frighten us still more. Mark this: as long as people are afraid, they will rot like the birches in the marsh. We must grow bold; it is time! ~ Maxim Gorky
Who is a Useless Man?
Certain literary works transcend the historical moment in which they were conceived and become, instead, prophetic mirrors held before successive generations of humanity. The Life of a Useless Man by Maxim Gorky is one such work. Written against the backdrop of late Tsarist Russia — a society riddled with autocracy, surveillance, suspicion, bureaucratic inertia, and spiritual decay — the novel emerges not merely as a narrative of one individual’s decline, but as a profound philosophical inquiry into the paralysis of the human condition under systems of political oppression. Gorky’s “useless man” is not merely an indolent or incompetent figure. He is a symbol of civilizational exhaustion: a human being detached from moral purpose, incapable of decisive ethical action, trapped between awareness and impotence, and condemned to drift through history as spectator rather than participant.
In Yevsey Klimkov, Gorky presents a timid, psychologically fragmented man whose life is governed less by conviction than by fear, conformity, passivity, and the survival instinct. Yevsey is neither hero nor villain. He is something far more disturbing — an ordinary man whose moral agency has gradually eroded beneath the pressure of authoritarian structures and spiritual emptiness. As a police informer moving through a world where trust has collapsed and human relationships have become transactional and hollow, Yevsey embodies the tragedy of the modern political subject: he participates in the machinery of oppression not out of ideological fervour, but out of weakness, fear, and resignation. The “useless man” therefore becomes not merely a literary archetype but an existential diagnosis.
Gorky’s insight was devastatingly simple. Tyranny does not endure solely because of tyrants. It survives because millions of ordinary individuals become psychologically diminished — too frightened to resist, too exhausted to hope, and too alienated to act with solidarity or courage. The useless man is thus the silent accomplice of history’s cruelties. He observes suffering yet remains inert; he recognizes injustice yet retreats into passivity; he senses the erosion of his humanity yet lacks the moral energy to reclaim it. In this sense, Gorky democratized alienation. Unlike the aristocratic “superfluous men” of earlier Russian literature — such as Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time or Oblomov in Oblomov — Gorky’s useless man emerges from the lower strata of society. Alienation is no longer the existential boredom of privileged intellectuals; it becomes the collective pathology of a civilization crushed beneath autocracy and fear.
Application to the Current Context
The enduring power of Gorky’s political vision lies in its terrifying relevance to the contemporary world. For although the architecture of modern authoritarianism differs technologically from that of Tsarist Russia, its psychological effects remain hauntingly similar. The twenty-first century increasingly reveals a geopolitical landscape marked by democratic erosion, surveillance cultures, information manipulation, militant nationalism, economic precarity, and the progressive diminution of individual agency. Today, nearly sixty percent of humanity lives under authoritarian or semi-authoritarian political systems. Yet even within nominal democracies, citizens increasingly experience themselves not as empowered participants in civic life, but as isolated spectators trapped within vast systems of technological, bureaucratic, and ideological control.
The Harari Paradox
The tragedy of our age is therefore not merely political but spiritual. Human beings possess unprecedented technological sophistication while simultaneously suffering profound existential dislocation. Never before has humanity been more interconnected digitally, and never before has the individual felt so psychologically isolated and politically inconsequential. The citizen of modernity inhabits a paradoxical condition: perpetually visible through surveillance systems and social media platforms, yet profoundly unseen as a moral being. One speaks constantly yet feels unheard; one participates endlessly yet senses the futility of participation itself.
This paradox has been perceptively identified by Yuval Noah Harari, who warns that humanity has achieved extraordinary mastery over external systems while remaining perilously deficient in the arts of collective wisdom, cooperation, and meaningful communication. Harari observes that technological progress has accelerated at a pace unmatched by humanity’s ethical and political maturation. In his view, societies now possess the power to manipulate information, biology, and even consciousness itself, yet lack the institutional trust and moral cohesion necessary to use such powers wisely. The consequence is a civilization in which algorithms increasingly understand human desires better than human beings understand one another. Thus, while technology promises connection, it often deepens alienation; while information proliferates endlessly, understanding diminishes; and while humanity has become capable of reshaping the planet, it has not learned the more difficult art of sustaining solidarity among its own members.
It is here that the chilling observation of Thomas Hobbes acquires renewed relevance. Hobbes warned that in the absence of social order, the life of man would become “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet contemporary civilization reveals an even darker possibility — that human life may remain technologically sophisticated and materially interconnected while becoming spiritually solitary and morally diminished. The modern State no longer merely governs territory; it increasingly governs consciousness. Fear circulates through economic instability, digital surveillance, geopolitical insecurity, climate anxiety, and informational chaos. The citizen becomes psychologically exhausted by permanent crisis.
In many respects, the literary prophets of the twentieth century anticipated this condition with extraordinary precision. In The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka transformed Gregor Samsa into an insect not simply to evoke horror, but to dramatize the dehumanization inherent within bureaucratic modernity. Gregor’s tragedy lies not solely in his grotesque transformation, but in the realization that his worth to others depended entirely upon his economic usefulness. Once incapable of productive labour, he becomes expendable. Kafka thereby exposed one of modern civilization’s most terrifying truths: systems governed by bureaucracy and instrumental rationality ultimately value human beings only insofar as they remain functionally useful.
Kafka’s universe is populated by individuals crushed beneath incomprehensible structures of authority. In The Judgment, guilt appears arbitrary and condemnation descends without rational explanation. In these worlds, authority no longer requires moral legitimacy; it merely requires obedience. The accused need not understand the charge; the citizen need not comprehend the system. What matters is acquiescence. Modern geopolitics increasingly mirrors this Kafkaesque condition. Algorithms determine opportunities; bureaucracies regulate identity; surveillance systems categorize behaviour; and digital infrastructures shape perception itself. The individual confronts institutions so vast and opaque that meaningful resistance appears impossible.
This condition achieved perhaps its most chilling articulation in Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Orwell understood that authoritarianism ultimately seeks dominion not merely over bodies, but over consciousness itself. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” These slogans endure because they reveal the epistemological ambitions of political power. Totalitarianism seeks to colonize language, memory, and perception until objective truth itself dissolves into ideological performance.
Current Politics
Contemporary geopolitics increasingly exhibits these tendencies. Governments, corporations, and digital platforms compete not merely to control resources or territory, but to shape narratives and emotional realities. Information warfare, disinformation campaigns, algorithmic amplification, deepfakes, and performative outrage have transformed truth into contested terrain. Citizens are submerged within torrents of contradictory information until exhaustion produces cynicism and resignation. Orwell’s Winston Smith is tortured not merely physically but epistemologically. He is compelled to betray the integrity of his own perception. Such is the ultimate ambition of authoritarian power: not simply obedience, but the destruction of independent thought itself.
Yet if Orwell feared tyranny through terror, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World foresaw a subtler and perhaps more enduring form of domination. Huxley recognized that populations need not always be oppressed through violence. They may instead be pacified through entertainment, distraction, consumerism, and engineered pleasure. In Huxley’s dystopia, citizens surrender freedom willingly because they have been conditioned to prefer comfort over truth and stability over conscience.
The modern world increasingly embodies the nightmares of both Orwell and Huxley simultaneously. Citizens are surveilled yet distracted, informed yet manipulated, connected yet isolated. The digital age promises empowerment while generating unprecedented capacities for behavioural control. Social media platforms encourage self-expression while commodifying identity itself. Human attention becomes monetized; outrage becomes algorithmically profitable; political discourse degenerates into spectacle. Under such conditions, moral seriousness becomes difficult to sustain.
This broader geopolitical environment has produced the resurgence of authoritarian tendencies across the globe. The collapse of faith in liberal democratic institutions has created fertile ground for strongman politics, populist nationalism, and illiberal governance. Across continents, political leaders increasingly portray pluralism as weakness, dissent as betrayal, and independent institutions as obstacles to national destiny. Complexity is reduced to slogans. Governance becomes theatrical performance. The citizen, overwhelmed by uncertainty and instability, often embraces authoritarian simplifications because freedom itself demands moral and intellectual labour.
My Take
Technological acceleration has vastly expanded the capacities of the modern State. Surveillance systems now operate with a degree of sophistication unimaginable in previous centuries. Facial recognition technologies, predictive policing, biometric databases, digital currencies, and artificial intelligence enable governments to monitor populations with extraordinary precision. Even democratic societies increasingly justify intrusive powers through appeals to national security, counterterrorism, pandemic management, or cyber resilience. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that exceptional powers once granted to the State rarely disappear entirely. Emergency becomes normalized; surveillance becomes routine.
The result is a profound crisis of human significance. The ordinary individual increasingly experiences himself as a replaceable component within immense systems of administration, consumption, and ideological management. Economic insecurity corrodes social trust; geopolitical instability generates chronic anxiety; climate change intensifies existential uncertainty; and technological transformation destabilizes traditional forms of identity and community. The citizen becomes psychologically exhausted by permanent precarity.
This exhaustion is central to the modern political condition. Authoritarianism thrives not only through fear but through fatigue. Populations overwhelmed by economic struggle, informational overload, and institutional distrust gradually lose the capacity for sustained moral resistance. Political fatalism emerges. Citizens cease to believe that meaningful change is possible. Democracy does not die solely through coups or censorship; it also dies through resignation.
Herein lies the enduring genius of Gorky’s “useless man.” Yevsey Klimkov is not a monster. He is weak. He drifts through systems he neither controls nor fully understands. He accommodates himself to power because resistance appears futile and survival requires conformity. In this sense, Yevsey becomes the archetypal citizen of modern authoritarianism. He embodies the tragedy of individuals who recognize injustice yet remain psychologically incapable of transformative action.
The terrifying implication of Gorky’s vision is that oppression ultimately deforms not merely institutions but the inner architecture of human consciousness itself. Human beings gradually internalize their own insignificance. They cease to perceive themselves as moral agents capable of altering history. Instead, they become passive observers drifting through systems that appear immutable and omnipotent.
This phenomenon is increasingly visible in contemporary geopolitical culture. Citizens consume endless streams of catastrophe — wars, ecological crises, economic instability, political corruption — while possessing little capacity to influence outcomes beyond symbolic gestures of outrage or despair. Social media amplifies emotional intensity while simultaneously fragmenting collective action. Individuals become hyper-aware of global suffering yet profoundly powerless before it. Knowledge without agency produces paralysis.
And yet, beneath this atmosphere of despair lies a deeper philosophical question concerning the nature of human dignity itself. What does it mean to remain fully human within systems designed increasingly to instrumentalize, categorize, and manage existence? Can moral courage survive under conditions of permanent surveillance, distraction, and exhaustion? Can solidarity endure within cultures organized around competition, consumption, and fear?
The great literary dystopias of modernity all revolve around this central question. Kafka feared that bureaucracy would reduce individuals to insects. Orwell feared that totalitarianism would colonize truth itself. Huxley feared that pleasure and distraction would render freedom irrelevant. Hobbes feared the violence of unrestrained human conflict. Yet Gorky perhaps perceived something equally devastating: that the greatest danger to civilization may be the gradual production of spiritually exhausted individuals who no longer believe themselves capable of meaningful moral action.
This is why The Life of a Useless Man retains such extraordinary contemporary relevance. It is not merely a Russian political novel confined to the anxieties of Tsarist decline. It is a timeless meditation upon the psychological consequences of political systems that diminish human agency and normalize fear. Gorky understood that tyranny survives because ordinary individuals become habituated to passivity. The useless man is therefore not useless because he lacks intelligence or sensitivity. He becomes useless because history has deprived him of courage, solidarity, and faith in his own significance.
Indeed, one of the most disturbing features of the contemporary geopolitical order is the extent to which it risks reproducing millions of such lives. Individuals today increasingly inhabit conditions of existential fragmentation — economically precarious, politically alienated, digitally surveilled, and psychologically exhausted. They observe history unfolding through illuminated screens while feeling unable to intervene meaningfully in its trajectory. They drift, consume, react, obey, and disappear anonymously within immense systems of power.
And thus we return inevitably to Gorky. His political theme was never merely about Tsarist Russia. It was about the fragility of human dignity under conditions of fear and alienation. It was about the terrifying ease with which ordinary people surrender moral agency when confronted by systems that appear invincible. It was about the spiritual consequences of living without courage, conviction, or solidarity.
The “useless man” therefore remains one of the defining metaphors of our age. He wanders through modern geopolitics as citizen, worker, consumer, voter, and digital subject — informed yet powerless, connected yet isolated, visible yet unseen. He survives rather than lives. He adapts rather than acts. And in that adaptation lies the deepest tragedy of all. Gorky is explicit in his works that the so-called “useless man” is not a creature of idleness but of surrendered will: a man who reflects that he lived for years without conviction, drifting between fear and submission, performing what was demanded of him without ever truly believing in it, and who, in retrospective clarity, cannot identify a single moment in which he acted as a free moral agent. This condition, Gorky suggests, is the essence of existential passivity—a life lived without inner authorship. In another recurring reflection on isolation, the same figure recognizes that his separation from others is not merely circumstantial but arises from an internal emptiness that renders genuine human connection impossible; even in the midst of society, he is already estranged from life itself. Here, Gorky deepens the thesis that uselessness is not simply social exclusion but self-estrangement. At the core of this moral anatomy lies a harsh retrospective indictment: what once appeared as survival is revealed as a continuous surrender of will, a gradual forfeiture of dignity. In this sense, the “useless man” becomes ethically tragic—not wicked, but progressively erased as a moral subject. Ultimately, Gorky arrives at a bleak philosophical recognition that human life may be consumed not only by external oppression or suffering, but by a quiet, almost imperceptible failure to resist, a letting of existence slip by without ever asserting meaning against its drift.
Gorky ultimately asks a question that remains profoundly urgent today: can a civilization endure when millions of its citizens no longer believe that they matter?
Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne DCL, PhD, LL.M, LLB, FRAeS, FCILT
Senior Associate, Aviation Law and Policy
Aviation Strategies International
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