This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders
Yesterday, I saw a troubling post by Pieter Omtzigt shared on X. I responded like this:
“As Europeans, we must once again learn to speak the language of power.” Can someone please call out these dusty bureaucrats and their childish superhero fantasies? You grew up on that nonsense, but you’ve become a drab follower.
I think that pretty much sums up the core of the issue: this kind of “tough talk” is a form of psychosis. It stems from growing up inside a superhero narrative while, in reality, having a bullshit job and being a colorless figure—who, to make matters worse, wears the same-colored suit as all the others just to rub that mediocrity in our faces.
Psychoses like these are dangerous, because these people could lead us straight into a world war.
There is, by the way, only one “language of power,” gentlemen—and that is the language of fascism. It’s terrifyingly close when police are already showing up at your door for engaging in protest.
And that, precisely, is why we must not learn to speak that language, but unlearn it—radically, on principle, in the name of everything living. Because whoever adopts the language of power first loses their courage, then their sensitivity, and finally their humanity. The “strong statesman” with a clenched jawline proclaiming to protect our safety is not a hero, but an actor in a poorly written disaster flick—and we’ll be the ones paying the price, with our bodies, our children, our cities full of poems not yet written.
What these colorless types in stiffly buttoned suits fail to realize is that power has never been a language, but rather the absence of one. Power is silence, oppression, orders issued without space for a reply. And so, it is precisely the language of response that we must speak—the language of resistance, of passion, of poetry. Against their polished emptiness, we raise the robust sentences of life. Against their realpolitik, the raw reality of bombs on foreheads, of refugees on shores, of fathers in coffins.
Those who learn the language of power forget the language of the mother—the oldest, softest, and ultimately strongest language there is. The only language in which anything truly grows.
So no, Pieter. We don’t need to learn that language. We need to unmask it. And then shout over it—with a thousand voices, in a hundred languages, in one unshakeable breath of the living.
The idea that bureaucrats—who have spent fifty years running headless after the United States, legitimizing every war crime, every invasion, every covert bombing campaign in Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America either in silence or with applause—can now suddenly “project power” simply by speaking the word out loud, is a psychodynamic spectacle of the highest order. It’s reminiscent of a cult in which the faithful are ordered by their guru to say, while looking into the mirror, “I am mighty”—until the universe supposedly curls to match.
But the universe doesn’t bend. The mirror cracks. And behind it: a greying open-plan office, fluorescent lighting, a PowerPoint in which the word “synergy” appears beside “hybrid threats.”
What you see then is not power, but shame—shame dressed up as decisiveness.
David Graeber understood these people like no one else. In his famous essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, he explained how modern bureaucratic systems create roles that are not only pointless, but morally corrosive. People who find themselves in such roles—policy advisors advising on policy advice—know deep down that what they do is entirely devoid of meaning. And that eats away at them. It causes a quiet rage, a disorientation, a confusion that eventually demands compensation.
Enter: “the language of power.”
This is a textbook case of compensatory behavior. Bureaucratic subjects, stripped of any real agency, attempt to create a facsimile of existential value by projecting “strength.” They don’t want to be mere cogs anymore; they want to be fists. They don’t want to be mere assistants facing rooms full of spreadsheets; they want to be generals.
Except: that general doesn’t exist. It is a phantom, nurtured by NATO presentations, by geopolitical TED talks, by the wet dream of an “assertive Europe” that inflates itself into a parody of its own irrelevance.
Because what does “power” mean to someone who has never put anything on the line? What does “security” mean to someone who’s spent their entire career in advisory committees? What does “war” mean to someone who thinks war is something outsourced to pixels in drone footage?
These people dream of tanks because they fear silence. They need the word “power” because their days are filled with call transfers, agenda items, and Friday afternoon drinks where nobody laughs.
All of this—this entire language of “assertiveness”—is nothing more than the bullshittization of being. A mythologizing of one’s own hollow existence into something resembling grandeur. Instead of facing the painful truth—that their work makes no real difference, that they are easily replaced by a script or an uninterested intern—they cling to the one thing that still sounds grand: power.
But power is not a sentence. Power is not a soundbite. Power is not a policy vision in PDF. Power is what you find in blood, in soot, in ravaged cities. Power is a tragedy, not a slideshow.
So when these people say we must “learn the language of power,” what they actually mean is:
Let me pretend I matter for a moment.
But we already know, Pieter. You are not Caesar. You are not Churchill. You are the middle manager of a continent that doesn’t know what to say, so it chooses to shout instead.
And shouting without listening does not lead to strength—but to madness.
Madness in charcoal-grey. With a badge. And a bullshit job.
Martinus Benders, 29-03-2025