Milei: Cruelty as the method

At this stage of the libertarian experiment, it is clear that we are not simply facing an austerity plan, but rather a strategy of domination. The cruelty that spills daily from President Milei’s mouth and from his no less uncouth officials is not rhetorical excess or a communications blunder. It is method. It is doctrine. It is a form of power aimed at reconfiguring not just the economy, but the very fabric of social bonds.

There are countless examples, far too many, but a few from just this past week suffice. The government launched a fierce offensive against all staff and resident doctors at the Garrahan Children’s Hospital (a beacon of Argentine paediatrics, treating children from across the country with severe illnesses), who are resisting the brutal austerity imposed on them through degrading wages. Workers at Garrahan report wage losses of up to 50 percent since December 2023 – a catastrophe made even worse by the fact that the hospital is now expected to operate with the same budget it had two years ago.

La Libertad Avanza national deputy Lilia Lemoine did not hesitate to add her grain of salt to the inhuman zeal of the administration, declaring: “If what the State pays them isn’t enough, they should’ve studied something else.” This came just days after the director of the ANDIS national disability agency, Diego Spagnuolo, told Marlene Spesso that if she had a child with a disability, “it’s the family’s problem, not the State’s.”

Marlene is the mother of Ian Moche, the 12-year-old activist/influencer who raises awareness about his autistic condition. Spagnuolo made this appalling statement during calls for the declaration of a state of emergency on disability issues. President Milei himself also chimed in, joining the libertarian mob on social media by accusing Ian – again, a 12-year-old with a neurological condition – of being a Kirchnerite operative.

Also last week, the national government issued a decree (signed by Milei, Cabinet Chief Guillermo Francos and Human Capital Minister Sandra Pettovello) that absolves the State of responsibility for assisting people living on the streets. And there are more and more of them: 4,049 in Buenos Aires City alone, as of last November. The national government will no longer handle the issue; it will only “regulate, supervise,” and eventually “assist” provinces and regions – but only if they lack “financial resources” to address the crisis. And this is announced just 15 minutes before the onset of winter.

We already know the slogans: “He who doesn’t work shall not eat”; “If they die, let them die”; “There’s no money.” These phrases pile up like an inventory of moral violence, where the poor are guilty, critics are enemies and the suffering of others becomes a tolerable statistic.

Javier Milei has turned cruelty into a narrative device. But he is not the first. Authoritarian power has long spoken in this tone. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes claimed that men submit to the State out of fear of violent death. Milei inverts that reasoning: in his view, the State does not protect people from fear, it amplifies it. It administers it. It threatens chaos to justify obedience. Cruelty is not the breakdown of order: it is its guarantee.

Closer still is the echo of Friedrich Nietzsche, who celebrated the “will to power” as a transcendence of the morality of the weak. Milei follows this tradition by scorning compassion as hypocrisy. “I’m not worried about hunger, I’m worried about political patronage,” said Pettovello, his minister.

What is being installed is a pedagogy of punishment. It’s not enough to cut spending; there must be humiliation. Society must be reminded, every day, that the State no longer exists to cushion pain, but to administer it efficiently. Cruelty thus becomes performative: it aims to discipline.

The President’s contempt for journalism follows the same logic: “Journalism is a sewer”; “Political operatives disguised as journalists”; “The press is a mafia.”

The authoritarian regimes of the 20th century understood well that language doesn’t merely describe the world – it constructs it. Hate speech has always been the first step towards the normalisation of harm. If someone suffers, they must have done something to deserve it.

“If you don’t understand the austerity, tough luck,” seems to say Economy Minister Luis Caputo with his body language as he shrugs. Or the “What’s that got to do with me?” or “Why should they eat for free?” – statements from Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni in one of his grating exchanges with the press. Statements like these are not random: they serve a purpose. They dismantle the democratic pact of solidarity. In place of rights, competition. In place of empathy, hostility.

Thus, cruelty becomes not a mistake, but a pedagogy of order. Every hurtful word, every gesture of contempt, every mockery of the weak serves to draw a boundary: on one side, those who obey; on the other, those who must pay the price. As Hannah Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem when analysing the “banality of evil,” cruelty is not always sadistic, it can also be bureaucratic, carried out without thought or personal hatred. Evil can be impersonal, mechanical, obedient. It is part of a system of order-following. And here stands the presidential spokesperson – yet again – as a prime example.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that cruelty, far from being a peripheral element of politics, is intrinsic to it: a way in which ideology takes form. Ergo: Milei does not insult out of impulse. Milei punishes by design.