By Edward Curtin
EdwardCurtin.com
November 14, 2026
There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
It is well known that Shakespeare has Jacques in As You Like It say that "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players." It is generally accepted in a vague way that it's true. But it really is. And it's generally accepted in a vaguer way that it isn't true, especially in a personal sense.
But what else can we do but act ? Even sleeping is an act, and we spend a good deal of our lives doing that. And then there are the acts performed every waking day, some consciously and others not, each to carry out one's intention.
And societies provide structures fitted with roles for people to perform, and most slip easily into those roles. In sociological lingo there are prescribed statuses - e.g. lawyer, teacher, grandmother, doctor, etc. - that one occupies, and attached to these statuses are roles, which are scripts as how to perform, how to dress, how to talk, etc. But I am getting too technical.
For Shakespeare, Kafka, and Nietzsche, among many other deep thinkers extending back to classical Greece and Rome, the world is a theater and men and women players. This is meant primarily in the existential sense with the theatrical versions being reflections on lives outside the stage door.
Now that another "most important election of our lifetimes" has concluded with a sweeping Democratic Party victory in the midterm elections, the revels now ended, the time is coming, as it did for Donald Trump when he took office for the second time in January 2025, for the Democratic winners to take off their campaign masks and show their "true" faces in our theater of the absurd - the masks behind the masks.
You may recall how in February 2025 there was much talk about Trump in media circles of the so-called "right" and "left" as a peacemaker with Russia over the US/NATO proxy war against Russia via Ukraine. Those who were praising him then were saying he was a changed man after spending four years "in the wilderness." The stupidity of such wishful thinking about Trump was as shallow as the last segment of mainstream nightly news shows where an uplifting story is offered after all the disaster news to send the audience off to sweet dreams.
Trump, it is now acknowledged, like his predecessor Joseph Biden who also presided over the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, is no man of peace. Far, far from it. He is a warmonger, fully in support of the extinction of the Palestinians and behind Israel's war aims in the Middle-East. He would love to blast Iran to smithereens. Ditto: Russia. Ditto: China. Ditto. Ditto. Ditto.
He always was and always will be an actor - an acting president - in the service of the national security state. His Archie Bunker grotesque crudeness is his role. But soon it will be time for a more sophisticated show as the winners of the U.S. Midterm elections take their seats.
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, just wrote an article, For Trump and America, a Clear Election Verdict Leaves a Murky Future, in which his language usage reveals the theatrical nature of our politics. I list a few phrases from it: "unwilling to cede the stage; "staged an audacious comeback'; "a drama for the ages"; "do not want political theater, we don't want drama."
But drama we got. For such metaphorical stage language is everywhere. Because, of course, all the world is a stage and men and women actors, and even when it is completely unconscious, the way we talk and write reveals it in our use of terms with unintended theatrical meanings, Baker's lingo being one small example.
The stage management of social and political life is nearly complete. There's almost no business but show business now.
It is November 11 as I write. Veteran's Day, a national holiday in the United States. It was once called Armistice Day to mark the armistice that ended World War I and is now is called Remembrance Day in Commonwealth countries. The "theater of war" has long been a staple descriptive. That Great War performance ended at 11 A.M. on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.
The 16 or so million dead didn't attend the celebrations. No Oscars were handed out. But parades have been happening ever since to remind the audience of the dead and their "sacrifices" for their respective flags, a reminder meant to celebrate wars while the band plays on. Those who march in military parades are acting out parts in a play that both repeats and prepares for the next show. The parades serve a double function: to create a form of psychic socialization through repetition and to be dress rehearsals for the next war. The key being repetition. Repeat, Rehearse, Remember - do it again.
Rehearse: to bring back the hearse.
In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes the following: "Seeing warfare as theater provides a psychic escape for the participant: with a sufficient sense of theater, he can perform his duties without implicating his 'real' self and without impairing his innermost conviction that the world is still a rational place."
The uniform provides the costume to distance one from "real life" and the roles are delineated by the ranks and insignia. In recent years the corporate world uses the sports term "teams" to describe a similar process of alienation whereby one can "play" the game of distancing efficiently. There is the actor/player at work - akin, let's say, to a "designated hitter" in baseball - and then the "real "person in one's free time. The psyche is divided so that the acts one performs on the battlefield or at work are divorced from the person on home leave, whether that is a few weeks or after 5 P.M. every day and on weekends.
Divided selves are the norm in our Kafkaesque world where power is hidden behind figureheads and the search for the real is a dark comedy of errors. Try getting to the master of the castle or discover what your crime might be.
Writing in 1934 on the tenth anniversary of Franz Kafka's death (and the year Hitler became the Führer and the spectacular Nuremberg Rally, which was the basis for Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, was held in Germany), the German writer Walter Benjamin wrote this about Kafka:
Kafka's world is a world theater. For him, man is on the stage from the very beginning. The proof of the pudding is that everyone is accepted by The Nature Theater of Oklahoma. What the standards for admission are cannot be determined. Dramatic talent, the most obvious criterion, seems to be of no importance. But this can be expressed in another way: all that is expected of the applicants is the ability to play themselves. It is no longer within the realm of possibility that they could, if necessary, be what they claim to be.... The law of this theater is tucked away in 'A Report to an Academy': 'I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other reason.' Before the end of his trial [Kafka's The Trial], K. seems to have an intimation of these things. He suddenly turns to the two gentlemen wearing top hats who have come for him and asks them: 'What theater are you playing at?' 'Theater?' asks one, the corner of his mouth twitching as he looks for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a mute struggling to overcome a stubborn disability.' The men do not answer this question, but there is much to indicate that it has hit home.
Here we are in The Nature Theater of the United States. Does anyone not realize that they are acting as if the politicians who come and go are not acting ? All politicians are actors twice over. This theater they perform in is not a question of aesthetics. You have to hand it to them; in their shamelessness they are not just single persons (persona = mask in Latin) but rendezvous of persons, each adjusted to their different audience but ultimately in service to their producers who have brought them to the big stage. Their talent for mimicry is fabulous.
Without a loyal audience they are lost. The audience must act as if they believe them, even as they don't believe themselves. For the audience is part of the act. Most people will never admit that they are actors. They presume they are good, sincere individuals without pretense. They are honest, straightforward; do not wear costumes or pretend; do not change from scene to scene; do not rehearse.
This sincere persona is of course an act. Can a person do anything but act ? The reason professional actors so fascinate people is because they are assumed to make a distinction between on stage and off - maybe. Something regular people might like to do if they could figure out what the distinction could possibly be.
So when the latest winning Democratic politicians - the fresh blood - assume office and get their dressing rooms in the Nature Theater of the United States, watch them melt into thin air. It is the politician's best role, and they need a "believing" audience to clap for their role reversals, which always come.
In the days ahead you may want to ask your favorite actors in the U.S. Congress: "What theater are you playing at?"
And wonder: What is a "genuine actor"?
This article was originally published at EdwardCurtin.com.