Libido Dominandi

Augustine’s Core Political Insight

Augustine’s political philosophy has one of the most important insights into all political thought before or since. The identification of the root of political disorder. The libido dominandi is the disordered desire to control others—a spiritual disease rooted in pride. It is not limited to political tyranny but manifests in families, churches, and inner motivations. This lust perverts love (which is properly directed toward God and neighbor) into self-centered control.

“The earthly city…has its good in this world, and rejoices in it with such joy as can be given by things such as they are. The heavenly city…lives by faith, sojourning as a stranger in this world.” (City of God 19.17)

This contrast between the earthly city and the civitas Dei, the City of God, is political-spiritual geography. Those ruled by libido dominandi build Babel; those ruled by love build Zion.

In his essay “The Inner Ring,” CS Lewis offers an example of the libido dominandi in action in daily life. The insatiable desire to be “inside,” to have influence, status, and a sense of control, Lewis warns, leads men to betray their consciences:

“Of all the passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis critiques modern education and technocracy for severing knowledge from virtue and power from the moral order. He sees the ultimate form of libido dominandi in man’s attempt to dominate natureless nature—and, by extension, the natureless modern man himself:

“What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

When reality is a machine, and the present has simply evolved through force acting on matter over time, there are no limitations to our activity besides a lack of will.

This is Augustine’s doctrine reborn in modern terms: when man forgets his telos (end) in God, he redefines freedom as domination—first over the created world, then over his fellow man, and ultimately over his own nature.

Every attempt to simply claim that gender can be changed by an act of the will, that some people are disposable for convenience, and that the freedoms of the weak can be stolen by the strong, we are seeing Augustine’s Libido Dominandi at work.

Brave New World and Soft Tyranny

In Brave New World, Huxley presents a society where libido dominandi has taken a subtler, more insidious form. It is no longer brute force or visible tyranny, but domination through pleasure, control through comfort. The libido dominandi has become dominatus libido, domination by libido. The World State achieves peace, not by virtue, but by pacifying the masses with drugs (soma), promiscuity, and entertainment.

Here, Augustine’s insight is inverted: the libido dominandi no longer wears the mask of Caesar—it wears the smiling mask of a circus ringmaster. The rulers dominate not by fear but by seducing citizens into docility and controlling them through shame and the threat of being put out of the ring. The spiritual cost is profound, but the Libido Dominandi justifies itself by effectivity, not morality.

Compare this to Augustine’s critique of Rome. Rome was majestic, but was ruled by a will disordered toward glorying in control. Huxley predicts the same bondage on the back end of modernity, but under a regime of pleasure rather than pain.

Augustine rung a bell, though, that continues to peal. True freedom is not the ability to dominate but the capacity to love rightly. Libido dominandi is a counterfeit freedom—it promises control but delivers enslavement. The Christian tradition calls us instead to the libido serviendi—the desire to serve—as modeled by Christ, who, being in very nature God, “made himself nothing… taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:6–7). We ought to still desire greatness, but Jesus unflips the path to greatness that was inverted by the fall.

But Jesus called them to him and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Matthew 20:26-28)

Both Lewis and Huxley, in their different ways, reawaken Augustine’s insight for the modern soul: that without the anchor of transcendent truth, man’s reason becomes a tool of domination, and his freedom a mask for bondage. The antidote, always, is Christ—who dominates death to liberate us from the lies of our Libido Dominandi.