The Aesthetics of Authority: How Power Makes Nations Ugly by L. Ali Khan
Nations are judged not only by what they do, but also by what they make us see, and what they force us to feel. Nations are not merely political or economic constructs. They are aesthetic phenomena that leave lasting visual and emotional imprints. We evaluate nations by their constitutions, laws, religions, morality, and wealth. Yet their aesthetic dimension is often overlooked: nations can also be judged by the beauty or ugliness they project. In Afghanistan, the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas, monumental statues that had stood for nearly 1,500 years, reduced carved stone to empty cavities, illustrating how authority can deliberately extinguish beauty in the name of belief. In contrast, the Pharaohs’ laws and customs have faded, while their pyramids endure as wonders, confirming John Keats’ ambitious observation that “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”
What does power look and feel like when stripped of its narratives?
Raw power prowls behind fragile ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon, drone battles in Ukraine, and recent U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iranian targets. Graphic imagery of devastation, amplified by social media and state-sponsored videos that market military action as cinematic spectacle, circulates globally, forcing viewers to confront the visual and emotional consequences of authority in conflict. A gaudy ballroom appended to the White House, oil tankers stalled in the Strait of Hormuz, and U.S. bases across the Gulf under fire shatter sanitized official narratives. Fake videos spread as satire, propaganda, and commentary, confirming a simple fact: images move faster, and cut deeper, than words.
Legal and moral frameworks are not enough. They do not exhaust judgment. We ask whether a war is just or unjust, legal or illegal. Yet we rarely ask whether a war is beautiful or ugly. Aesthetic effects provide an independent standard of judgment. Scenes of devastation are inherently hideous. Thus, what law or morality permits, aesthetics may still condemn. Nations engaged in conflict, such as Israel and the Gulf States, actively manipulate the images of warfare, fearing that the aesthetics may reconfigure battlefield outcomes.
A beautiful nation may turn ugly with alarming speed, for destruction is easier than construction. Becoming ugly requires far less effort than becoming beautiful. Several months ago, graphic images and videos of federal immigration enforcement operations targeting individuals and businesses in Minnesota’s Somali community spread rapidly across social media. These visceral scenes of tension and hardship posed a disturbing question: Is this America the beautiful?
In countless matters, nations, leaders, and institutions exercise authority in ways that are beautiful or ugly. This essay examines the aesthetics of authority, drawing on a few nations as examples. The analysis, however, applies broadly to all nations, large and small, as well as to their leaders and institutions. The aesthetic commitments vary across nations and even over time within the same nation.
Power in Plain Sight
Power cannot hide; it broadcasts itself in what people see and feel every day. It is visible in how nations shape their landscapes, maintain their municipalities, and treat their populations. Power is revealed in plain sight through its visual and emotional effects. It shows whether rulers are attentive to beauty or indifferent to degradation, whether they elevate human life or tolerate conditions that diminish it. What a nation allows to be seen becomes the most immediate measure of its governance.
Literature commonly identifies two aspects of national authority: hard power and soft power. Hard power refers primarily to military power. Soft power is more elusive and may include a nation’s behavior toward others, the reception its people receive abroad, and its creativity in the arts and sciences. Yet these categories are insufficient. The visual logic of power offers a more discerning paradigm.
Aesthetics is not mere decoration but concerns the intentions behind the exercise of power. It requires a deliberate commitment to beauty and a principled aversion to ugliness across all domains of governance.
For example, the aesthetics of authority asks how a nation protects its geography and environment. A nation may inherit a beautiful geography. Whether a nation protects its rivers, beaches, hills, wildlife, and other natural assets is an aesthetic exercise of authority. Are the rulers even aware of, let alone committed to preserving, the natural environment?
Likewise, how a nation maintains its villages and cities reveals much more than its official ideology. Garbage-filled cities and public parks signal cynical disregard for beauty. They also reflect how much pride people take in the places where they live. The nearly two-decade garbage crisis (1980s – 2008) in Naples, where streets were overtaken by uncollected waste, contrasts sharply with Singapore, where disciplined governance sustains order, cleanliness, and visual harmony in public spaces.
The visual violence of economics becomes vivid when one asks whether rulers consider aesthetics when crafting economic policies. A nation whose economy is built on ugly industries, such as unregulated extractive mining that scars the landscape, or sweatshop labor, exercises authority in ways that leave lasting images of degradation and exploitation of labor.
How a nation treats its poor reveals much about its sense of beauty. Affluent communities can build gated neighborhoods with amenities, architectural elegance, and order. The true test lies not in the beauty of wealthy neighborhoods but in the condition of poor ones. When poverty is accompanied by filth, disorder, and abandonment, the nation projects an aesthetic of indifference.
In Rio de Janeiro, affluent neighborhoods with high-rise apartments, beachfront promenades, and curated public spaces coexist with favelas such as Rocinha, where infrastructure is deteriorated, sanitation is poor, and public order is fragile. A society that tolerates large zones of decay while preserving islands of beauty reveals not a lack of resources, but a failure of aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic authority must extend dignity across all conditions of life.
The claim that basic needs must be satisfied before aesthetics can be considered is misguided and should be discarded from political, economic, and social thought. Nature offers no such hierarchy: trees bear fruit without surrendering beauty. Human systems, guided by enlightened authority, can and should emulate this harmony. Productivity and aesthetic excellence are not rivals; they are mutually reinforcing.
Military Pageantry
Relativists may argue that beauty is a matter of preference and that there are no absolutes for judging whether the exercise of authority is beautiful or ugly. This view holds insofar as aesthetics permits a range of things to be called beautiful or ugly. Beauty or ugliness is not an either-or judgment. Still, scenes of graphic suffering evoke near-universal revulsion across cultures, lending aesthetics greater objectivity than pure preference.
Military power has two aesthetic dimensions: the static beauty of hardware and its kinetic use. The equipment includes vehicles, tanks, aircraft, ships, and uniforms. Sleek aircraft flying high in the sky can inspire awe. Citizens feel pride during military parades showcasing national missiles and other weapons of war. The pageantry of the Victory Day parade in Moscow or the Bastille Day parade in France is dazzling.
Beneath the disciplined beauty of military equipment, however, lies its kinetic aesthetics: how the equipment is used and for what purpose. Kinetic aesthetics refers to the purposeful application of military power and its human impact. It is the kinetic use of military equipment that makes it beautiful or ugly.
In October 2005, a powerful 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck northern Pakistan and Kashmir, killing more than 100,000 people and leaving millions homeless. A combined Pakistan-U.S. military response swiftly delivered tons of food, water, medicine, and blankets. At the operation’s peak, more than 1,200 U.S. troops and 25 helicopters flew more than 4,600 missions, distributing approximately 26 million pounds of supplies, including winterized tents and plastic sheeting, while also evacuating civilians and providing medical treatment through a mobile field hospital. This exemplifies the kinetic beauty of military power.
By contrast, in the final months of World War II, British and American forces raided the historic city of Dresden, renowned for its cultural beauty and baroque architecture. Thousands of tons of high-explosive and incendiary bombs created a massive firestorm that engulfed the city center. High temperatures melted glass and asphalt. An estimated 25,000 civilians suffocated in shelters or were incinerated in the streets.
No justification for military action survives the images it leaves behind. No matter how morally righteous the cause, the people of the world equate the obliteration of homes, families, hospitals, and residents with an act of ugliness that no justification can hide. Recent conflicts, particularly the war in Lebanon and Gaza, have generated global outrage not only on legal and moral grounds but also through the visual and emotional imprints of suffering.
Ravaging communities is inherently ugly, obscuring the distinction between just and unjust war. Nations that repeatedly resort to war accumulate an aesthetic stigma. Their war narratives no longer overcome the graphic imagery of ruins. Nowhere is it clearer than in war that aesthetics is a separate and powerful standard. The visual and emotional realities of suffering cannot be fully mitigated by appeals to historical land claims, strategic necessity, religious mandate, or any moral or legal justifications.
Optical Oppression
Authority that institutionalizes racism, caste hierarchies, or religious fanaticism generates optical oppression, regardless of a nation’s material prosperity, historical longevity, or associated ideology or faith tradition. Such systems produce visibly and emotionally degraded public realities marked by discrimination, dehumanization, repression, and division.
While the immoral is often ugly, morality itself can conceal ugliness. Optical oppression, therefore, offers an independent standard of judgment.
Racism and caste-based hierarchies are not only morally problematic but also aesthetically repellent. Both have been defended for centuries on legal, moral, and religious grounds. Yet the entrenched practice of consigning entire groups to degraded social status, whether through slavery, segregation, and lynching, or through caste systems that allocate civic burdens such as garbage collection exclusively to lower castes, creates a social landscape of profound ugliness.
A social order that normalizes humiliation, or one in which an identifiable segment of society endures social indignities as a marker of inherent inferiority, cannot produce beauty, no matter how firmly tradition or belief may defend it.
Religious extremism produces a parallel optical oppression. Regimes or movements that impose coercion, systematic mistreatment of women, public corporal punishments, or the suppression of cultural diversity, such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, distort what might otherwise be rich faith traditions into visibly repressive realities. Cities that reflect diverse expressions of Islamic aesthetics, such as Istanbul, Cairo, Lahore, Kuala Lumpur, and Amman, despite their imperfections, stand in contrast to the atmosphere of intolerance in Kabul.
Faces of Authority
A nation’s aesthetic authority is fundamentally shaped by the conduct of its leaders and the design of its institutions. Public institutions, such as the court system, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and social support systems, directly influence the nation’s aesthetic image through their design, functionality, and accessibility, both at home and abroad. Videos of heavily armed law enforcement personnel stain a nation’s governance. So does the rude behavior of immigration and customs officers at airports.
Cultures have long recognized that dignity is beauty, whether it is the dignity of architecture or of the people. Authority manifests aesthetically through public institutions such as legislative buildings and monuments. Elegant, accessible, and well-maintained civic structures project order, justice, and shared dignity, enhancing the nation’s visual authority. Germany’s Reichstag in Berlin, with its iconic glass dome by architect Norman Foster, symbolizes transparency by allowing citizens to observe parliamentary proceedings.
Conversely, dilapidated or fortress-like institutions that seem inaccessible convey oppression and decay, undermining public trust and aesthetic appeal. Police headquarters, administrative complexes, and prisons in various countries project authority through intimidation rather than openness. The Nicolae Ceaușescu regime’s aesthetic brutalism in Romania demolished historic quarters to erect gray concrete structures that embodied fabricated uniformity, material austerity, and emotional oppression.
Beauty is not merely architectural. A nation that promotes open access to information, respects viewpoint diversity, and protects privacy projects an aesthetic of transparency and intellectual freedom. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, association, and religion. When people feel free to speak, associate, and practice their religion without fear, they cultivate a strong civic sense of belonging. By contrast, an atmosphere in which authority suppresses fundamental freedoms is ugly.
Dignified leadership enhances the beauty of a nation. The personal conduct, demeanor, and visual presentation of leaders form a critical domain. Leaders who embody composure, restraint, and graceful communication project kinetic beauty in authority. Conversely, leaders who display arrogance, vulgarity, or performative aggression diminish a nation’s aesthetic standing regardless of policy achievements.
Nelson Mandela of South Africa demonstrated aesthetic sensibility through his measured conduct and emphasis on reconciliation during the post-apartheid transition, enhancing the country’s global image. His personal grace offered the ultimate refutation of apartheid. Likewise, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand displayed competence, empathy, restraint, and genuine concern during national crises, most notably in her response to the 2019 Christchurch terrorist mosque attacks.
Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s frequent use of crude rhetoric projected impulsiveness that drew widespread international criticism. Similarly, U.S. President Donald Trump’s repeated public disrespect toward domestic political opponents, world leaders, and religious figures such as the Pope has undermined the traditional decorum associated with high office, weakening the aesthetic authority of American governance on the global stage.
Conclusion
Authority expresses itself through law and morality, determining whether its acts are lawful and moral. Acts that are lawful and moral may still be ugly. Aesthetics provides an independent standard for judging the acts of authority, particularly those of nations. In the realm of war, aesthetics reveals the profound ugliness of ruination, transcending justifications and narratives. When authority takes its aesthetic obligations seriously, it refuses to degrade the environment, cities, towns, disfavored groups, and public institutions such as courts and law enforcement. It rejects the notion that beauty is a luxury to be pursued only after social needs are met. Such logic evades aesthetic responsibilities.
In peacetime, a nation is known not only by what it permits or forbids, but also by its aversion to ugliness. In war, a nation is ultimately judged not by its victories, but by whether it can endure, without shame or guilt, the images and emotions it leaves behind.
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