Or: How outrage promotes its opponent until language itself becomes satire
Not even a Sun King was enough anymore. It had to be a sun god.
That is where the real appeal of the found piece already lies. Not in its sharpness. Not even in its recognizable overheating. But in its conceptual skew. For the Sun King would at least have been a culturally well-established figure: Louis XIV, Versailles, center of the world, courtly orbits, absolutist self-staging. A grand, exaggerated, but familiar image. You know where you stand. Excess has form.
The sun god, on the other hand, is already the next, unclean promotion. No fixed idiom. No precise cipher. Rather a hastily cobbled-together mixed metaphor of Sun King, godlikeness, and infallibility. Linguistically slipped, but inwardly completely logical. For such mistakes do not happen in spite of outrage, but because of it. When the available vocabulary no longer seems big enough, the opponent grows. First he is unpleasant. Then narcissistic. Then destructive. Then infallible. And at some point he stands there as a metaphysical problem case with a private address: the prosperity-neglected sun god.
Precisely for that reason the wrong word here is the right one. It reveals more about the temperature of the attribution than about its object.
The son of the Sun King
Perhaps that is the most precise reading: The sun god is the son of the Sun King.
The father still ruled over axes of mirrors, palace courtyards, and etiquette. The son already rules over spaces of interpretation, family prose, and moral weather conditions. The father demanded a bow. The son demands that his mere existence be felt as a cosmic imposition.
This is how exaggeration works when it no longer wants to concern itself with reality. What was still excessive yesterday seems almost moderate today. A king is no longer enough. It has to be a god. The opponent must not be merely difficult, hurtful, unpleasant, or wrong. He must be shifted into a dimension in which differentiation already looks like betrayal.
And it is precisely at this moment that the matter tips into the comic. For whoever calls someone that almost always says less about that person’s actual shape than about their own urge to make him even bigger. Language does not lose its grounding by accident. It sacrifices it voluntarily in order to gain impact.
Versailles on the edge of the kindergarten
No sun god without a court.
That is the second great feat of such enemy images: They immediately create a planetary system. Around the sun god orbit crawlers, sufferers, appeasers, wrongly concerned people, the silent, and those diffuse figures who supposedly “have all long since understood” what is going on. Where the opponent grows large, his gravitational field instantly expands.
Anyone who does not contradict decisively enough soon belongs to the court. Anyone who does not condemn publicly enough becomes suspect. Anyone who simply continues to exist is already a fellow traveler. Anyone who appeases stabilizes the system. This is how that peculiar moral astronomy arises in which a conflict partner becomes a celestial body and his surroundings a suspicious orbit.
Particularly reliable in such orders are the high priests of child welfare. Their formula is simple and almost unbeatable: please think of the children. In this liturgy, children are no longer first and foremost persons, but the last currency of moral legitimation. Whoever invokes them often no longer needs reality. The reference is enough. It anoints one’s own harshness and burdens the opponent with sacred instant guilt.
This is how dispute becomes atmosphere. Atmosphere becomes certainty. And certainty then becomes that sentence that every exaggeration loves: Everyone sees it.
It was not the man who had a court. The court had him.
Prosperity neglect as sacrament
Among all modern final judgments, prosperity neglect is one of the most elegant.
It does not sound like an outburst of rage, but like a finding. Almost like an expert report. Someone who is prosperity-neglected is not merely unpleasant, hurtful, difficult, overstimulated, or exhausting. At his core he is already shaped by the wrong. The word takes care of the explanation before it would even have to begin.
That is precisely where its beauty lies. It saves reality.
You no longer have to ask whether there are real injuries, asymmetrical backstories, social counter-framings, or simply a tough, contradictory conflict. All that would be arduous. It is much more elegant to turn the other into a moral final form: too much ego, too little humility, too much entitlement, too little self-limitation, possibly even too much prosperity, too much language, too much craving for recognition. Diagnosis complete. Contempt released.
Prosperity neglect is thus less description than exorcism. A word like a seal. Once stamped on, it is meant to render any further differentiation superfluous. In this it is completely equal to the sun god: both terms live not from precision, but from moral finality.
One could say: the word sounds profound precisely because it has already replaced thinking.
One opponent is too small. A climate is needed.
What is truly remarkable about such attributions is not their harshness. Harshness is old. What is remarkable is the moment when outrage stops becoming sharper and instead becomes less precise.
That is exactly where the grotesque begins.
The opponent is then supposed to be ridiculous and all-powerful at the same time, unpleasant and dangerous, embarrassing and infallible, pitiable and to blame for everything. That is not anthropology. That is baroque enemy poetry in civilian clothes.
The prosperity-neglected sun god is therefore not revealing because he would be an apt figure. He is revealing because in him it becomes visible how language needs its opponent to be bigger than reality provides him. The affect does not want to describe. It wants to inflate. It does not want to clarify. It wants to promote.
And where German has no ready-made idiom for this promotion, it is simply improvised. That is exactly what makes the matter complete.
For the wrongly formed image is often more honest than the clean one. It does not show the opponent. It shows the inner distress of the language that needs him so badly.
The dignity of the wrong word
One should therefore not correct the wrong word too hastily. It is precisely its skew that makes it valuable. Had there been a clean reference to the Sun King, one would only be faced with a grand but familiar exaggeration. The sun god, on the other hand, reveals the entire mechanics of escalation. Here language is visibly working beyond its quota. It loses its form because it wants to increase its effect.
Perhaps that is the true dignity of this botched term: it is more honest than its intention. It does not show the opponent, but the state of the language that needs him. The temperature of a judgment. The speed with which an attribution abandons its own order in order to sound one notch bigger.
The human being then no longer becomes a person, but a climate. No longer a counterpart, but a figure of condensation. No longer a conflict partner, but a moral weather event with a court.
The man is not the grotesque here
In the end, that may indeed be the punchline: not the alleged sun god is the real grotesque. The grotesque is the language that needs him so urgently. The language that turns a counterpart into a type, a type into a climate, and a climate into a final judgment. The language that prefers labeling to thinking. That already takes prosperity neglect for depth and sun god for grandeur.
Perhaps a Sun King really would have sufficed.
But then the matter would have become less revealing. For only in the unintended promotion to sun god does it become clear how moral overheating really works: not more precisely, but bigger. Not truer, but more total. Not clearer, but only more loudly disguised.
And perhaps that is the final elegance of satire: that it does not simply reject such words, but takes them seriously enough to make their ridiculousness visible.
Final image
The Sun King needed Versailles.
The sun god now needs only a bad evening, an overheated judgment, and a word that wants to be bigger than reality.
