Fascism Begins in the Heart and Mind Way Before It Gets to Politics.
As a person who bears many of the cultural markers of the “dominant group”, or more accurately phrased “privilege class” I need to acknowledge how odd what I write might sound (A white, educated, liberal, straight, male, but more like top 50%, not .01%.) I hate our current trajectory as a species; let alone our country! We need more love, less hate, have all the apparatus globally in place to remove the survival fears of everyone, yet we perpetuate wars to kill each other, over consumption to decimate the planet, and human inequality as to destroy the lives, livelihood, and hope of billions of our fellow citizens of Earth. (That includes all life forms not just we Homo Sapiens). Fascism is a disease that foments in a species a wide-arc contagion of fear. And it is from closed-minds that it spreads.
Why? What I say can be bolstered by facts from biology, chemistry, history (from all sources and perspectives), and observed geography. How we have laid barren forests with farms and cities, leveled mountains from strip mining, poisoned rivers, seas, and our own drinking water to accommodate making baubles creating monetary riches for a few; while others drown in plastic. Leave rust belts from abandoned industries or try to escape to the few remaining places we are actually under the delusion to call “wild” or “open spaces.” We are invaders. Open space migrators, omnivorous consumers, and ambush predators (from zoology). And now we are what is termed a super-predator: everything that can consciously feel (sentient), fears us. Too bad our collective Ego’s don’t have the courage to face up to those real aspects of our nature and the consequences they wrought. It is not the trivial and superficial “Cancel Culture” we should decry but a lack of acknowledging the Consequences of Culture. Indeed!
Here, I am going to elaborate about my statements about Fascism with a mixed commentary referencing evolutionary psychology, with some Universalist sense of morality, and an Existentialist view of Ethical (an non-ethical) behavior.
A Fascist is a cornered animal whose fear has risen to the level of near rabid hatred. In that state, a biological life form essentially devolves backward to its atavistic roots and seizes upon the simplest of neurological binary choice: kill or be killed. Self-preservation becomes weaponized and goes from defense into offense. Referring to the layer of our mammalian-simian brain we call homo sapiens, it has produced a socializing psycho-behavioral palette construct commonly termed, an Ego. Its function is to interact with and maintain status within a collective of our own species. When Ego perceives threat, whether real or imagined, it is put into a state of cognitive dissonance careening between the fight, flight or freeze defense reactions. But when a threshold is artificially manipulated, like a Peter crying wolf or Big Brother yelling hate, then an entire herd can stampede and become a mob. But this seldom happens so quickly, even for a conforming and numbed animal like the automaton Sapiens[1] have settled into. Nope, it happens in a series of stages as fear grows and intelligence erodes.
So, the culprit is fear. And fear is a hydra with many heads, but it also has a few real legs, as well. Those legs it stands on, citing concerns about food or safe or shelter, territory, etc., are real world needs (Think Maslow’s Hierarchy). Yet, Americans have so much ‘stuff’, access to food, resources, and for the wealth class – provisions of luxury that make even the average wage earner more comfortable, more than any pharaoh of ancient Egypt. (They didn’t have air conditioning, we do!) Many have never been educated in these factual comparisons of history, and thus take advantages automatically as-granted.
Yet when their supposed losses are invoked as survival threats, where none might actually exist at that moment, a neurosis of paranoia sets in – a fear of a vague and ominous specter: a bogey man. And to address that abstract threat, a search for a tangible scapegoat first to blame, but then eliminate, commences. Thus, the tendency for conspiracy psychosis.
Yet it is the hydra heads we must worry about. Many under-educated people (a term I mean deliberately and will return to) are not merely informationally underinformed but their labors to conform to simplistic social norms and stereotypes, often render them emotionally illiterate and greatly burdened by the stresses of daily life. This state does not mean they are mentally substandard or morally corrupt, many feel exhausted. But both conditions are symptoms of persons deprived of exposure to history and not challenged in critical thinking, leaving only thrill and entertainments to fill the space where thought and analysis might otherwise dwell. Imagination suffused with fear invites escapist fantasies or living nightmares to fill the gaps. Too many of our fellow citizens are as tyrannical in dealing with fear within themselves (shame and blame leading to denial or abuse) as any fascist totalitarian who singles out a scapegoat people or group, to pour out their derision and hatred upon. Conform to the “accepted way”, true or not, but because it is what one has been taught to believe…and it will make me safe! Certainty hangs not on facts but in credulity to widely held cliches. Such is the nature of religious faith but not scientific inquiry. The former dissuades even punishes inquiry, the latter thrives in and pursues it.
Undereducated people DO NOT get exposed to diversity of ideas, possibilities, and opportunities, that would emerge when immersed in environments where they are both challenged and invited to contemplate outside their own experience and weltanschauung (worldview). Therein lies the essential problem that dooms democracies, the failure to jointly explore, crossover and intermingle opinions which promotes thinking. For the Fascist, an undereducated populace is the key to ensuring a status quo of inequality that begins with suppression of thought and then eventually leads to oppression of behavior, and finally persons conditioned to self-repress their expression. Stupidity, as defined by Lutheran Minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Letters and Papers From Prison (he was arrested and later executed by the most glaring example of Fascism – the Nazis), is a type of internal censorship via avoidance and reductionism that they cling to for a feeling of surety. It is the tendency of the underdeveloped and inexperienced (not inferior) mind to reduce to palatable and digestible explanations and call it understanding; and label it TRUTH! (From their limited perspective). For the Fascist cult leaders, it is the fertile ground to sew propaganda and misinformation. Thus, education means life broadening, affirming, and enabling experiences that present knowledge and methods to sort through more and complex aspects of life for oneself. Not from some imposed dictum, decree, or dogma.
In real life there is no “one-size-fits-all” unless you are speaking about death. Then the proper adage would be “it happens to all of us eventually.” But how we measure a “good (human) life” is how well one lives it. Living is a verb of experience and thinking, but one needs the means to have either. A means, that in successful democracies – the antithesis of authoritarian totalitarianism – originates in rigorous public education and NOT the ever diminishing ‘whitewashed’ curriculums from a constricting, authoritarian, power elite. Indoctrination is NOT the same as education. Education is inclusive. It compares and contrasts ideas. Indoctrination trains conditioned, programmed responses, which discourage active reasoning or debate! The so-called “party line”.
Possession of some absolute truth is the smug declaration by people who require a narrow and simplistic view of the world as a bulwark against doubt. Because complexity, with all its uncertainties and unpredictability’s is a root cause of their fear of fear. And, with limited or only socially prescribed means of redress to access, and few critical thinking skills to evaluate them, the Fascist mind must beat back those invading thoughts as they later project their fear-driven intolerance onto others. In the extreme, it begins with numbness, then a callous and Ego-assured entitlement, and can then devolve into abject cruelty flying the banner of their moral superiority; while dumbfoundingly, proclaiming themselves victims of the perpetrators they are now righteously vanquishing. It is no wonder how, and why, the Fascist mindset requires a rigid religious hierarchy to grant them a holy carte blanche permission with a built-in moral escape clause for an Ego to secure absolution from any single act or attitude of horror toward: sinners. Perfect tautological, solipsistic, and narcissistic rationalization! Brilliant in its reductionism and stupefying in its implementation; devastating in its results.
Propaganda (narratives of victimhood and grandiosity), promoting simplistic solutions to often miscast or exaggerated problems (while skirting real ones), and blaming a scapegoat for their cause, are the underpinnings of the Fascist’s oppressive mindset, both the movements leaders and the people drawn to join them. Fascism manipulates, promotes and exploits fear! And it also promises the deliverance from fear if punishment (often declared as Justice) is meted out upon the accursed other, the enemy: intellectuals, liberals, minorities, people of color, women, foreigners, and in the case of Nazi Germany, the Jews. Pick a target, you will always see some monstrous “them” to an abused “us”. Stoke those narrative embers of fear into a blaze of hate; convincing people they are righteous in their indignation, then show them a target to strike, and salvation will come their way! Hallelujah Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, Shiva, or whatever deity be invoked! (Insert your preferred Theology here.)
This is the same struggle in a consciousness whose limited understanding and desperation to feel secure, will make them intolerant of any aspect, even of their own human sympathies, let alone those they’ve been socially imprinted to hate, deem weak; and of course, label as evil. They suppress any similarities in fear of becoming a target and then hide in the throng with conformity; since mediocrity (capitulation, compliance and sameness) are the only things that don’t draw suspicion from or monitoring authority who you fear as accuser: your inner critic an external policeman or bully with a grudge .
Evil is not a supernatural presence or consciousness, it is a human malevolence that emerges when animal fear is boiled into a rue of hatred, put through a sieve of a shallow mindset and then putrefies into a blob of cliches which no one can intellectually explain but everyone emotionally engorges. It is not liberal or conservative, it is the love of power and the hatred of feeling afraid. It is the fear of fear itself. A fearful person is too defensive to admit that hating someone else is not a balm for what upsets their world, but it is a temporary escape from facing the real concerns that confront them in the world.
In the collective world, those real, actual life-threatening and Earth-threatening concerns are: climate destruction, food and water insecurity, and the greater difficulty for persons to access safe and secure places as to let down from the constant trauma of impending threat; real and imagined. Any animal in Nature, when faced with drought, flood, fire, starvation, extreme heat or cold, or any type of disaster…it flees! But on our little planet, there is nowhere to run any longer. Only to turn and face ourselves and the state of the world we have created.
Our choice, both by commission and omission, is to live deliberately together or to die en masse. So, are you thinking about murdering someone? If so, maybe you should consider what will happen, gun or no gun, when resources become more scarce? Human history shows that murder ensues! Murder is killing offensively not for self-protection. For the simplistic Fascist, often a religious justifier, undereducated and a security-desperate seeker-joiner, the answer is reduced to some authority: the LORD, the BOSS, the Fuhrer (Leader), The Savior will make it all right and tell us what to do! And a Messiah Complex ensues.
Any Fascist regime begins within the psyche of its followers. Stop following, start leading. The most important person to lead in your life is yourself. Leaders learn and are made; they are not born! You want rights? Exercise your responsibility to think. Remember the responsibility Smokey the Bear told us about? “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Well, extinguish those embers of hate, face any fears with the waters of compassion; but then lay bare any questionable assertion and expose the motives of those who assert them. Including the binary moralizing conclusions of your own mind. And heck, to stretch the metaphor, let’s remember another great Forest: “stupid is as stupid does.” The opposite is also true, wisdom is as wisdom does. Mr. Gump might have been simple, but he was wise. And, in actuality, our choice is also simple: choose the love of life over the fear of death. Everyone has both within us. Which one governs you?
[1] To grasp the totality of implications with use of the word Sapien, read Sapiens by Yoval Noah Harrari. His is a magnificent treatise of eloquence tackling the complex array of human biological and social constructs interactions. Homo Deus, his next book, follows up with an exploration of how our technology has wrestled power to ourselves and distorted Nature in the doing. A brilliant and critical analysis!