The other day I was looking for some light reading or video-essay watching while eating some snacks, which is how great stories always start. Between my usual diet of YouTube recommended videos, I found an old friend: the Horses channel, with a video titled "What is Fascism?". For those of you unfamiliar, the video-essay genre in the internet is more or less a combination of Wikipedia reading (aren't you meant to actually "say" something in an essay?) and/or endless random personal rants about a subject behind the veil of factual information, with some images on top to trick your brain into the feeling that you are not reading (god forbid) but consuming "content" instead while having the vague sensation to be learning something through osmosis. You know, despite not absorbing anything at all and having it in the background while you do other stuff and nod your head in approval. I like to call it info-entertainment. But that channel is a good egg. Good quality, stunning creative visuals that don't only ensnare but actually form part of the narration, good references and information combined with actual reasoning. In essence, everything this blog itself is not. What can I say, I don't get paid much.
I don't agree with him most of the time. But if you know me at all, you would know that's normal in me, not agreeing with anything. I'm a contrarian, after all. That's my gift to humankind.
Regardless, I can still recognize good things from time to time, so I clicked right away.
In order to try to accomplish what the video promises, a definition, first one might be tempted (as I guess most people end up doing) to identity fascism by their colorful actions. Fascism is violent racism, fascism is invading Poland, fascism is Swastikas, fascism is dude with funny mustache. But that only gets you so far. That's what certain fascist states in their late form ended up doing. They might be irremediable consequences of their existence, they might be not. If you only look at the obvious signifiers, you will miss the forest. And any particularly smart fascist will circumvent the recognizable signs to avoid being defined as such while very much being. Even perhaps disguising himself as "anti".
The horses video started really good. It planted the idea that, despite fascism being instantiated historically and associated to certain countries, it wasn't just that. And that an etymological explanation and ideological underpinnings of the historical countries that engaged in some form of it were not enough to understand what was a phenomenon in itself. Bravo. That you couldn't just list a bunch of characteristics Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Reich had and call that fascism (what Russians do, by the way, is reduce it to an historical entity).
And then, it did exactly that.
Sigh.
I mean, I get it. How else are you gonna do it. Are you going to restructure all of history and challenge the very foundations of the framework through which we observe the world to answer a question in a twenty minutes YouTube video? No, of course not. There's no framework of ideological systems as emergent phenomena, so we have to deal with these things in their simplified rational form, even when in nature they are not. The behavior of the colony of ants does not depend on the consensus of their individuals, even when it emerges from their individual "thought". It doesn't even depend on the decisions of the particular individual or group of individuals at the top of their very monarchical hierarchies. There's violence, there's cannibalism between class, keeping the whole structure in permanent check and death is part of daily life. If they had a God, it would be Rousseau. You will point out that there are some "imperfections" in the way you do it and some noise in the data and some strange ways in which your ideas don't apply to certain different contexts or times and move on. The problem is, the exceptions are the norm. The narrow space in which we develop our ideas is the exception. And our ideas don't generalize well. I don't want to dunk on the video. It's a great video. It touches interesting points like approaching Fascism like a form of secular religion, from an emotional standpoint, and also focuses also in it's "process" as an integral part of it and not just as a regular transformation from proto-fascism into fully fledged. Go watch it. I am using it as an example because, well, that's what actually happened. I zoned out, and started thinking. Ten minutes later, with the video still on in the background (being a bit ignored) I paused it, and interrupted a couple of hours long silent conversation I was having with a friend in a Discord channel.
"There's this funny thing I noticed..."
And what followed was an almost hour long tirade (accompanied with shared paint diagrams and funny images I was drawing to further explain myself) that started about the definition of fascism and ended up being a dissertation on demonology, passing through important and related topics like psychology, Catalan independence, nation-states, the IQ normal distribution meme, dictionaries and most importantly: reductionism.
I will not try to reproduce it here faithfully. It was a product of the moment. One of these things you can't repeat, like a jazz improvisation or throwing a hat directly into a distant hanger like if it was a frisbee. This is just a tribute. But what I will do is try to articulate some of the points I was trying to make. First of all, you have to watch this video of an hour long lecture on anthropological psychology I have talked about before. Yeah, I don't make the rules. Fine, I do make the rules, so the rules are: go watch it. Well, that didn't work. It's ok, we will try to continue without it.
This is fascism.
Quite underwhelming, uh? I'll clarify. This is a point representation of what fascism is inside a two dimensional graph with undisclosed abstract, vector representations of more complex and imaginary ideological axis (heh). In essence, a representation of fascism as a discrete point in the ideological hyperspace. You can do the same with other ideologies, color them and position them as you want. In conclusion, it's the result of smashing the complexity of the world of ideas into few dimensional spectrums (like we are so accustomed to do and I mentioned in Media). From there, you can start to define the point.
But the reach the same problem as the Horses video. Definitions, however good, can only approximate. You have to delve into the specifics, and those are just shown in the actual cases where fascism has existed. You end up with a list, that in our drawing is a constellation of dots that have our point definition as the center. But the center is not defined by any of the points in particular. Fascism is not just the economical behavior of fascist regimes. Also not the religious one. Not the expansionist one. Not the autocratic one. It goes on.
When you try to apply the concept to civilizations that are not in the same scope of time as ours, the concept falls apart. From the point of view of a Teutonic barbaric tribe in the third century before Christ, we are indistinguishable from fascism. Was Athens fascist? Was Rome? Why, or why not. If liberal democracies are playing the identity game of being the polar opposite of whatever the nazis were, how on earth do you explain that the cradle of our culture is also of the fascist nationalistic sense of an state? Are the genocidal tribes of Papua Nova Guinea? China? The Aztecs? Was not WWII England fascist? It behave as such, but didn't fall into "the spiral", it just performed fascist functions inside it's own chaotic superloop without changing cultural idiosyncratic identity as an almost utilitarian cultural war mobilization tool; which is very revealing. If no set of sufficient conditions are enough, no characteristic makes it not be it, then there's no Wittgensteinian essence to the word. It becomes a linguistic problem more than a political one. In a sense, we don't "feel" like we need a definition, we just "know". That instinct is way more complete and certain in approach (when given proper historical distance and context) than any seemingly analytical evaluation —no matter how deep. It doesn't matter how you define it as an ideology, it escapes through the cracks. The more you look into it's core, the more diffuse you are in your approach, the more you try to clear the space from particular context and variations, behind which you expect to find the nuclear crystal core of the phenomenon: the more you realize. It's not there. It has vanquished. Like a grandmother neuron (I told you to watch the video) like the exact position of an elemental particle, like your "true self", like your girlfriend on Saturday night. Because the phenomenon is not reductionist. Because definitions are a lie. A point-nuclear idea of fascism doesn't exist in the ideological hyperspace, and ideas that are proto-fascist or fascist emerge and conduct to and from it. The constellation is the phenomenon. The phenomenon is in the historical noise and "coincidence". At the same time unconstrained as a meta stable entity or phenomenon from it's instantiation, and dependent to every single particular point of them.
You can make a shopping list for fascism. Map the constellation. Many have tried. I will try as well.
―Exaltation of Group Identity
―National Identity Myth (both past or future)
―Authority-Based Hierarchical Structures
―Monopoly of Violence
―Cult of Personality
―Homogenization of the Culture
―Idealization of Abstract Previous Idiosyncratic Values
And you immediately notice something. That I can't count very well. And that these are not only constituents of fascism. These are the foundations of the very notion of nation-states and civilization itself. In fascist regimes you are just looking at a sort of "elevated" form of them. A sort of "natural" culmination of the ideas, an unnatural natural fascination for them, a psychotic determinism turned moral delirium. To eleven. But the same. And from there it comes my own particular non-reductionist definition of fascism.
"The metastasis of industrial nation-states into their internal attractor."
But that doesn't just entail another or better definition of something. You can't generalize emergent phenomenon and concepts like attractors from chaos theory into the simplified reductionist form and call it a day, or a footnote. Because that doesn't mean it doesn't "exist". It just doesn't in the reductionist sense. Like everything else in the world. It requires a complete new conceptualization of the idea. With these I don't mean we live in a fascist state (although we do, but not in the sense you think we are) as conspiratorial extremist from both sides like to think. Just that the underpinnings are the same. Civilization is, itself, proto-fascist. Here's a drawing I made, so you know I'm serious.
With each other ideological loop containing it's own form of "fascism". The same beast, with their own path.
I don't know. Convergent evolution is a bitch.
But this is not how we perceive it. We perceive it in a reductionist basis, even when we acknowledge rationally that such representation of the world is by default incorrect. We do the same with psychopathologies: a system is stable as static (with a certain resilience to go back to homeostasis) and then something happens akin to a pathogen entering our system and you have now an illness. That description doesn't need to acknowledge the "nature" of what exactly throws the system out of balance, it very could be an internal system that serves a purposes that has gone rogue or entered a self-perpetuating loop, but we act as if that doesn't matter. The reductionist model acts the same way.
Because we treat Fascism as an ideology in itself, we see it everywhere. From our point of view, it's in all directions, and thus it makes us run from it unknowing that we are running from the very foundation of the stable systems that in most configurations balance themselves (and without which, we fall into other more profound destabilization of the spirit). So we do this.
Man, I'm getting really good at drawing.
An athletic exercise I call "The Paranoia of the West". Not unfounded, but misguided. We don't even need to try to define what our ideology is, because we know what isn't, what we don't want it to be. So we run the other way. For a reason Hitler is still the most relevant political figure of the XXI Century, more than seventy years after his death: ideology is as much an story as it is a set of ideas; and ours is a survivor one from the jaws of totalitarianism that depends on us either healing or atoning, in any case getting as much as possible away from that (well, I'm from Spain so it's complicated here) even if it involves pathologically dismantling anything resembling organized popular movements, real ideological communities (not political parties) and anything that could be branded as "traditional values" or is romantic about the past. Power cannot ever again be concentrated. The more we can surrogate human agency to a bureaucratic systems the better, as leadership and independent decision making are dangerous on itself. Better leave all the decisions in the hands of the invisible market than even again be the captains of our own destiny. That's the ideology of the west. A perfect blend from the trauma of two world wars into the daze inducing waters of neoliberal capital realism. In the process of killing everything we perceive from this point of view, as it seems to us like fascism, we destroy the potential for our own transformation and effectively engaging in societal level ego-death.
Guilt consumes the pathos of Europe. Colonialism, autocracies, racism, patriarchy. We succumb to our own righteous decadence while sublimating our desire in an endless impotent almost masochistic trip towards a blend of managerial systems dominating every aspect of our lives.
But in fact, that's not what we are doing, running towards utopia, we are just doing this.
And it's not only nonsensical and eats itself, it can very much cause a rebound effect and promote the very thing they are trying to run from presenting it as a radical anti-establishment establishment posture; an ideological pocket they anyway see themselves identified with because the most inane "anti-progressive" argument is instantly branded as proto-fascist. And because we deconstruct everything (guilty) we end up finding ideology everywhere. So everything is. Everything not explicitly anti-fascist is fascist, and can be. Because in our post-modern era every single thing we creat it's so devoided of message to better fit the demands of the offer and demand that is essentialy a Rosharch test.
If I were to guess, a new death spiral into itself will not be able to be branded with the particular signifiers of neo-fascism. Like, at all. It will emerge as something new, and will be something new. Maybe born itself from the paranoia of trying to run as far from possible to it. Maybe even as an alternative solution to itself. Because in a sense, Fascism (like any secular religion) seems to emerge from the necessity to fill the libidinal power vacuum in industrialist societies; the lack of individual agency and the superficiality of impotent surrogate destiny-making and purpose mechanisms. Something we are very, very familiar with. And so, it feeds from the omnipotent presence of a bureaucratic and boring system, even when the result that emerges from it can very well also be exactly that. If even more brutal. Maybe because even it being brutal and explicit, that is felt as a liberation from the obscure forces of convergent eusocial evolution, making "the hand" reveal it's iron chain.
An individual lacking goals or power joins a movement or an organization, adopts its goals as his own, then works toward those goals. When some of the goals are attained, the individual, even though his personal efforts have played only an insignificant part in the attainment of the goals, feels (through his identification with the movement or organization) as if he had gone through the power process. This phenomenon was exploited by the fascists, nazis and communists. Our society uses it too, though less crudely. Example: Manuel Noriega was an irritant to the U.S. (goal: punish Noriega). The U.S. invaded Panama (effort) and punished Noriega (attainment of goal). Thus the U.S. went through the power process and many Americans, because of their identification with the U.S., experienced the power process vicariously. Hence the widespread public approval of the Panama invasion; it gave people a sense of power. We see the same phenomenon in armies, corporations, political parties, humanitarian organizations, religious or ideological movements.
Industrial Society and it's Future ― Unabomber
It's a fearful prospect. Don't think I don't fear it as well. The realization that such fanatic feast of collective murder is not the act of a rogue and evil philosophy, but an instantiation of what we really are and the substrate of the systems we have created to manage our lives and live in. A society doesn't suddenly go mad and the idea to invade Poland is born: the very same systems that make us wage war are deep down the same that make us love. Why do you think so many man think about the Roman empire? They yearn for agency, for vigor, to put their very souls to the test and that survival clings upon the strength of their sword (this is by the way, also the reason calcified totalitarian systems are death spirals, they end up suppressing it without realizing it's the individual power fantasy what drives them and what makes societies progress through time ―which is surrogate in the XXI Century as inane entertainment, hobbies and body cult). That makes the world way more simple, is in that situation where things become artificially clear. The idea to "pick up the rifle" (no matter the "side" you're in or in whatever conflict you are at) is not so much to accomplish something in particular with it or to defend a particular way of life but to retroactively make worthwhile and consistent what's fundamentally an incomplete and incoherent representation of the world (and self-identity therein) that otherwise produces existential angst and cognitive dissonance. Fascism rest on a base of very deep instincts of gregarious survival in a dangerous and resource limited world, where they fest into organisms and institutions, and show their final form.
This idea is not new. Jewish people have always been about the "structuralist" explanation of the horrors of the Shoah, and detested the view of an act simply perpetrated by an small group of deranged individuals. Although in their case, they were blaming the whole of the German people, and not the notion of the nation-state (which they have embraced and converted to recently with let's say "fervor") or as a phenomenon that could be found in all of the human race. A similar problem arises when you try to explain the causes of WWI, where we tried to impose an idea of either the Germans or the Austrians or the Russians provoking it (depending who you ask) because the idea that the stable systems of militarized nations that try to expand (as systems do to survive) and form a system of checks and balances but acts almost pacifically between them most of the time can in particular circumstances erupt into a whole new level of Dante's Inferno even when every single agent in them is trying to avoid war.
And kidding ourselves about the hungry xenomorphic entities called Nations we have created along the way.
Europeans believe in the fable of the wise nation. According to this narrative, European nation-states have a long and rich history. In particular, these nation-states learned from World War II that war is bad, and so bound themselves together in its aftermath in peaceful cooperation.
(...)
And yet the fable of the wise nation is false. The history of the nation-state in Western and Central Europe is practically nonexistent; in Eastern Europe, it is longer but hardly glorious. Nation-states in the Balkans set the stage for World War I, and in its aftermath six new nation-states were created in Eastern Europe, all of which had been removed from the map by the middle of World War II.
By 1945, European powers had not learned that war is bad. They kept fighting colonial wars until they lost them or were exhausted by them. Remember Indochina, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt; Malaya, Kenya, Angola, Guinea, Mozambique and the Spanish Sahara.
Europe’s dangerous creation myth ― Timothy Snyder
After all, our very wise national fables are just the product of a systematic and cyclical process of conquest, assimilation and homogenization we won that we now try to hold others accountable for. Whatever is we want to believe (and doing so, trying to instantiate) the social contract view of democracies, the result is convergent with the view of nation-states as entities of inherent violence; not just in it's constituting phase —colonization and settlement— but afterward, as it seeks to maintain a particular version of itself. This second type of violence can be especially ferocious when one community comes to believe that it is the state. We hope that the advent of XX Century fascist states and calamities will act as a cultural vaccine against it in the future, but I'm not so sure. Because, again, it's not a pathogen.
In that regard, these things seem to behave more like demons in christian mythology and practice than like a medical malaise.
Moloch? Moloch.
That fear is very much present also in modern German culture itself. While Hollywood and the history channel try to portray Nazism as just an evil-strawman system (and they cannot dissimulate the morbid fascination that accompanies their disclaimers against it for very long) they make movies about Hitler coming back to life (Look Who's Back) and feeling right at home or a highschool professor creating his own Fascist movement as an experiment (The Wave) trying to prove not only that it's easy to fall into those things, but also that they don't require that much fundamental moral transformation. That modern societies themselves are a perfect fertile ground for an "ideology" that seems to be laid down into it's very emotional, ethic and logical core. One we cannot destroy without risking destroying ourselves. That it's the shadow in the mirror. The timeless sculpture at the heart of each peace-loving city in the world.
And no wonder. It is.
A molti, individui o popoli, può accadere di ritenere, più o meno consapevolmente, che “ogni straniero è nemico”. Per lo più questa convinzione giace in fondo agli animi come una infezione latente; si manifesta solo in atti saltuari e incoordinati, e non sta all’origine di un sistema di pensiero. Ma quando questo avviene, quando il dogma inespresso diventa premessa maggiore di un sillogismo, allora, al termine della catena, sta il Lager. Esso è il prodotto di una concezione del mondo portata alle sue conseguenze con rigorosa coerenza: finché la concezione sussiste, le conseguenze ci minacciano.
Se questo è un uomo ― Primo Levi
