The Existential Pleasures of Fascism
Everybody wants to be a fascist.
In today’s society we derive a sick satisfaction flirting with fascism. There is sadistic gratification and a sense of security in being lost in the heard and defined by common external goals. There is a desire to be led and to have a parental figure legislate life for us. This desire makes us all sick today. What is it about this group ‘superego’ that leads us to fascism? We believe it is always the ‘other’ that is the fascist, the capitalist, or the communist, while we remain blameless. Where does this self-righteous rationalization come from? What constitutes our sickness today, and what would constitute healing?
Society has captured our desire. We move from one institution to another disciplined, controlled, and alienated. Modern society manufactures desire, fear, and anxiety as a tool to control us. We have been taught to derive pleasure from our subjugation. They have hijacked and captured our collective unconsciousness. We have become desiring machines unable to escape the institutions that make us; family, school, job, nation, and party. There is no escape. We must see the modern institution as desire production factories coercing us to desire, to over-produce and over-consume, to produce ‘surplus value’ of capitalism. How can we be sane in such an insane society?
Marx taught about ‘alienation’ in capitalist society, but the reverse process of ‘desire manufacturing’ also takes place. Capitalism captures the unconscious collective will. The capitalist machine targets the ego and the fascist in each of us. It is directed at all that is nonhuman, capturing our desires and ego, directing it against our best and highest nature, destroying all that is heroic in us. It turns us from individual people to ‘subjects’. What is the reality of Power as it subjugates us? Its function is to tame us producing docile and obedient subjects.
Capitalism manufactures desire though advertising, media, and education to support the capitalist machine of over-production. Our consumption is regulated through controlling our desire. These techniques are designed to produce pleasure and desire in the individual for fascism and capitalist production. The individual’s mind is not their own but has been captured and used in service of mass production and consumption.
This is done through the following techniques:
Othering: Creating hate against a disenfranchised segment of the population.
Othering uses natural human fear and hatred other people to create a permanent xenophobic culture. There is always an ‘other’ that must be despised. All political action must be orientated against fighting against the other.
Power Porn: Worshiping Power creates the desire for what dominates and exploits us.
We are taught by our social institutions to worship Power and all that subjugates us. Wealth, prestige, and the power it provides excite us. Modernity attaches itself to the productive machines of the libido exciting us, capturing our desire.
Totalizing Paranoia: Creating paranoia and anxiety around news and events with the only protection being Power.
We are taught totalizing paranoia by schools and institutions. From the horrors of nuclear war, to communism, to climate change, and finally the pandemic, socialized paranoia becomes an effective tool to control and subjugate the mass mind. This produces in the developing minds of children ‘climate anxiety’ and other anxiety disorders. We become fearful of any narrative that falls outside of existing Power structures. Our social institutions, technology, and especially the state is the only protection against these horrific events.
Sad Revolutionaries: Making revolutionaries and militancy against existing Power structures appear sad and misguided for their role in oppressing fascism.
Revolutionaries to Power are painted as sad and often martyrs. We are taught that resistance to Power brings only pain and suffering. Instead, we must accept our torture, embrace, and enjoy it.
Truthing: Using knowledge and science to ground political practice in truth.
Institutional control of knowledge means they fund the ‘science’ and our perception of reality. All knowledge is politicized and has a social agenda. Knowledge does not exist to understand the world, but rather to ground all plans and projects in political action.
Production Porn: Worshiping over-production creates the desire for production-for-production’s sake.
We are taught from an early age that we must ‘produce’ to be accepted in society. From kindergarten through higher education people are taught to learn how to be more and more productive. Higher education is reserved for ‘professionals’ to work a job. Never do we treat education as knowledge, but rather a tool for production. Advertising and branding capture our desire and force us to consume completing the process of over-production and over-consumption.
Protecting Rights: Politics is used to restore individual rights turning individuality into a product of the state.
Individual rights may be endowed by the creator, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, but they are protected by the fascist state. Protecting human rights always ends in political fascism where the state protects one class of people against another. In protecting one group the state must mobilize and weaponize laws against other groups. This creates a society at war with itself and must create a fascist state to enforce such ‘protections’.
The individual cannot exist in society without Power protecting them against other people. This creates a culture where victimhood is rewarded by the state with additional protections. People are encouraged to express their identity though victimization. Political groups are developed that don’t have a common identity, but rather a common victimhood and need for protection under a fascist state.
Institutional Rights: This creates hierarchical power of institutions maintained by the bureaucratic state and its technicians.
In protecting institutional rights the state creates a hierarchical social structure where corporations and non-government organizations are privileged in society and the individual is minimized. These institutions structure society and production creating a hierarchical structure eliminating individual autonomy and agency. Laws are written protecting institutions and corporations while minimizing the rights of the individual.
Decentering the Subject: This removes ‘sense making’ from the hands of the individual and puts it in the hands of Power.
Always in fascist politics the individual is decentered and replaced with the collective. The ability of ‘sense making’ is taken from the individual and given to institutions, the bureaucratic state, and technicians. ‘Trust the science’ becomes a way to stop people from analyzing reality directly, and instead must outsource their common sense. The fascist state must tell people what is or is not real.
Internal Suffering: This creates a depressive tone for life that must be mitigated by the fascist state. Politics is the only hope to end suffering.
Institutionalized depression is created by agencies of the state, agencies of paranoia, agencies of Power. The state delegates depression creation down to the institution, the family, then finally the individual. This neurosis is the result of Power on the individual. It is everywhere.
How do we neutralize the negative effects of Power on our psyche? How do we keep from being a fascist when we believe ourself to be a revolutionary militant?
From the above analysis one realizes the desire for fascism has been ingrained into the very fabric of a subject’s psyche. The neurotic person is one on which Power’s imprint takes place. The psychotic person is impervious to imprinting. Thus, the revolutionary must be psychotic. One must act like a schizophrenic and be freed from all beliefs and desires.
Yet, we should not trade one mental illness for another, trading neurosis for psychosis. Instead of acting like a schizophrenic, there is another way to live a nonfascist life. It involves reintegrating one’s psyche. One must become an existentialist directly experiencing life instead of needing the bureaucratic state to mediate desire. Opposing fascism is a three-stage process comprising of deconstruction, centering, and reclaiming desire:
Deconstruction: Action though juxtaposition and disjunction to deconstruct the existing Power structure.
The ego must be dismantled through an assault on analytical and political forces. It is necessary to destroy all that gives us faith as it robs us of our agency. We must destroy all the teachings that make us desire our own repression. This training must occur at the home, at school, and at work.
Centering: Centering around a person’s life and circumstances instead of Power, politics, and identity.
The ego must recenter around a greater desire than just society. It must center around life, nature, and reality before civilization. The ego centers not around itself as an internal ‘subject’, but rather a greater ecosystem of life. This is the opposite of ‘decentering the subject’ of fascism.
Reclaiming Desire: Dropping out of existing desire manufacturing machines and desiring things outside of existing Power structures.
Desire is reclaimed not for the individual, the family, or society, but rather the greater ecosystem of life. The ego is reborn into a codependent, coarising world of interaction. One’s desires are not for one’s tribe, one’s party, or one’s nation, but for all life on the planet. In this destruction of individual desire, a greater more profound desire is created.
This is the path of the existentialist that must rise above existing society to become their own individual. The will to reclaim their power. To think for themselves. To be fully whole. This is the only way to overcome fascism. Stop thinking like a subject and become an authentic individual. Don’t let society control your desire.
The nonfascist life is calling you. Will you give up the pleasures of fascism to heed its call?
(Notes: Based on a rethinking of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Captialism and Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus can be seen as pitting Marx against Freud by way of Nietzsche. It is a poststructuralist analysis of capitalist society that tries to control human desire. I add my own theories liberally into the mix.)
