Eternal Fascism

On the collective unconscious

Due to the still-ongoing gang conflicts in Sweden, there are now calls for children to be sentenced to life imprisonment. I think the last time we handed over a 12-year-old to any equivalent sort of punishment was back in the early 1800s. Arson, probably accidental.

At the same time, our government is proposing obligatory indoctrination in “Swedish values” (like safeguarding the rights of children, right?) as a criterion for immigrants to have their basic needs supplied.

Yeah, things are much weirder than that, though. Douglas Murray, far-right arch-provocateur and starlet proponent of hostility towards Muslims, is currently in Gaza, defending the ongoing genocide perpetrated by the IDF with the argument that Hamas is worse than the SS.

The European far-right is today, on the whole, supporting a Zionist Israel headed by a government which by any metric is steeped in fascism.

Cory Morningstar. Wrong Kind of Green.

Almost every nation in Europe has parties anchored in the far right, often in actual Nazi ideology, among the two or three most popular ones. AFD in Germany, the Sweden Democrats, Front National in France, the post-Fascist People’s Party as the by far largest party in the Spanish parliament. The examples abound.

Ten years ago or so, some of these battles were still taking place in the streets. I guess they were already lost long before then, though. Maybe it was just that the effects of the unyielding pressure of compounded and lumbering social processes weren’t obvious.

But we had this idea that even so, our work amounted to some sort of harm reduction, that it was meaningful to postpone the inevitable even if the tide could never be stemmed in the long run.

2014.

I like to think it was. I’m far from sure.

Yes. So. Fascism. What is fascism? You all know that there are dozens of nitpicking definitions, and on the other end, there’s this sloppy tossing around of the concept to equate it with any sort of authoritarian structures whatsoever, rendering it meaningless for any sort of analysis.

All of these lists of bullet points distilling some regional manifestation of fascism aside, it’s really pretty simple. Fascism, if it’s to be a meaningful concept at all, must identify a pattern of structural iniquity that is unique and peculiar to the modern social order.

This means that fascism must be taken to refer to a particular form of authoritarianism that brings out and emphasizes the tools of external and internal violence of capitalism and of the social structures characterized by the industrial mode of production.

Fascism is the organized violence of the hierarchical capitalist state in its pure form.

It’s the reproduction and cementing of the class structure, of nationalist and imperialist narratives of social cohesion and expansion, and of a way of life of extraction and accumulation.

It’s the co-mingling of magic and mythologized science, from which emerges racism as a ritual of purification, sacrifice and social control, and it’s the quintessential manifestation of the twin myths of progress and history and the associated Faustian projection of mankind’s will towards a utopia of our own making.

So, evidently, its roots are deep, and they penetrate most aspects of the modern worldview complex, but they’re not so old as to be perennial. They can be extracted and burned.

The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes must for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct compels them to live in society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind.

Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabitants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders, — who, although benefited by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until some chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure any acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible that the political state of the country can be improved.

At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another.

On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power.

Charles Darwin. Journal and Remarks (Voyage of the Beagle). 1839.

With this in mind, what we call fascism is a deep-seated and ubiquitous tendency within the social order of modern civilization. It’s in the source code; it’s in the DNA of our society and its constituent roles and relations of production. It’s in the stories we tell to make sense of ourselves and the world. It’s in our very identities. Yeah, what’s probably most important of all, it’s an essential part of the authority structure to which we as semi-infantilized denizens of industrial society are attached and submit to. Yet this part is hidden in plain sight. The deeper structural facts do not align with the more palatable stories we like to tell ourselves and our children, no matter how important those fundamental facts happen to be.

Fascism is thus in a sense a key part of the collective Shadow of modern society.

The fixation on Nazi Germany in popular culture is symptomatic of this fact. Recall the innumerable Discovery Channel specials about World War II and the enticing secrets of Nazi Germany. Feature shows on the sexy tanks of the Third Reich, about the Nazi nuclear weapons programme, on how we outsmarted the Desert Fox. A good recent example is the Hunting Hitler show, whose premise is that the führer actually managed to escape to South America. And let’s not even mention the countless examples from popular fiction.

Hitler has more or less emerged as a predominant trickster archetype in the collective “unconscious”, which is an interesting position from which to reflect on Guido Preparata’s excellent analysis of how our narrative manufacturing apparatuses to a certain extent “conjured” the myth of Hitler as a counterweight or foil in our own civilization’s story about itself.

Anyway, one important thing about the Shadow, whether on Freudian or Jungian types of analyses, is that it emerges when the human being faces severe stressors. The Shadow personifies or refers to all that which is part of the individual (or of the collective) yet which cannot be explicitly acknowledged, often for moral reasons or because these aspects cannot be integrated into the individual’s or society’s preferred, cohesive narratives about themselves and their place in the world.

One important reason for this situation is that the repressed aspects of the Shadow or of the unconscious often connect with more basic amoral operations such as those related to survival, the provision of basic needs, or the service of inflamed desires.

In connection to this, fascism can both be thought of as a pattern of relating to oneself and the world generated by a particular set of traumatic stressors, and also as something which emerges as a more or less coherent coping response to later traumatic triggers. Fascism is present in the unconscious as a particular trace of the constant background trauma perpetrated upon us by the alienating repression of modern civilization. It’s the distinct pattern of authority and violence imprinted in the depths of our psyche, with which some part of us learns to identify, and for that reason it also becomes the default template role when we ourselves are driven to perpetrate violence.

This is arguably especially the case when we’re meting out violence in a more or less conscious defense of that very social order, of the myths, narratives, roles and relations that characterize our trauma, yet which we have submitted to and depend upon.

So in other words, when push comes to shove, the repressed and unreflected aspects of the Shadow, of the collective unconscious, will tend to manifest. The inevitable effect of broad-scope civilizational decline when it comes to the modern (1600s-) West, is arguably then the marked and pervasive re-emergence of an increasingly naked form of fascism.

Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

auden