There. I have attracted your
attention by putting the word "fascism" in my title. That's a good
start. Now let me explain why I did that.
Fascism is one of the worst things we ever did. It seems to have gone
away, at least in many countries. But there is a permanent danger that
it will come back. To stop that from happening, we need to understand
the causes. When we see the causes happening, we need to act before
it's too late.
People don't like to use the word fascism. The very mention of it makes
you sound like a radical. Or at least someone who is irrationally
angry, and therefore possibly not trustworthy. Perhaps a communist, or
someone who actually cares about other people.
For most people, their reputation is the most important thing. Give a
group of educated people a theoretical choice between saving a million
human lives
on the one hand and preserving their reputation on the other, almost
everyone will choose the latter. That's why hardly anyone has the
courage to use the word "fascism" when referring to things that are
happening right now. It can also explain the
widespread silence that is currently reigning on many other crucial
issues.
Most of those who talk about fascism divide into two groups: those who
use the word "fascist" as a
general insult for anyone they don't like, and those who conduct
astute academic discussions about fascism. But everyone should be
talking about fascism because it is one of the greatest
threats to humanity. We should be talking about it in public, in ways
that everyone understands.
Let me explain briefly what I mean by fascism. It is more than
"far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism", which is how Wikipedia
defined it in 2021. To understand fascism, you have to understand where
it comes from. The origin of fascism can be broken down into four
elements.
Step 1: Superiority-illusion.
It's part
of our animal nature to think that the group we belong to is superior
to other groups. We have a feeling that our "ingroup" is
superior to our "outgroups". If I speak English I might think that
English speakers are superior, or if I play the piano I might
think that piano players are superior. Whatever my "ingroup" happens to
be, I can find good reasons why it is superior. But anyone with a head
and a heart knows that that cannot be true. The trouble with fascists
is that they don't seem to have that head and/or that heart. They
mistake their feelings about their own superiority for the truth. Then
they get together and reinforce their irrational idea.
Step 2: Purity-illusion.
If we
think our group is superior to other groups, we naturally want to keep
it that way. That means looking after our group by making sure it
maintains its identity and doesn't get mixed up with other groups.
That's the idea behind ethnic cleansing. Stop out-group people mixing
with in-group people and corrupting their pure minds or worse still,
mixing their genes with "ours". The trouble is, nothing is ever "pure"
in this sense and mixing with other groups is actually usually
beneficial.
Step 3: Victimhood-illusion.
The
next
step is to feel like a victim, although one is in fact victimizing
others. It's called victim blaming. The logic runs like
this: My ingroup is
inherently superior, but those inferior outgroups are being treated
equally. Some are even getting better treatment than my group, from my
subjective viewpoint.
Therefore, something must be done. As long as I believe that my group
is inherently superior, I feel justified in attacking other groups, and
I can use my irrational logic to convince myself and others that in
fact they are attacking me.
Step 4: Lies and violence.
Fascists
start out as reasonable people. They are flesh and blood like the rest
of us, and they are not suffering from any particular psychological
disorder. They try to explain to each other and to their outgroups why
they are inherently superior. Surprisingly, their arguments are not
accepted. The outgroups come up with plausible counterarguments. What
makes fascists special is their failure to listen to or understand
those counterarguments. For fascists, their feeling of superiority is
more important than any logic, so their response to rational argument
becomes increasingly violent. The violence starts out being verbal,
often in the form of lies, misleading arguments, or denial. That leads
to discrimination
or mobbing. It's when the violence becomes physical that things start
getting dangerous.
Any group of people that displays all four features has fascist
tendencies that should be labeled as such. If we want to stop fascism
from re-emerging, we have to nip it in the bud.
Trump
voters are a classic example. They believe themselves to be inherently superior ("America
first"). Trump's immigration policy is about preserving non-existent
American purity: building
walls to prevent "contamination" by
innocent people being labeled (ridiculously) as immoral, dirty
murderers and rapists. Trump voters also
felt victimized by the US
federal election result in
2021. Again, that was an absurdity, but hey - fascism is absurd. Their violent tendencies include
encouraging gun ownership, an over-the-top
cruel approach to immigration control, and military attacks against
other countries. Not to mention storming the Capitol. Their hero is
constantly lying. They fit all four points perfectly. They are well on
the way toward full-blown fascism. It's no
surprise that those same people tend to be racist, which can be seen as
a
form of fascism. The combination of superiority, purity-illusion,
victimhood and
violence becomes clear when people objected to a policeman being
accused
of murder after killing a black person.
(In fact, Trump voters are indeed victims. They are victims of an
unfair economic system. The solution, for them, is to support the left
side of politics. Unfortunately, they don't understand that.)
If
the American government thinks it is justified in bombing Islamic
countries (violence) because
Christianity is inherently superior
to Islam, and
Islam poses a threat to the purity
of Christian culture and values (victimhood),
then that contains all the main elements of fascism.
If
conservative Australians think they are superior enough to have a high
individual carbon footprint (because the country is so big) and making
enormous amounts of money from exporting coal to China and India
(because capitalism is good), and then feel victimized by climate
activists when they start telling the truth, and at the same time spend
enormous amounts of money preventing impure
refugees from reaching
Australian shores, and finally support all this nonsense with blatant
lies, which is a form of verbal violence,
then
they might be called "climate fascists".
Climate
fascism comes in different forms. Some people argue that they can't
reduce their carbon
footprint because their need to burn carbon is bigger than the needs of
other groups (superiority), or
their work is inherently more important. They
feel victimized (perhaps by
environmentalists) in response to weak
measures to reduce their carbon
footprint. In response, they start spreading lies (climate denial of
various kinds -- verbal violence)
in an attempt to maintain their position. If they
combine that attitude with callous opposition to asylum for desperate
refugees, implying that refugees are a threat to their country's purity, they are showing all the
hallmarks of climate fascism.
If
university professors argue in all
seriousness that their
academic discipline is inherently superior
to other disciplines, and
try to keep their disciplines pure
by blocking or inhibiting
interdisciplinary interactions, and then claim that it is unfair that
other disciplines are doing so well
and they are not (victimhood),
and finally try to increase funding for their
discipline at the expense of others by political rather than rational
means (verbal violence), they
are heading toward a kind of academic fascism. Believe it or not, this
kind of
thing can happen in universities everywhere -- even the best ones.
The long-standing conflict between humanities and sciences often
involves attempts to keep each side "pure" by excluding the other side
-- people may not use that vocabulary, but that is often what happens
in the end. The solution, I believe, is first to explicitly promote and
reward
interdisciplinarity in all disciplines and second to make funding
generally
and transparently
dependent on accepted objective measures of academic performance and
impact (e.g., citation rates), or on carefully conducted anonymous peer
review procedures by international experts. Provided, that is, the
university wants to promote academic quality. Perhaps it does not, in
which case other strategies will be appropriate. The point is to
actually do these things and not merely talk about them in the mission
statement. Unfortunately, whereas the
best scholars
and researchers according to these criteria tend to agree with this
strategy, others may not, and those others maybe more numerous or more
powerful. Some may claim that a solution of
this kind is too neoliberal, but the truth is that there is no
reasonable alternative. Funding solutions have to be based on
something and despite the problems there is nothing more informative
than academic citation rates. Anything
that is not a serious attempt to objectively quantify academic quality
and quantity is arbitrary by comparison.
The opinions expressed on
this page are the
author's personal
opinions. Readers who know and care about this topic are asked to
contact the author with suggestions for
improving or extending the content:
parncutt at uni-graz dot at. Back
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