Zeitgeist: "the spirit of the times". First used in 1835. The general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate that characterises an era.
"We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some of us are on super-yachts. Some have just the one oar."—Damian Barr.
In the twenty years since I started this blog, as a newly-ordained member of the Triratna Buddhist Order, I have explored many themes, but I have generally steered clear of commenting on contemporary political issues. However, the global political situation seems perilous and worsening. The mainstream commentary—both professional and amateur—that I see on a daily basis seems confused about what's going on.
Be warned, this is a long post (around 12,000 words. I'm going to do a pdf once the blog is finished).
The headline is that fascism is now the dominant political ideology on the planet. Fascists govern the USA, Russia, India, Israel, and much of Eastern Europe. Fascism is growing in strength in Europe and the UK (where I live). I believe that fascism is a perverse ideology. I also believe that fascists are in denial about the existential threats that humanity now faces, particularly:
- Climate change and extreme weather.
- Sea-level rise and coastal inundation.
- Pollution (i.e. the poisoning of air, water, and land).
- Ecosystem destruction and mass extinction.
- Pandemics.
I'm not neutral on this topic. This essay is polemical. Spoiler alert: I am opposed to imperialism, capitalism, and liberalism (which, as I will show, are all ways of viewing the same phenomenon). I'm also profoundly pessimistic about the future. I don't think it will be possible to turn things around in the short term. As far as I can see, things are going to get considerably worse in the coming years until the systems that sustain us break down under the strain. Food production is particularly vulnerable. The resulting chaos will likely result in billions of people dying in a short space of time.
Another caveat is that this essay will not be a buddhist hot take. I look at the politics of nominally buddhist countries, and I don't see anything I'd want to emulate. Nominally theravāda countries have some of the most oppressive political situations on the planet. Moreover, buddhist converts in the European imperial sphere are a tiny minority, and they conspicuously avoid and performatively condemn politics, and thus play no role at all in national governance.
I do propose some rational solutions, in contrast to the irrationality I see daily in the media, but my sense is that my solutions will be unpopular, since they conflict with ideas that progressives and "liberals" cherish. I don't believe in any kind of utopia. We cannot get everything we want, especially if that means denying others. I think we have to be pragmatic. I think we will have to compromise, but I can also see that, right now, no one is willing to compromise.
Like George Monbiot, I will cheerfully acknowledge that this is a story about a conspiracy, i.e. a conspiracy theory. This is fine, since there is a well-documented conspiracy amongst the ruling classes in this case. This story is not a conspiracy fantasy; it's a description of an actual conspiracy.
My method is to begin with a broad historical overview and then drill down to some specific, illustrative examples of how the zeitgeist manifests, guided by the works cited.
Background.
In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber (anthropologist) and David Wengrow (archaeologist) argue that evidence from the past shows that humans previously had a wide variety of lifestyles with a greater variety of political systems than are available to us today. They also argue that change from one political system to another was much more common in the past. While the book was intended to address the issue of inequality, the practicalities involved forced the authors to dwell on the question of how our political options came to be so drastically narrowed in the twenty-first century.
My sources agree that the story of the zeitgeist begins about 600 years ago, as feudalism and agrarianism were beginning to give way to plutocracy/capitalism and mechanisation. At the same time as these internal changes were taking place, Europeans began to construct ocean-going ships and expand out into the world. This was partly an act of imperialism, which involved conquering people, capturing their land, commodifying their resources, and exploiting them to exhaustion. And it was partly an act of colonisation and expansion of European states, resulting in the permanent erasure of indigenous cultures and replacement with European culture.
The "industrial revolution" would more aptly be called the capitalist revolution. Industrialisation didn't really happen until the 19th century, and steam engines, long after the changes that defined the period had happened. Industrialisation was wholly reliant on the wealth generated by imperialism and colonialism.
Jason W. Moore has called our current age the Capitalocene. In other words, the defining feature of the revolution was not industrialisation per se, which didn't occur until the 19th century; it was the new forms of wealth and wealth-generation that appeared and the new "class" of people it created: the capitalists.
I'm going to use the two terms—plutocracy and capitalism—as synonyms with slightly different emphases. Plutocracy (rule by the wealthy) is based on plutolatry (worship of wealth). Capitalism is an ideology that equates wealth with moral virtue and political power. In practice, plutocracy and capitalism amount to the same thing: rule by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
I draw a distinction between wealth and money. Money is—fundamentally—a representation of an obligation, especially a debt. Using money diminishes how much you have available to settle your debts. Wealth, by contrast, consists of income-generating assets, i.e. assets that generate more money for no effort. Land is the quintessential "asset". Money is how we meet certain social obligations. Wealth entails no social obligations.
A rich person has a lot of money. One can get rich by winning a lottery, but lottery winners don't always become wealthy; many of them simply spend the money until it is gone. A wealthy person is someone whose income mainly derives from owning things (their "capital").
The idea of gaining income without effort is sometimes called "rent seeking". By charging a fee for access to shared resources that have been privatised—especially land—the wealthy make money without making any effort. Rent seeking is a characteristic of capitalism. It's the polar opposite of "working hard".
We need to begin by addressing the origins and broad outlines of the history of capitalism. As we do this, we have to keep in mind that commerce—including international commerce—has existed for thousands of years. Capitalism is a relatively new development that coincides with, and is intimately linked to, the origins of European imperialism and colonialism. Note, for this essay, I treat European colonies as European. This includes almost all the Americas (including the USA) and my home nation, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Imperialism, colonialism, plutocracy, capitalism, and fascism are not separate ideas; they are all aspects of a longstanding pattern of behaviour amongst the ruling classes in Europe. The task ahead is to tease out and highlight how these ideas fit together and interact.
Jason Moore (2010, 2011) has proposed the island of Madeira as a good candidate for the emergence of the capitalist model. In the 1540s, the Portuguese settled the Atlantic island of Madeira (Portuguese: "wood"), which was previously uninhabited. After a brief period of general farming, they hit on the idea of growing sugar. Settlers borrowed money from wealthy merchants in Genoa and Flanders, imported slaves from Africa, and set about becoming the main source of sugar for all of Europe. Making several fortunes in the process.
Making 1 kg of sugar required burning 60 kg of wood, so the forests that gave Madeira its name were soon being cleared. More sugar was planted, and slaves had to go further to find wood. Gradually, the soils were depleted by intensive cropping, the forests shrank to remnants, and the island ecology collapsed, taking the economy with it.
That might have been the end of the story, except that making sugar was so very lucrative. Having exhausted Madeira, the nascent capitalists moved their operation to the island of São Tomé and repeated the process: colonising and privatising, exploiting, exhausting, and moving on. When São Tomé was exhausted, the Portuguese shifted their operations to Brazil which has yet to be exhausted but is definitely worse for wear. São Tomé continued to be a staging post for the Atlantic slave trade. Across "the new world", the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British began to set up competing businesses on the same "boom, bust, quit" model (including slave labour).
Thus, Monbiot and Hutchinson (2025) define capitalism like this:
Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting. It operates on a constantly shifting and self-consuming frontier, on which both state and powerful private interests use their laws, backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labour, and money into commodities that can be accumulated.
At least part of the rationale of European imperialist expansion in the 16th-19th centuries was the search for new natural resources to exploit. And they were always exploited for short-term gains, with no concern for consequences.
The great problem that nascent capitalism faced was that Europe was fully occupied and armed to the teeth. Natural resources were jealously guarded. Europeans have been constantly fighting wars amongst themselves over territory and access to resources since the end of the Roman Empire. The development of ocean-going ships meant that expanding out of Europe was easier than fighting a war inside Europe. Although war continued to be a feature of European life since the appetites of the ruling classes were insatiable.
However, the world that Europeans expanded into was also largely occupied by people. Truly uninhabited places that could be inhabited—like Madeira and São Tomé—were already rare in the 1500s. For example, Polynesians had settled all of the habitable Pacific islands centuries before Europeans ever ventured into the Pacific Ocean.
Australia was first peopled some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and was home to hundreds of distinct societies (each with its own language). However, the Aboriginals maintained a foraging lifestyle and did not practice farming. As far as European capitalists were concerned, this meant that they were "not using the land" and thus it was unilaterally declared Terra Nullius, i.e. uninhabited.
In essence, capitalists insisted that any land that was not being used for capitalism was not being used at all. In which case, they unilaterally declared that it was available for the taking by anyone who would put it to use for capitalism. All it took was having a minion ritually plant a spade in it.
Indigenous resistance to colonization was met with overwhelming, technologically enhanced violence. Genocide was normalised. Jason W. Moore has described capitalism as "the marriage of commerce with warfare."
Conceptually negating and physically eliminating the existing occupants, Europeans claimed ownership of the whole of the Americas, Australia, and the Pacific; most of Africa and the Middle East, and most of India. China was one of the few places that managed to resist European imperialism, but it suffered greatly for it. Europeans used their capacity and propensity for violence to suppress all local resistance. They also spread diseases, which hit the New World like a nuclear bomb. And they weaponised this, for example, by distributing blankets infected with smallpox to native Americans.
Everywhere they went, Europeans stole and privatised all the shared natural resources and exploited them to exhaustion, offering only murder and disease in compensation.
The British Empire, for example, was every bit as evil as the Nazi Third Reich. Any crime that the Nazis committed in Europe, the British had already done tenfold in their empire: genocide, murder, and other forms of brutality were their stock in trade. The difference is only that the British Empire was outside of Europe, while the Germans, coming late to the imperialist party, decided they would have an empire within Europe. This proved to be unpopular with the other European ruling classes.
In Britain, the flood of wealth from the burgeoning Empire made a new class of people: the plutoi or capitalists. Monarchs ruled by divine right, with support from established churches. The plutoi used their new wealth to buy influence in the political realm and support from the churches. This established the pattern of corruption that characterises plutocracy. Plutolaters (those who worship wealth) began to edge out the more traditional hereditary aristocrats in politics. Monarchism and feudalism gradually gave way to plutocracy and capitalism.
As Britain was being industrialised as part of the capitalist program, the vast majority of British people still lived in rural settings and did agrarian work. But the "dark satanic mills" needed vast numbers of workers. Initially, work in mills was long, arduous, and dangerous: 14-hour days, 6-day working weeks, and child labour were the norm. At the same time, farming was also industrialised, meaning considerably less work for rural people. So people flooded into the new cities seeking work and ended up working in mills and living in slums.
However, working people could never work hard enough or long enough to satisfy the plutocrats. The same theorists who justified brutal imperialism had perverse ideas about people. Thomas Hobbes, for example, characterised people as fundamentally selfish and chaotic. His big idea was that we need a tyrant (the eponymous Leviathan of his best-known book) to keep us in line and enforce social norms. This reflects his experience of decades of war in Europe and Britain, and the biases of his class.
As described by David Spencer (2013), the consensus of imperialist intellectuals was that workers were lazy. Early plutocrats developed the utility of poverty doctrine to counter this laziness. This doctrine says that, since workers are fundamentally unwilling to work, forcing them to live in poverty will give them the necessary motivation. Hence, wages were often paid at subsistence level or below. This attitude has never gone away. This is why "welfare" is a dirty word, but phrases like "business subsidy" or "government contract" are not.
Established churches colluded with the plutocrats and financially benefited from capitalism.
An agrarian lifestyle has periods of intense labour (planting, harvest) and periods of relaxation (winter). Far from being idle, rural people used their free time for life-enhancing activities such as socialising, playing music, dancing, and practising crafts like knitting and weaving. They would also grow their own food and graze an animal or two on common land. And all this was anathema to capitalism because it could not be monetized (at the time), so it was taken away by force.
Under capitalism, communal behaviours like singing, dancing, and storytelling, which used to involve the whole community, were re-imagined as individual skills and subjected to competition. With the result that these communal behaviours have become "spectator sports" in which most people are merely passive observers who cannot compete and thus can only win vicariously. Spectators don't get the benefits of participation. Sport itself went from being a source of communal fun to being a circus in which the morbidly obese watch absurdly overdeveloped and overpaid individuals chasing balls and/or running very fast. Patrick Mahomes, the star quarterback, has a 10-year contract worth US$500 million. He's an extraordinary athlete, but all he does is throw footballs. Meanwhile, something like 40 million Americans live in poverty.
In Britain "common land" gave rural people a way to escape from the mills. So it was all confiscated and placed in private ownership by act of Parliament. The newly privatised land was all gifted to existing plutocrats. This process of "enclosure" of common lands was also predicated on the idea that if land was not being used for capitalism, it was not being used at all. Much the same happened to the vast region of wetlands called "the fens" in Eastern England. The fens had supported a foraging lifestyle for millennia, but they were declared "unproductive", privatised, drained, and turned into farmland for the plutocrats. Of course, the entire USA was already in private ownership once the original occupiers were eliminated. Different starting point, same endpoint.
When I first encountered the ideology of "privatisation" in the 1980s, I had no idea that this was business as usual for capitalism. I grew up in that post-war blip during which socialists often held power and improved the lives of workers. With a broader view, it's clear that privatisation of shared resources, backed by state violence, was a built-in feature of capitalism from the outset.
Also, from the outset, plutocrats were thinking about human beings as a natural resource to be exploited. The first capitalists relied on slave labour. The Atlantic slave trade was merely an extension of the capitalist mindset. It's easy to forget that the slave trade carried on for 400 years before being abolished in the 19th century. The European slave trade was not some passing fad. The commodification of people, to the point of enslaving them, was foundational to the capitalist mindset and integral to the imperialist/colonialist program.
Liberalism
See also my essay On Liberty and Liberalism (3 May 2019).
The ideology that justified imperialism and colonialism is called liberalism. Liberalism is a syncretistic ideology combining ideas about individualism, liberty, competition, secularism, utilitarianism, and commerce. Liberalism and capitalism substantially overlap. In many ways, liberalism provides the theoretical justification of capitalism.
In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that Europeans first learned of the concept of liberty from Americans (i.e. indigenous Americans). In particular, from the records that French Jesuits published of their encounters with the Algonquin people in what is now eastern Canada.
Graeber and Wengrow point out that 600 years ago, no one in Europe was free or even talking about freedom as a concept. At that time, all Europeans served two masters: state and Church. Even kings notionally served the mythical figure of Yahweh/Jehovah (via his priests).
At the same time, however, the power vested in a king was always subject to support from other aristoi. The Magna Carta (1215 CE) was all about curbing the power of a king over his barons. The concessions in the Magna Carta were granted because the combined military power of the barons outstripped that of the king. At this time, ordinary Europeans were subjects of their local lord and bound, by violence and threats of violence, to follow his orders. The Magna Carta was all about liberating and enabling the aristoi, leaving serfs as serfs. And so it went.
The Jesuits happened to contact Americans who were actually free in the way that modern Europeans living in America can only dream of. Every adult Algonquin person was sovereign, within the general limits of their culture. Unlike European leaders who commanded obedience through violence, American leaders had to persuade people to follow them. And the people were free to not follow them. At the same time, no member of an Algonquin tribe would ever let another go hungry, let alone live in poverty and squalor over the long term. They looked after each other.
Moreover, the Jesuits recorded that the Algonquins saw Europeans as obnoxious, avaricious, violent, and cruel to each other (they saw them accurately, in other words). The Algonquins were completely unimpressed by European "civilisation". And they had little or no interest in having Yahweh/Jehovah or Europeans as their masters. They bowed to no one. As free people, the Algonquin resisted conversion to christianity because conversion meant loss of freedom.
These ideas filtered through the Jesuit publications into the new salons of Paris, where they were discussed and were eventually taken up by romantic intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788). Liberalism also owes a great deal to the romanticism of the ruling classes.
However, European liberalism was not like indigenous American freedom. The problem was that the intellectual class were of the ruling class or were their enthusiastic servants. Liberals were, on the whole, fully behind imperialism and colonialism. European liberals sought to ensure the liberty of the plutoi, leaving the working people untouched. As Bertrand Russell put it:
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.
The founding fathers of the US republic were profoundly influenced by liberalism and romanticism. But at heart, they were capitalists/plutocrats. Many of the men who asserted "all men were created equal" owned slaves. They certainly didn't include Africans or native Americans under the rubric of "all men". They also excluded all women from "all men". At the time, they also excluded men who didn't own land. All men were created equal, it's just that wealthy, land-owning European men were more equal in the sense that only they got to vote in the USA. And that is "classical liberalism" in a nutshell.
It's worth citing the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on nineteenth-century liberalism, since it perfectly summarises the endpoint of classical liberalism and laissez-faire capitalism. Britannica is famed for taking a neutral point of view.
The Britannica editors note that the catastrophic effects of classical liberalism were apparent by the end of the nineteenth century. The concentration of vast wealth in the hands of a few plutocrats had three detrimental effects.
- The majority failed to benefit from the wealth flowing from factories and instead lived in poverty in vast slums. With all the attendant social problems that poverty and slums cause.
- The economic model of capitalism created cycles of boom and bust.
- The wealthy corrupted the political system, using their wealth to buy political influence and favours. They ended up controlling the government, manipulating an inchoate electorate, limiting competition, and obstructing substantive social reform.
What the Britannica editors do not say is that this was not accidental. As we have seen, capitalism is based on the cycle of boom, bust, and quit. We've also seen that capitalists despised workers and subscribed to the utility of poverty doctrine. Plutocrats wanted a political system to support their exploitative mindset and lifestyle, and to justify and facilitate their commodification of people. Since neither the aristocracy nor the working class wanted capitalists to have political power, they obtained it by using their wealth to subvert politics.
Classical liberalism ended with the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. These catastrophes were a searing indictment of the failures of capitalism. To be fair, post-war governments put measures in place to prevent a recurrence. However, by the end of the 1980s, all such measures had been decried for holding capitalism back and repealed.
Somewhat ironically, the collapse of classical liberalism led to an expansion of the franchise and civil rights. Women got the vote. The Civil Rights movement was born. Environmentalism was born. Anticipating the end of this story, one important aspect of neoliberalism was to undermine this expansion of rights where it impinged on profits. Gay marriage does not subtract from the bottom line, hence it is allowed (despite the objections of the powerful christian lobby in the US). Environmentalism, by contrast, does seek to limit the activities of capitalists; it does subtract from the bottom line, and so it is constantly under attack by capitalists.
Nonetheless, the liberal ideology continued to hold sway amongst the plutoi and their allies, the technologists, or technoi.
We sometimes call technologists "technocrats". This is problematic since the -crat part means "ruler". Just as the aristoi no longer rule, so it makes no sense to continue speaking of "aristocrats" or "the aristocracy"; the technoi are not technocrats. They do, however, make common cause with plutocrats. However, as Elon Muck amply demonstrated during his brief tenure in the Trump administration, the technoi are not team players, they cannot handle compromise, and they don't understand politics. The technoi rule their tech companies just as feudal lords ruled their fiefs. And since WWII and the Manhattan Project, they draw heavily on public funds for research (see Is Physics a Scam?).
The contribution of the technoi to capitalism has been: (1) opening up new frontiers for the plutoi to exploit, (2) minimising the workforce by replacing humans with machines, and (3) inventing news ways for people to kill each other (especially weapons of mass-destruction).
The industrialisation of Europe was born from the symbiosis of capital and technology. This is similar to the relationship that existed between the lords and priests prior to capitalism.
A major terminological problem occurs with "liberal" in the 21st century. As capitalism took hold and societies changed to accommodate it, certain (often religious) liberals were appalled by the effects of poverty, corruption, and instability. This did not shake their faith in capitalism, but it did prompt them to practice a kind of charity.
Liberals strongly believe in individualism and competition (i.e. setting people against each other). As such, they tend to deny the existence of systemic problems and see all problems as individual problems, which can be solved through competition. As Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society". Thus liberals see systemic poverty—a built-in feature of capitalism—and they blame individual poor people for their condition ("the poor are lazy and feckless"). This is an example of the bias that social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error.
Liberal charity is aimed at individuals. And it aims to help the poor to help themselves to become "productive". That is to say, when someone falls out of the capitalist system, for whatever reason, the bleeding heart liberal aims to stuff them back in.
Something similar happened with climate change. Rather than address systemic problems at the systemic level, the responsibility has been foisted on individuals with stupid ideas like "personal carbon footprint". Thus, people are falling over themselves to recycle plastic, while supermarkets increasingly sell plastic crap and cover every product with layers of plastic packaging.
Worse, "plastic recycling" often amounts to merely exporting plastic waste to the developing world. Personal recycling cannot solve the systemic problems we have with the overproduction and overuse of plastics. I can remember a world in which no food came wrapped in plastic. So I know that using plastic in this way is not necessary. It's a choice made anonymously within very large corporations for which the bottom line is the only thing they care about.
This form of liberalism, which acknowledges systemic problems but tries to solve them with individual acts of charity, is sometimes called "social liberalism". I call it "bleeding heart liberalism", a pejorative term that was common when I was a kid but has generally gone out of use. To be fair, if it wasn't for bleeding heart liberal christians, I'd be homeless (another reason this isn't a "buddhist hot take").
Systemic problems cannot be solved individually or by individual acts of charity that leave the system untouched. Systemic problems have to be addressed systematically.
Following the Great Depression, classical liberalism disappeared from the world. However, the term "liberal" remained in use for bleeding-heart liberals. Especially in the USA, "liberalism" became synonymous with acts of charity and the government equivalent, i.e. "welfare". Since it expresses concern for the poor and aims to solve problems through individual acts of charity, this remnant of liberalism came to be considered "left-wing" despite the ongoing support for capitalism amongst bleeding heart liberals. Since capitalism is the "right-wing" of politics, anyone who thinks capitalism is a good idea is, ipso facto, on the right of politics. There is no substantial left-wing in the US but they still use the terms "left" and "right" in their own way.
Classical liberalism failed on a massive scale and was discredited. Liberals faded from view and were, by and large, absorbed into conservative political parties. As a result, the label "liberal" came to be exclusively associated with bleeding heart liberalism (capitalism plus charity). And yet the ideology of liberalism continued to obsess capitalists. Behind the scenes, liberalism mutated into what liberals themselves initially called neoliberalism. Before diving into that topic, we need to look at another change that capitalists made to society.
Capitalism and Class
We have seen that capitalism is based on colonial looting. That is to say, the privatisation, commodification, and exploitation of shared resources (including people) until they are exhausted. Boom, bust, quit; repeat.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, concerted resistance to capitalism began to emerge. Notably, labour unions and the labour movement emerged as a political force in Europe, before being killed off in the neoliberal revolution a century later.
The most famous critic of capitalism is, of course, Karl Marx (we almost always forget about his writing partner Friedrich Engels). I don't want to dwell too much on Marx. He was a pioneer, but in my view, while he was right about capitalism, he was wrong about history and communism. At the same time, we cannot simply ignore Marx.
Marx's criticisms were rooted in the European conception of society stratified into relatively fixed classes of people that Marx called the bourgeoisie, the petite bourgeoisie, and the proletariat. In ancient Rome, according to the traditional division of the state, the proletarius was one of the propertyless people, exempted from taxes and military service, who served the state only by having children (Latin proles is cognate with prolific). According to Marx, capitalists saw physical labour as the only contribution of the working class to society.
In the UK, the most common terms for the three classes were upper, middle, and lower. The hierarchy is more explicit in the vernacular. The "upper class" rule, "the middle class" administer and conduct commerce, and the "lower class" (aka "the working class") physically labour in service to the upper class.
The European class system is predicated on the idea that the wealthy deserve to be pampered, while the poor deserve to be deprived. And the middle class arrange for both.
We can generalise that the upper classes accumulate assets, the middle classes accumulate goods, and the lower classes accumulate problems.
Quite obviously, these divisions are not new but have their roots in feudalism: kings, barons, merchants, and serfs.
Marx, rather naïvely and idealistically, saw the move from feudalism to capitalism as (natural) progress towards a communist utopia. In fact, capitalism maintains aristocratic class distinctions and simply changes the criteria for membership. Newly wealthy capitalists could simply buy political and social influence. The aristoi scorned them as nouveau riche "new money". But imperialism generated vast fortunes, and the capitalists used their new money to dominate politics, side-stepping and then relegating the aristocracy. This, in turn, allowed the plutoi to use the apparatus of the state to serve their interests. The word we use for buying influence is "corruption". A capitalist state is fundamentally corrupt in this sense.
In the 1980s, alongside many other radical changes, the European class system was redefined with just two classes: producers (i.e. capitalists) and consumers. And this doctrine was called consumerism.
One of the most striking aspects of this change was a total redefinition of the value of work. Prior to the 20th century, both church and state had passionately advocated for the moral benefits of hard work. And early economists had allowed that labour added value to resources that contributed to profits.
In the ideology of consumerism, work was downgraded from a source of value to a cost of doing business. Labour became an overhead. And every business seeks to minimise overheads. This means that work now has a negative value in capitalism. If anything, capitalists' resentment towards humanity has only grown, which is why they seek to replace us with machines at every turn.
Now, capitalists are apt to point out that capitalism and consumerism have raised millions of people out of poverty (for some definitions of "poverty"). Setting aside rampant problems like sweatshops and child labour that characterise capitalism in such places, what has really happened to those people?
It's true that many people in so-called "developing countries" now earn more money. However, they are still relatively poor and can only afford inferior products that do not last and do not work well. Moreover, capitalists use their control of mass media to saturate the environment with advertising and brainwash people into buying a load of worthless crap they do not need. They also exploit the lack of regulation in "developing countries" to sell harmful products like tobacco. So more money doesn't necessarily mean "a better life".
Modern advertising uses sophisticated psychological manipulation and propaganda techniques to stimulate desire and discontent. In his film The Century of the Self (2002), BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis talks about how Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud's nephew) used Freud's ideas on the subconscious to sell stuff and influence opinion in the 1920s. His great "success" was convincing women to overcome social convention and take up smoking cigarettes... resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths.
As malignant as this accumulation of crap is, the real evil genius of consumerism is that it pits us against each other. We not only accumulate worthless crap, but we also compete with our neighbours over who has more or better crap. Identity no longer comes from work itself, but is tied up with the crap we accumulate.
At the same time, as David Graeber (2018) pointed out, many people in the modern world do work that makes nothing and contributes nothing to society. He called this phenomenon "bullshit jobs". Most people these days are merely "flunkies, goons, duct-tapers, box-tickers, or task-masters." It's still the case that professionals identify with their job, but for people with bullshit jobs, there's nothing for workers to identify with. They don't do anything of value for society. And these are the people whose jobs are at most risk of being replaced by machines.
So, sure, some previously impoverished people have more money on paper. This doesn't make up for having a job that is completely pointless and a lifestyle that revolves around competitive accumulation of useless crap, which breaks almost immediately and then becomes an eternal source of toxic chemicals in the environment.
We should also note that capitalism has now so adulterated our food and distorted our minds that almost half of the people in wealthy countries are obese and a quarter suffer from mental disorders.
One might ask, at this point, if plutocracy is so awful, how has it lasted for 600 years? Which brings us to the authoritarian dynamic.
The Authoritarian Dynamic
I was never able to study history at school, but I suspect it wouldn't have helped. High school history in the 1970s and early 1980s was all about glorifying the imperialism of the past and the capitalist hegemony of the present.
My first inkling of the importance of history came with the revisionist histories of Aotearoa that began to appear in the mid-late 1980s (after my formal education in the sciences was finished). I had grown up with stories of the glory of Empire. Māori who resisted European colonisation were presented as terrorists rather than the freedom fighters they were. While the Māori were hardly saints, it was the Europeans who brought terror to the "Land of the Long White Cloud". It was the British who were murderous, acquisitive, covetous, underhanded, and savage. The Māori defended themselves vigorously enough that the British government had to send an army of 10,000 men equipped with cannons to subdue them. And notably, under the leadership of christian converts like Te Whiti-o-Rongomai, the Māori pioneered the use of passive and nonviolent resistance. Te Whiti was imprisoned by an act of Parliament. "Perfidious Albion" indeed.
One of the historical questions that my generation were still asking ourselves at the height of the Cold War was how the intelligent and cultured German people could have let the Nazis take over. And yet, this is one of the most studied phenomena in history. Academics from across the social sciences studied the situation, the people, and the history, and produced a range of insights. But almost none of this knowledge reached me until I was middle-aged, and only after the revolt of the elite. Then, as now I suspect, most people understood history through the lens of popular dramas. WWII films were still very popular in my youth.
Perhaps the most striking amongst all my sources for this essay is the long article, simply titled "Authoritarianism", by Karen Stenner for Hope Not Hate magazine in 2020. From this essay, we get a succinct and brilliant summary of why people follow authoritarian leaders.
In her article, Stenner summarises her research into what she calls the authoritarian dynamic. About one-third of the population has the authoritarian personality type. Personality is roughly half nature and half nurture. Those born with this personality are affected by upbringing, peers, education, and culture, but there remains a core of attraction to authoritarianism.
The personality type is associated with low scores on the Big-5 trait of openness to new experiences and low scores on intelligence tests. This correlates with struggling to cope mentally and emotionally with complexity and novelty. Cognitive dissonance that cannot be resolved often results in feelings of aversion.
The result is that people with this personality type favour situations characterised by physical similarity and shared values between group members (group conformity) and by strict adherence to group norms (group authority). Stenner calls this the need for sameness and oneness.
Note that the authoritarian need for sameness is not necessarily sameness over time. For example, traditional conservatives are primarily opposed to change over time. Authoritarians are troubled by physical differences or change over space. An authoritarian will happily support sweeping changes over time, even revolutions, if the goal is sameness and oneness.
Deprived of sameness and oneness, people with the authoritarian personality type feel under threat, and they turn to authoritarian leaders who promise to restore order. Many authoritarians find democracy difficult and puzzling.
It seems to me that authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders have very different personality types. Stenner illuminates the former. For the latter, I turn to Jason Stanley, more on this shortly. Let's stay with followers for now.
Stenner's overview of her own work succinctly explains why many ordinary Germans supported Hitler, why Russians support Putin, why Indians support Modi, and why Americans support Trump. Not only is the support for authoritarianism understandable, it is entirely predictable. The rise of authoritarianism is always preceded by a perceived threat to the normative order that authoritarians crave.
Stenner explains that authoritarianism is not personal. One person losing their house is not a normative threat, while an event like the global financial crisis is a normative threat. And one that many people have not recovered from.
It's tricky, but I think we have to disentangle the authoritarian personality (and the demands it makes on people) from ideologies like racism.
"Race" is an imperialist concept. The idea is that superficial characteristics—especially skin colour—can be used to create a hierarchy with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. Keep in mind the class hierarchy that I've already described and how it was used by capitalists to justify exploiting the poor. Race is also a capitalist discourse. In this case, it is used to justify exploiting people with dark skin, notably the enslavement of millions of Africans over 400 years. The first capitalist ventures, such as Madeira, relied entirely on slave labour from Africa.
While there are smoke screens, the basic concept of race is that the European ruling classes see themselves as the masters and everyone else as their servants. The masters deserve to be pampered, and the servants exist to do the pampering. Race is one of the ugliest, most delusional ideas ever conceived by humans. Racism is a delusion of grandeur amongst the most selfish and violent people in history. The intellectuals who promoted race theory did so to provide legitimation for inhuman behaviours.
Now, I know that there are genuine, ideological racists in the world. But there are a great many people who simply find cultural diversity confusing and uncomfortable without having any ideological commitment to the race delusion. They crave group conformity and find non-conformity threatening. To my mind, this is not racism. It's not ideological. It stems from feelings rather than ideas.
On the other hand, if we simply label all people who resist diversity initiatives as "racists", this is also an ideological position.
I remember the world before political correctness. One of the main insult terms kids in my milieu used was "spastic", which started out as a medical term for cerebral palsy. However, the pejorative use took over. It soon became embarrassing for doctors to refer to someone as "a spastic". So also with the term "cripple", as in "The Crippled Children's Society". "Moron" and "idiot" were also once medical terms and are now only used as insults.
The whole drift of political correctness began as an effort to stop the fortunate from cruelly mocking the unfortunate for their misfortunes using medical terminology. Cruel mockery is an integral part of European imperialism. A "put down" is inherently hierarchical. A great example of this is two of my neighbours who are close friends. But one of them only ever says mean things about the other. If I'm around, that one just continually points out the other's fault to me, while he is standing right there. Relentless mockery and put downs is a common feature of male friendships in Britain and her colonies.
The point is that people with the authoritarian personality type cannot change their personality. So, for example, it's not simply a matter of presenting them with facts as so many liberals believe. Parading examples of diversity before them and shouting "ISN'T THIS GREAT?" won't change their minds. Celebrations of diversity are anathema to someone who craves sameness.
Here's an analogy. I don't like raw tomatoes. There is no fact you could tell me that would change this. No amount of watching other people enjoy eating raw tomatoes will change my view. No amount of mocking or shaming me will make me like tomatoes. Forcing me to eat tomatoes or threatening me with violence if I do not eat them will not help. I have been subjected to all of these measures with respect to tomatoes, and I still find the texture and taste utterly repulsive. At the end of the day, I don't like tomatoes unless they are thoroughly cooked, heavily seasoned, and pureed. Tomato soup is fine, and tomato sauce (aka "ketchup") is excellent.
De gustibus non est disputandum ("There is no arguing with taste") and all that.
So also for authoritarians who do not like diversity and individualism. The methods we currently use to try to force them to change—including coercion, shame, and mockery—don't work and won't work. The harder we try these methods, the more they see us as a threat, and the more they look for an authoritarian leader to "restore order".
While Stenner's perspective is fresh and sums up the situation succinctly, we've known a lot of this for decades. Many scholars studied the Nazis with a view to avoiding this situation. But capitalists and technologists are not interested in history. So they are creating the conditions for fascism all over again. This time, amongst the "allies".
The Recapitulation of Fascism for the Modern World.
The Neoliberals
Following the Great Depression and WWII, Europe and the USA went through periods of prosperity, though they took significantly different forms.
In the UK, the Labour movement saw socialists gaining political power and founding institutions to help workers. Universal, government-funded healthcare was one of the great achievements of this period.
In Western Europe, post-war rebuilding aimed to create a more united Europe that would not go to war on that scale ever again. And international commerce was seen as essential to this process. The idea would eventually manifest as the European Union, a partially federalised Europe envisaged by capitalists for capitalists, and dedicated to the free movement of capital, goods, services, and people.
Eastern Europe fell under the sway of Stalin's monstrous totalitarian regime. This only helped capitalists by providing them with a stick with which to beat socialists.
WWII was fought in Europe and Asia. Apart from Pearl Harbour, there were no attacks on American soil. The US government commandeered most of the industrial capacity of the US for the war effort. After the war, the factories went right back to making cars and fridges without a gap. There was no rebuilding of whole cities that had been carpet-bombed or nuked. The USA began to expand rapidly. On the whole, work was plentiful and workers were paid enough to live on.
The future looked to be progressive on both sides of the Atlantic. We honestly believed that things would only get better. But something dark was brewing.
In 1938, amongst the many Viennese intellectuals fleeing Nazism, were Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. The pair had attended the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, which aimed to revive interest in liberalism, while at the same time distancing themselves from the abject failures of classical liberalism, also known as laissez-faire capitalism. They called themselves "neoliberals".
Friedrich Hayek, like Hobbes before him, based his worldview on having lived through a terrible period of war across Europe and having emerged from it with a dismal view of humanity. Hobbes argued that a tyrant was necessary to impose order on an unruly humanity. Hayek was more concerned with avoiding tyranny. He took the rather perverse view that any capitulation to the group inevitably leads to citizens becoming enslaved by a tyrant. Hayek's book propounding this theory—The Road to Serfdom—was a bestseller. Von Mises' book Bureaucracy made much the same argument.
One has to admire the hutzpah of a European intellectual who can completely ignore the long history of class-ridden, imperialist and colonialist Europe and blame "collectivism" for European tyranny.
The Road to Serfdom is the core text of the neoliberal movement. It is still widely read, or at least talked about, by neoliberals. The neoliberals advocated for radical individualism amongst the world's wealthy and powerful. The idea that government should not "interfere" in matters of commerce was especially important.
Hayek and his wealthy backers formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. This became a model for hundreds of neoliberal think tanks, with seemingly endless funds, churning out neoliberal propaganda for the mass media and "lobbying" (i.e. threatening and bribing) politicians.
Having initially called themselves "neoliberals", the neoliberals consciously dropped this term or any label for their views. Part of their strategy was to present their ideological program as being free of ideology. Monbiot and Hutchinson call it the "invisible doctrine". The opening lines of their book are
Imagine that the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of Communism. That's more or less where we find ourselves today. The dominant ideology of our times--that affects nearly every aspect of our lives--for most of us has no name.
However, the lack of a clear term for these ideas was no impediment. By the late 1970s, the mainstream of politics was convinced by neoliberalism and was presenting it as necessary and inevitable. Thatcher was elected in 1979 and declared that there was "no alternative"to but sweeping social and economic reforms in line with neoliberal ideology. Many people still accept that there was and is no alternative.
As with the classical liberal catastrophe at the end of the 19th century, neoliberalism has resulted in the concentration of wealth amongst a tiny group of people. It has led to increasing inequality and declining standards of living for most. Political corruption—in the sense of using wealth to buy influence—now completely dominates the political scene in the USA and is a major problem everywhere. Economic instability is increasing, with massive adverse effects like the global financial crisis.
That is to say, the problems caused by neoliberalism are more or less identical to the problems caused by classical liberalism. Only now the liberal grip on power is much stronger. Society is increasingly atomised. People are increasingly alienated. Most people do jobs that contribute nothing to their community. Standards of living are declining.
In the neoliberal revolution, shared resources (often developed using taxes) were unilaterally privatised to benefit the wealthy. Governments legislated to curb the power of unions. Post-war rules to prevent another Great Depression were deprecated, and the finance industry massively expanded (consumer credit became a new source of rent seeking).
At the same time, bleeding heart liberals have taken up the cause of promoting diversity, and freedom of movement has seen more and more people eager to migrate to rich countries.
People with the authoritarian personality type experience this as a perfect storm. The need for sameness and oneness is not being met. They are confronting multiple normative threats: diversity, economic decline, and immigration. So they are now supporting authoritarian leaders.
I have no defence against the charge that this is a "conspiracy theory". But lest we think this is all "leftist" sour grapes, I will now give an outline of a key document from the other side of the argument.
Free Enterprise and Propaganda
We get an early view of the neoliberal mindset in the form of a memo titled Attack on American Free Enterprise System, written to the US Chamber of Commerce by (future Supreme Court Associate Judge) Lewis Powell (1971). Powell saw socialism as an obvious threat, but he's quick to point out that US socialist groups are tiny and have little influence. Rather, he notes...
The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.
As we noted above, fascists target intellectuals because they are the canaries down the mine. Intellectuals are often the first to notice fascism and call it out. They have also led calls to prevent the poisoning and destruction of the natural environment (which particularly annoyed Powell).
Powell identifies Ralph Nader as the archetype of the liberal intellectual who poses the greatest threat to the business community. Nader's "attacks" consisted of such nefarious activities as lobbying for US car manufacturers to include safety features in cars to prevent deaths. As the Britannica article on Nader notes, "[General Motors] went to exceptional lengths to discredit Nader, including hiring a private detective to follow him."
But Powell is also dismayed by the "apathy" and passivity of the business community in the face of such "attacks". And he mentions General Motors by name in this context. The fact that GM did include safety features in their cars is portrayed as a capitulation to those who would ruin America.
Powell continues the theme of being "under attack" by repeated use of war metaphors:
"businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it."
And portrays the situation as a fight to the death:
The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.
Having established the idea of the wealthy and powerful being "under attack" and "fighting for survival", most of the memo is an outline of a comprehensive program for conservative businessmen (i.e. fascists) to take control of the USA and impose their values on the nation. Powell sees the Chamber of Commerce itself as having a leading role in coordinating the war effort.
Powell returns to the university campus as a particularly problematic arena. He allows that "Liberal" ideas are essential for a balanced point of view. Still, "a priority task of business — and organizations such as the Chamber — is to address the campus origin of this hostility".
Powell's solution is for businessmen to take a more active role on campus. The Chamber of Commerce should seek to appoint sympathetic academics (to provide "balance"). They should have a roster of business-oriented public speakers and an agency to promote them. Such speakers should demand equal time (to socialists and liberals). Moreover, they should actively seek to control what textbooks say. In classic Orwellian doublespeak, he says:
"In a democratic society, this [censorship] can be a constructive process and should be regarded as an aid to genuine academic freedom and not as an intrusion upon it."
Which is to say... "censorship is freedom". Moreover, businessmen should take their message to the people:
"The national television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance."
Businessmen should be thinking of flooding the airwaves with pro-business propaganda. Through TV, radio, the press, scholarly journals, books, pamphlets, and advertising. He suggests that businessmen devote 10% of annual advertising budgets to propaganda.
In a classic fascist move, Powell plays the victim:
Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders.
This was never true in the USA, let alone in the 1960s. As well as urging concerted political activism, Powell suggests making more use of the courts to protect business interests. He notes that "Labor unions, civil rights groups and now the public interest law firms are extremely active in the judicial arena." And their successes were "detrimental to business".
Powell proposes radicalising shareholders:
The question which merits the most thorough examination is how can the weight and influence of stockholders — 20 million voters — be mobilized to support (i) an educational program and (ii) a political action program.
At the same time as denigrating labour unions, Powell suggests that shareholders "form a union" so that their collective power can be more effectively mobilised on behalf of business. As if the Chamber of Commerce was not already playing that role.
While Powell constantly invokes the idea of "balance", his desire for power cannot be disguised.
There should be no hesitation to attack the Naders, the Marcuses and others who openly seek destruction of the system. There should not be the slightest hesitation to press vigorously in all political arenas for support of the enterprise system. Nor should there be reluctance to penalize politically those who oppose it.
The irony ought to be apparent. We now take safety features in motor vehicles, like seat belts, for granted. But more than this, safety features not only saved lives, but they proved to be incredibly popular, to the point where they are now a major selling point.
Powell acknowledges that his proposed war on environmentalism and consumer protection would require a massive expansion of the staff and budget of the Chamber of Commerce. So much for small government.
Right at the end, Powell pivots away from the threat being against "free enterprise" and seeks to make it seem more fundamental.
The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.
In his view, government regulation of business—such as mandated safety features in cars to prevent deaths, or banning smoking as a public health measure—threatens individual freedom. He is obviously invoking Hayek's conclusion in The Road to Serfdom at this point. He's unironically saying that people can only be free under capitalism: the ideology that almost entirely wiped out indigenous Americans and enslaved millions of Africans for over 400 years.
The irony here is that the USA has always been an authoritarian state. When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, the American South still operated an apartheid system which unconstitutionally used state laws to remove Constitutional rights from US citizens based solely on skin colour.
And yet, despite the neoliberal revolution, which saw businessmen take full control of the US government, the USA has still ended up as an authoritarian state. As Bertrand Russell said:
"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate."
The Powell Memo does two things. (1) It shows that the seeds of the neoliberal revolution substantially predate Reagan and Thatcher. And (2), it shows that the agenda of US businessmen was always an expression of a fascist mindset. We now need to explore fascism in more detail.
How Fascism Works
Jason Stanley has spent his academic career studying fascism. His book for the popular market, How Fascism Works, outlines ten (overlapping) strategies that fascist leaders follow. Stanley recently announced that he is so concerned about the rise of fascism in the USA that he is emigrating to Canada (to take up a long-standing job offer). Two of his colleagues at Yale are following suit.
I find Stanley very helpful in his own right, but I also reinterpret his ideas in the light of Karen Stenner's. So, for example, I would say that fascist leaders leverage existing threats to the normative order, or manufacture them, in a calculated bid to activate the authoritarian response and gain the support of people with the authoritarian personality. They may not frame it in these terms, but this is what happens.
Each of Stanley's ten standard operating principles is illustrated with examples from recent political history. Contemporary fascists such as Trump, Putin, Modi, Bolsonaro, and Orban feature prominently. However, for my purposes, we can condense this to just three headings:
- The Mythic Past and Victimhood
- They Are Not Like Us
- Active Measures
The Mythic Past and Victimhood
The first step for a fascist leader is to construct an idealized and romanticized narrative (or myth) about the past greatness of the nation. In Stenner's terms, this grandiose mythic past must include the idea that we had greater oneness and sameness in the past.
The fascist leader also identifies a cause for the decline, i.e. a scapegoat. The scapegoat is always a minority group of people living within the nation. As Stanley says, fascism is "the politics of us and them". Where "they" are the enemy within; they represent a threat to sameness and oneness; they divide us; they dilute us; they reduce us. In Stenner's terms, they undermine our sameness and oneness. And this rhetoric is one that very much appeals to authoritarians since they value sameness and oneness. Any kind of difference can become a threat to the normative order.
Since the scapegoat group are portrayed as the agents of decline, this puts the society itself in the passive role, i.e. victims of the scapegoat group. They are ruining it for us. We encountered this in the Lewis Powell memo, which characterises the most wealthy and powerful men on the planet as powerless and under attack from malevolent people like Ralph Nader and Greta Thunberg.
Trump perfectly exemplifies this. He spent the years 2020-2024 complaining that the election he lost was actually stolen by the Democrats. He was a victim of the nefarious "deep state". He was a victim of the courts. He was a victim of "never-Trumpers". He was a victim of the Washington elite. He was a victim first of the liberal media, then the Murdoch media. And so on. Always a victim.
Yet, at the same time, Trump presents himself as a winner, a strong man, a smart man, a rich man, a successful man. For such a man, self-identifying as a victim might seem counterintuitive. And he routinely portrayed Biden (who won the 2020 election) as ineffectual, weak, stupid, and unsuccessful. The contradiction seems not to bother his followers.
Remember that Trump's audience have suffered declining living standards and substantial changes in social mores for at least two generations. Notably, many of the social changes involve highlighting differences and individualism rather than sameness and oneness.
So Trump was saying, "I'm one of you. I'm a victim of the same nefarious forces that have ruined your lives. It's personal for me too. And, if you vote for me, I'll be in a position to stop those forces and make America great again." And this obviously struck a chord with tens of millions of Americans.
Part of the point of this self-identification as a victim is to foster a "cult of the leader" in which people identify the leader with the nation. The idea on offer is that we're all in the same boat; therefore, what's good for Trump is good for America. Allegiance to the USA becomes allegiance to Trump, and all of his many crimes are forgiven.
In the case of the USA, we also have to factor in evangelical christians and their radicalization by Ronald Reagan and the televangelists. Stanley, who is Jewish, tends to downplay the role of christianity in US fascism.
American christians have their own version of the "once great people" myth. The early colonists were certainly religious fanatics, and they are often portrayed as fleeing religious persecution (which is partly true). Early colonial rhetoric was full of biblical imagery: a city on a hill, a covenant people, and so on. This romantic view of America as "the promised land" and Americans as Jehovah's chosen people persists. In evangelical circles, however, America is increasingly seen as having fallen from covenant nation to corrupt empire. In this view, the US once had divine favour (like biblical Israel), but has become decadent, idolatrous, sexually immoral, and militarily oppressive (like biblical Babylon), and so now it faces divine judgment.
Apparently, some American christians see Trump as playing the role of Cyrus the Great, who founded the Achaemenid Empire. In their mythology (as distinct from Persian history and archaeology), Cyrus was the king who conquered Babylon and freed the Jews from captivity, allowing them to return to Jerusalem and build a new temple on the site of the old Temple of Solomon (destroyed by the Babylonians ca 586 BCE). Of course, other christians see him as antichrist (more on this below).
The irony of such religious narratives is that, in fascist India, it is the "hindus" that are the "chosen people" and it was European christians who (along with Indian muslims) led India into decadence and decline. Their view is that, only by purging the outside influences and restoring "hindu purity" can the nation flourish. Classic fascism.
They Are Not Like Us
As we saw above, authoritarians like to draw a hard and fast distinction between "them" and "us" and to prioritise "us" (oneness/group authority). Blaming "them" for all our problems. Fascist leaders take this one step further by making a horizontal distinction between us and them into a vertical, hierarchical distinction.
We are not simply different from them; we are better than them. Compare this delusion to the racist delusion described above. Humans, like all other social mammals, naturally form hierarchical groups. People have different capacities, and these lead us to have different roles in our community. Fascists weaponize such differences.
Stanley, rather laboriously, draws out this theme over at least three chapters:
- We are law-abiding, they are criminals (Chp 7);
- We are normal, they are perverts (Chp 8);
- We are the salt of the earth and come from the rural heartland, they are urban libertines and hedonists" (Chp 9).
- We are believers, god's chosen people; they are apostates, heretics, idolaters, and heathens.
European ideas about race and class encapsulate the weaponization of difference. The basic idea of race is that Europeans with their pale skin (aka "the white race") are naturally superior to people with brown skin ("the black race"). This is, on the face of it, a very stupid idea. It runs counter to the many cultural warnings we have against such superficiality:
- Don't judge a book by its cover
- Beauty is skin deep.
- All that glitters is not gold.
- Appearances can be deceiving.
- All fur coat and no knickers
- Still waters run deep.
- The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The fact that we have so many ways of making this point is indicative of how important we think it is. And yet "race" is literally skin-deep.
The subversion of natural hierarchy allows fascists to invoke social Darwinism (which sometimes takes the form of eugenics). Our "natural superiority" ostensibly justifies the violent suppression and oppression we seek to impose on them. And (in this view) if they die, it's no great loss to us; indeed, it makes it easier for us to take their land and resources for ourselves.
Conspiracy theories are aimed at exactly these kinds of narratives: e.g. Obama was born in Africa, the Democratic party is a secret network of paedophiles, etc. The point of conspiracy theories is not to tell the truth, but to make authoritarians perceive a normative threat from them (whoever they happen to be).
Stanley's final chapter is titled Arbeit Macht Frei "Work makes you free", which was the slogan emblazoned above the gates to the Auschwitz death camp. This chapter largely rehearses the "them and us" message of earlier chapters with more focus on Nazi attitudes to the Jews. It doesn't actually talk much about work. Instead, it's about how fascist ideology glorifies a mythologized version of "hard work" to stigmatize and exclude groups deemed lazy, parasitic, or undeserving (e.g. minorities, immigrants, welfare recipients). The function of this rhetoric is to reinforce nationalist and racial hierarchies, not to promote a genuine work ethic. And as we have seen, the ruling classes of Europe have seen working people as lazy and undeserving for at least 600 years.
Active Measures
Having created the romanticized myth of past greatness, identified a scapegoat group within society to blame for the decline, identified the leader as a personal victim of the scapegoat group, and highlighted how they are not like us, fascists then go into action.
"Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language." (p.36)
As above, this is drawn out over several chapters, e.g. 2 Propaganda, 3 Anti-intellectual, 4 Unreality.
All governments employ propaganda. We all go from cradle to grave saturated in it. Most of us never notice.
Fascist propaganda is less about persuading people to adopt fascism and more about distorting reality and confusing public discourse. This serves two purposes: demonising the scapegoat (emphasising the us/them dichotomy) and undermining resistance.
While the gold standard of propaganda has long been the Nazi regime, the emergence of Putin in Russia was marked by a new extreme form of propaganda. Putin's propaganda chief, Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov, studied theatre direction before going into the advertising business and then politics.
Surkov set out to undermine the very idea of truth. More than anyone, it was his ideas that led us to the present "post-truth era". He did this, for example, by creating and funding fake opposition groups that he later exposed.
A key tactic was to have the Russian state media present wildly contradictory statements about events. For example, when Russia was annexing Crimea in 2014, Russian news both denied that any Russian troops were in Ukraine and, at the same time, celebrated the bravery of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Surkov also said things like "Ukraine doesn't exist". More recently, we witnessed Russian fascists claiming to be protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine from Ukrainian fascists.
An example from the USA is Trump's ongoing claim not to have lost the 2016 Presidential election.
As the very concept of truth is degraded and no one can tell what the facts are, it becomes impossible to have a proper public debate. After decades of this, we find ourselves in the "post-truth world".
These days, many Americans and Europeans are confused. They constantly fall prey to spammers, scammers, and sock-puppets. Experts who love to tell us what to think, say, and eat seem to constantly change their minds and contradict their own advice. Priests turn out to be paedophiles. Technologists replace humans with robots. Plutocrat politicians routinely lie, prevaricate, and talk like automatons. No one knows who to trust because no one in public life is trustworthy.
The first line of defence against fascism is intellectuals like the authors I am considering in this essay. Intellectuals are usually the first to notice what is happening and speak out against it. They can cut through the fog of propaganda to expose what is really going on.
Fascist leaders foster distrust of intellectuals for this reason. These efforts are supported by those who benefit from fascism. For example, Shell and other large oil companies clearly knew in the 1970s that burning fossil fuels contributes to global warming and climate change. However, they continued to fund anti-climate change propaganda, which has helped to undermine efforts to get governments to respond to the threat. Many other examples could be cited. They result is paralysis in the face of impending disaster.
Stanley's book uses many examples to illustrate how authoritarian leaders manipulate people, events, and images to mobilise authoritarian followers. Either they intuit how to do this, or they understand people in the same way that Stenner does. Because we can see them working to create the impression of a threat to the normative order and the fascist leader as just the man to restore it.
There is another problem that is specific to religious countries, like the USA. In the USA, the fundamentalist christians have their own peculiar authoritarian agenda related to Biblical prophecy. In evangelical christianity, “the Apocalypse” usually refers to the end-times scenario drawn mainly from the Book of Revelation. It is framed as Jehovah’s final intervention in history, where:
- The world undergoes escalating turmoil (wars, disasters, the rise of the antichrist).
- Jesus returns (the second coming) in glory to defeat evil and establish God’s kingdom.
- There is a final judgment, separating the saved from the damned.
The problem is literalism. Many American evangelicals treat the Bible as the literal "word of Jehovah". The prophecy is not just symbolic; it literally spells out future events. And some christians take it one step further by intervening to make prophecy come true in order to speed things along. As well as making common cause with Jewish Zionists in Palestine and supporting the genocide of the Palestinians, they are also indifferent to systemic problems like climate change. If Jesus is poised to come and defeat evil, one need not bother to do anything about it. One might even choose to vote for the antichrist, since his rise is necessary to fulfil prophecy. At least some of the evangelicals who voted for Trump are actively trying to initiate the prophesied apocalypse.
There is no doubt that fascism is now a powerful force in global politics. Brazil voted Bolsonaro out, but Putin, Modi, Orban, and Trump are all still in place. Fascist political movements are distorting politics right across the European Union and the UK. The religiously inspired fascism of the USA is particularly troubling because the goal of evangelicals is nothing less than the end of the world.
Summary
The roots of the zeitgeist are to be found in the history of European imperialism. In particular,
- The capitalist revolution (16th-18th century), industrialisation (19th century) and the neoliberal revolution or revolt of the elite (20th-21st century).
- European imperialism and the violent quest to capture and exploit the resources of other people.
- Slavery and racism.
- Hobbesian and mercantilist cynicism about humanity and the value of work.
- Liberalism and the liberal elite's fetishization of individualism, diversity, competition, secularism, utilitarianism, and commerce.
- The authoritarian dynamic: followers desperately seeking sameness and oneness, and wealthy demagogues who promise to provide it (at the cost of abandoning democracy and liberty).
A sizeable minority (~ ⅓) of the population craves sameness (group conformity) and oneness (group authority) and cannot change this. Authoritarians view diversity and individualism as inconvenient at best and pathological at worst. They prefer sameness and oneness to democracy and liberty. Fascists understand how to mobilise this minority.
Confronted with difference and individualism, authoritarians experience cognitive dissonance and aversion. This is not an opinion, it's more like an instinct. They are born that way and cannot "change their minds" about it. They do not see increasing diversity as progress; they see it as decline.
Denied sameness and oneness, people with the authoritarian personality type or disposition look to authoritarian leaders who promise to restore order.
The capitalism-technology axis is almost guaranteed to lead to fascism, since it aims to atomise society and to disempower and alienate individuals. And this is an existential threat to sameness and oneness.
Now What?
This story began with the capitalist revolution in Europe. With Madeira, sugar, and slavery. With imperialism and colonialism. Capitalism is not a separate story. Capitalism only makes sense in the context of European imperialism. Liberalism is the intellectual side of capitalism: the justification for individualism, utilitarianism, and overemphasis on competition. It's all tied up with the contrary notions of inherent European superiority and the need to legitimise the vicious habits of the ruling classes: i.e. war, genocide, wholesale theft, and so on.
Capitalism, liberalism, imperialism, and colonialism are all aspects of the same complex phenomenon. Fascism is not something new or separate from this complex. Fascism is a natural and very much expected outcome of capitalism. The very same capitalist nations that opposed fascism in the 20th century now embrace it in the 21st. Former "communist" countries now also embrace fascism, with even China now allowing hoards of personal wealth (which can only be a slippery slope).
Authoritarians support fascism as a means of restoring sameness and oneness. Fascism achieves this by subordinating citizens to the state and subordinating the state to the leader. Minority communities and intellectuals become targets under fascism.
This is not a romantic story. There is no happy ending. Fascism is now the dominant political ideology on Earth. We live in a plutocratic technological dystopia. Humanity is not only facing a whole series of existential threats, but they are threats that capitalism created and which capitalists are determined to prevent us from solving. Because, as Lewis Powell makes clear, solving our environmental problems would impinge on profit-making, and capitalists see this as "an attack" on their way of life. Their response was to wage a war on environmentalists and consumer advocates.
To be honest, I don't see a practical way forward that would fundamentally change things. We are considering an ideology that has risen to the level of world domination. I'm not like those liberals who believe that "pointing out the facts" changes anything. I know that belief is a feeling about an idea. And I know that facts don't generally change how people feel about ideas. I'm also not like those liberals and hippies who see the solution in atomised individual responses to problems. I do not agree with the platitude "before you can change the world, you have you change yourself." Systemic problems cannot be changed by individuals.
However, I think we can at least resist, especially if we make common cause with other people who think as we do. Which is, after all, how the capitalists took over the world.
I see two main ways to resist.
- Collectivity
- Compromise
Collectivity
To my mind, it's important to emphasise that humans are an obligately social species. Humans evolved, over millions of years, to live in communities. A few of us prefer solitude, but I suspect that there is always a reason for this: very often, traumatic experiences. The bottom line is that humans are a social species.
All social mammals are prosocial. We all have the same capacity for empathy and reciprocity that enable us to live in groups characterised by mutual obligations. These capacities and obligations form the basis of morality (including notions of fairness and justice). Belonging is fundamental to humanity.
The most powerful tool that humans have is our ability to cooperate in large groups of unrelated individuals.
With all due respect to my old friend Will Buckingham, xenophilia—the love of strangers—is relatively rare. Authoritarians are xenophobic in the true sense that they fear strangeness; they find difference and individualism taxing, confusing, and annoying.
This suggests that we need to rethink the liberal fetishisation of individualism. Evolutionarily, individualism is a pathology. Ideological individualism leads to the atomisation of society and to the alienation and disempowerment of individuals. Moreover, for authoritarians, individualism is anathema, since it conflicts with their need for oneness.
One idea that seems like it might be fruitful is to de-emphasise individualism and emphasise collectivism. Which of course immediately alienates all capitalists everywhere. But hear me out.
For example, as well as talking about rights (especially the right to be different), we could talk more in terms of mutual obligations. Rights are what others are obliged to grant us. But rights should be balanced by duties, our obligations to other people.
A simple example is that we have legal rights and we are also obliged to follow the law (even if we don't know it!). Although the law is now often so complex that it's difficult to know what it is.
So we might want to discuss and perhaps specify some basic obligations and be prepared to hold people to them.
I think we would do well to curb triumphalism. There's being a good loser, but there's also being a gracious winner. Winners have won, there is no need to then show off or taunt "losers". I think it would help if we rehabilitated values like humility, modesty, and fair play (what we used to call "good sportsmanship").
The whole idea that everything is a zero-sum competition is counterproductive. Rather than rewarding people who can compete well, we should reward people who can cooperate well. But of course, capitalists are never going to approve of this. What they fear is that if we learn to cooperate, we will overthrow them. I agree that this is a possibility. And of course, one that I would love to see become a reality. But I think it's unlikely to happen. Zero-sum competition is integral to capitalism.
It's all very well to have record-breaking athletes, but as professional athletes have pushed the envelope of human capacities, the general population has become obese. Competition doesn't lead to general improvement. Grand spectacles are no substitute for being able to afford to house and feed one's family. Watching professional athletes on TV does nothing to improve one's life. It's a distraction, at best.
The problem with making everything into a competition is that only one person or team can win. The majority are always going to lose. Winners are singular. In a world characterised by zero-sum competitions, almost everyone is a loser.
It's only through collectivism and large-scale cooperation that we are going to solve the many existential crises we presently face. While individualism is normalised, we won't be able to cooperate on a large enough scale.
Compromise
In addition to emphasising cooperation over zero-sum competition, we also need to emphasise compromise as a way to get to a win-win situation.
If people with the authoritarian personality type are, more or less, born that way, then it is unreasonable to expect them to change. Of course, this is precisely the liberal argument about issues like homosexuality. The principle of political correctness is that we should not mock the less fortunate, the afflicted, or the different. I'm saying that some people are afflicted with the authoritarian personality type.
The liberal approach to diversity is to rub the noses of authoritarians in it. To cite ostensibly value-free facts. To keep flaunting it, being triumphalist about progress, and mocking those who resist. We need to be clear that this won't work. All this approach achieves is conflict.
People who cannot change will not change. And expecting or requiring them to change is disastrously stupid. I'm certainly not saying that, say, a Pride Parade is a bad thing. But it's never going to be a thing that everyone gets behind. There are always going to be a sizeable minority who experience such displays as threatening.
This leaves the burden of compromise on those people who are capable of change. It's up to us to propose ways forward. We should not expect the authoritarians to come up with a better plan. Unless we offer them what they consider a good deal, their plan is to support a demagogue. History provides many salutary lessons about ignoring the needs of the people.
One of the major problems with individualism is that we neglect to consider the consequences of our actions on other people. Individualism fosters a sense of entitlement: "It's my right". All of our decisions have impacts on other people that we do need to take into account: if only at the level of the Golden Rule. Contrary to popular opinion, how we treat other people and what they think of us is important.
Moreover, there are no universal values. And if there were, those universal values would not be the elitist values of the liberal/capitalist hegemony. So trying to enforce that particular set of values is nonsensical.
We could relatively easily give authoritarians enough of the sameness and oneness that they need, so that they will rub along with us. But it would not be a progressive solution.
Many people have ideas about how to create a stable and sustainable economy. But the main thing is that we ensure that people who work can support their families. The utility of poverty doctrine breeds fascists.
Coda
Unfortunately, these ideas will likely fall on deaf ears. The hegemonic powers—the military-industrial complex, plutocrats and technologists—are resolutely uninterested in changing the system. They are only interested in profit and conquest. And they have been operating this way for 600 years. Old habits die hard. So rather than turning things around, I fully expect things to continue getting worse. Fascism fosters nationalism, xenophobia, and violence. Fascism almost inevitably leads to war, famine, and plague. Humanity has set a test for itself. And it seems likely to fail catastrophically.
I think the only real hope now is that the coming environmental crisis will finally discredit capitalism and force us to confront our folly. Since this will likely involve the end of civilisation, billions of people dying, and a mass-extinction event, I find it difficult to feel enthusiastic about it.
The great lesson of history is that no one ever learns the lessons of history.
~~Φ~~
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