Fascism Arises Within Us

I recently listened to an interview where Abby Martin asked Chris Hedges what defines fascism. His answer, in summary: “It’s a binary view of the world, which is basically the externalization of evil, as if evil only exists in the other group. When we fail to recognize the evil or potential evil within ourselves, when we fail to see that we too have the potential to be the torturer, fascism arises in our world through us.”

This is a point that is often made by Dr. Jordan Peterson, whose studies of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century led him to the terrifying conclusion that it would be more accurate for us to identify with the perpetrators rather than the victims when reading history. Statistically speaking, most people went along with the rise of fascism. This implies that the evils of the world come from our own hearts, not from some outside entity, and they spread according to how often we collectively create them. To some extent, the most horrible evils of the world today are in fact our fault, or at least they are our responsibility. They arise because we are not good enough, and because we do not tell the truth.

I recently read The Confessions of an Economic Hitman, by John Perkins, a book that describes how international interests used financial machinations to entrap various third-world countries with debt. Perkins was instrumental in developing this new imperial tactic, and he helped his employers (about whom we know little) to modernize and thus colonize many developing nations, from Indonesia, Panama, and Ecuador to Columbia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Perkins helped develop economic forecasts and models that showed the great prosperity that the target countries would supposedly reap from entering into predatory lending arrangements with private financial institutions. He knew the truth; their business partners would be given all the contracts to modernize and industrialize the host nation, and thus would be making all the money, while the toll of the debt would be taken out on the poorest citizens and the environment.

Throughout his career Perkins struggled with his conscience, and eventually he decided that he had to come clean. He knew that publishing a tell-all book about the industry was very risky, but he could stay silent no longer.

Staying silent while evil occurs around us is a sure path to horrifically despotic dictatorships. Totalitarianism doesn’t announce itself as such; it hides behind the veil of legitimacy, using corporations, governments, and social institutions to carry forward agendas that purport noble intentions, but that inevitably result in such evils as engineered poverty, environmental degradation, concentration camps, war, and genocide.

The public in the first world, although largely misinformed and distracted, is still generally aware of military-industrial-economic colonialism, but people tend to go along with it, consenting incrementally, like frogs in a slowly warming pot. It’s especially easy to look the other way when the spoils are being shared. Cars, fast food, shopping malls, and on-demand entertainment are all privileges afforded to the consumer class of the imperial system, and the last seventy years or so have been a very sobering barometer of how willing good people are to turn a blind eye to suffering that takes place far away as long as they have their needs and wants met.

From Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, Nicaragua, Yemen, Libya… all over the world, our dollars are at work. Evil people are committing war crimes, and we, who are mostly good people, are doing nothing. The unofficial, illegal wars tend to happen far away, but we are also affected here at home, where mass surveillance, police brutality, and the erosion of due process and free speech have all been normalized. By accepting these things as normal, we are creating fascism.
It’s time we face the truth, my friends. We have very little time left, and if we have any hope of turning things around, it’s time we admit that our system is out of control, and that we are heading fast towards a cliff. Honest dialogue is our best bet, but we have to get past our initial defensive response that says it could never happen. It’s too crazy. Too much like a movie. Too sci-fi. Too dystopian.

But it is happening. We need to admit to ourselves that we have been lied to, and that institutions we have long trusted have become corrupted. Tomes of research on how exactly this was accomplished and by whom have been painstakingly assembled over the decades, and anyone with doubts can find out for himself simply by examining the relevant literature. We must fully understand and accept that a great many of the so-called conspiracy theories are in fact true, and irrefutably so.

Ultimately, we must focus on solutions. We can’t properly develop a strategy without a clear sense of the forces working against us, so we must study the relevant history and educate ourselves as to how the military and financial dictatorship has been implemented. We must avoid the traps of identity politics or petty arguments over details within various investigations, and we shouldn’t get lost in endless analysis of how exactly it was done. It was done. This is where we’re at.

Now the focus must be on rebuilding social institutions on a foundation of liberty, transparency, and non-aggression. No organizational body, be it private or government, is legitimate if it violates consent or uses violence to force people into compliance. Nor can any institution existing to serve the public good be allowed to operate in secrecy, without oversight or censure. This should be perfectly obvious to anyone who thinks it through, but the world was deeply traumatized by the first half of the twentieth century, and the introduction of global, industrial conflict scared people into thinking secrecy and espionage were acceptable.

The emergence of secret agencies like the OSS or the CIA seemed a necessary evil, and as long as they were out there spying on bad guys and thwarting attempts to attack us, the good guys, the American public didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

In fact, people came to celebrate the notion. James Bond and Mission Impossible became long running franchises, always depicting good guy spies stopping evil plots for world domination or destruction. A key element of their success, of course, was that they were allowed to operate in secrecy, to lie, and of course, to kill whomever they needed to. In the name of something greater, this seems reasonable.

The irony of it is that evil organizations like the ones Bond was always fighting are in fact in control of the intelligence communities. The public was led to believe that the CIA or MI6 was protecting them from evil geniuses (or foreign governments) with plans of world domination, but the truth is that these agencies were created to support just such a plan.

Fortunately, the information age has brought much unprecedented disclosure, both from declassified programs and from leaks. We now know a great deal about what has been done, and we can easily identify some of the key players and the organizations they created. They have gotten away with so much, but we can still stop them. We can stop them because they are only able to do what they are doing through us.

It is important to understand the core philosophical difference between fair, socially enforced decency (natural law) and agenda-driven political power that is backed by violence (tyranny).

Natural law is innate, and it is practiced by nearly every human society, as well as embodied in most religions, in some variation of the golden rule. Non-aggression is the bedrock principle from which all other laws are derived. Do not harm others. Don’t steal, and don’t hurt people. Treat people with respect. Most people agree with this, yet many fail to realize that the social institutions that are supposed to serve them are actually funding themselves via coercion, both at home (taxation) and abroad (colonial aggression).

The truth is, not even the government has the right to initiate violence. Police and military can never be justifiably deployed unless it is against someone who has broken the peace, be it by through violence, theft or fraud. Unless you violate this natural law, they don’t have any right to bother you about anything. The government is not in charge of the citizens. Government is merely a service, and it has no right to fine or arrest anyone who is keeping the peace.

Public programs must not permitted to fund themselves through taxation; only through community agreements and voluntary, informed contracts. If the service being provided is in demand, people will pay for it. If people choose not to pay, they needn’t be taken to court or jailed; they may simply be ineligible for those or other services. Courts and jails are for real criminals, those who are violent or who steal and defraud. Any other use of the judicial system (ordinances, statutes, licensing laws, any punishment of victimless crimes) is unacceptable. It is a subversion of justice.

To implement such changes would upend nearly every major institution humans have created, but it would not be the death of our civilization. It would ultimately be a rebirth, a leveling up, a shift to another phase of evolution. How such changes might be brought about will be a very long (generations long, even) conversation, with many diverse voices contributing different ideas and solutions to different challenges, but the internet age allows us to collaborate in ways that were never before possible. So all that’s needed now is for more people to join the conversation.

As our collective efforts to design new systems become more coherent, more and more people will drop out of the antiquated political system and join instead the conversation about what we can actually do now, together. Decentralized, open source, collaborative efforts will result in the evolution of new social systems, where functions formerly served by governments will be provided through cooperative, consensual programs that have no power to imprison peaceful people or extort the population for money.

The answer to our social problems isn’t more laws, more government agencies, more guns pointed at the people we don’t like. The answer to fascism is recognition and declaration of the truth: It’s never okay to initiate harm against others. The individual is sovereign. Everyone is free to do anything they want so long as they don’t cause others harm. Any violation of this truth must be called out and resisted. Staying silent while governments infringe on our freedoms is a one-way ticket for us all to the death camps. This is not hyperbole, and it is no joke. We are in a very dangerous situation, and only the most monumental and heroic effort on all of our parts is going to turn this around.

So join me, my friends, in the conversation about how we could do things differently, and how we can solve complex social and infrastructure problems without relying on authoritarian systems of initiatory force. It’s not an easy puzzle to solve, so we need every great mind out there to pitch in. What will your contribution be?