Destination Collapse. Next stop Fascism?
If the COVID-19 pandemic is a dress rehearsal for future social upheaval then we are in serious trouble.
Fascism is rearing its ugly head again, just as a global pandemic exposes our vulnerability to it. But the unfolding climate crisis poses even greater risks to well being and social stability, and will invite even greater authoritarian responses from those that govern. With the Fascists knocking at the door might we be foolish enough to actually let them in?
Fascism cast a long dark shadow over much of the 20th Century. The atrocities of the Nazi’s in particular, and the horrific images of emaciated bodies, gas chambers and piles of extracted teeth were still remarkably current during my youth, even though it was my Grandfather’s generation who fought in the Second World War. “Never again!” we were told over and over. “Never again can we allow such a thing to happen.” So how can it be that in the 2020’s a growing chorus of thinkers and writers are warning us that Fascism is once again on the rise?
If you search online for a definition of Fascism you will be told that it is a political philosophy. And while this is technically correct, to view Fascism merely in terms of ‘a dangerous idea’ that infects people’s minds and causes them to behave in inhuman ways is, I believe, to miss the point — and the source of its power.
I have often wondered if I could somehow have been one of those people lining the streets of 1930’s Germany gladly waving in the new Führer? Or one of those people that stood by silently and watched as my neighbours were loaded into a truck by authorities and carted off to God knows where? The answer, I fear, is yes. And not because of my political leanings, or my education, or my cultural background. But simply because I am human and I share the same innate vulnerabilities that those humans had. As do you.
Fascism is powerful, and dangerous, and hard for us to detect in ourselves, because it taps into some of the deepest instincts we have as human animals. And instincts, being instincts, are not learned and conscious behaviours. They are “autopilot” responses that first evolved in forest-dwelling apes precisely because in that setting they were beneficial for survival. But it turns out — as history shows over and over again — that some of those instincts that helped our ancestors survive in small family groups in the forest do not serve us so well in the large societies we subsequently developed.
We modern humans flatter ourselves, thinking that because we have developed amazing technologies and utterly transformed our environment we are now somehow different to, indeed superior to, our forebears. But read any of Shakespeare’s plays, or any of Rumi’s poems, any of Plato’s teachings, or indeed ANY ancient text from any tradition and you will recognise yourself on those pages as clearly as if you were looking in a mirror. No matter how ‘advanced’ we think we have become, the scientific evidence is clear that our bodies, our brains and our instincts have hardly changed in 250,000 years. And like all organisms, characteristics that are beneficial adaptations in some settings can prove to be mal-adapted in other settings. Over the course of human history we have come up with many and varied ways to try to manage and control some of the more perverse outcomes of these mal-adaptations. But we are still astoundingly blind to some of them at the times when it really matters.
The “us and them” instinct
The first instinct that makes us vulnerable to Fascism (and indeed a host of other societal evils) is our natural tendency to view our human world in terms of “us” and “them”. The “in group” and the “out group”. We all recognise this behaviour and experience it our whole lives. As social apes we are terrified of being ostracised because, as far as our ancient brain is concerned, our very survival depends on being a member of the “in group”.
So our brains are constantly unconsciously scanning for subtle signals that we are either “in” or “out”, and will automatically adjust our behaviour and our thinking to make us a better fit to the “in” group. We also have an amazing capacity to unconsciously make the distinction between others that are “in” or “out” — and treat them accordingly — without us even necessarily being aware that that is what we are doing.
Of course the definition of exactly who is “in” and who is “out” is something we learn as we go along. And this is where the ‘dangerous ideas’ come in to play. If we are told over and over again that a certain type of person is “out” and, more importantly, witness over and over again that those types of people get ostracised and treated badly by others, our brains automatically adjust both our behaviour and our thinking to fit. The messages are received particularly strongly when they come from people we perceive to be higher up the social hierarchy — those that have the greatest sway in the “in” group: parents, role models, authority figures. Basically anyone we look up to, whether literally or figuratively.
We start to learn the rules about who is “in” and who is “out” in our childhood homes and in the playground, and we continue learning and updating these rules our whole lives. In religion defining who is “in” and who is “out” is the purpose of doctrine. In business it is the purpose of advertising. In government this is the purpose of propaganda.
As noted in a recent essay series by Charles Eisenstein:
“Why is fascism so commonly associated with genocide, when as a political philosophy it is about unity, nationalism, and the merger of corporate and state power? It is because it needs a unifying force powerful enough to sweep aside all resistance. The us of fascism requires a them. The civic minded moral majority participates willingly, assured that it is for the greater good. Something must be done. The doubters go along too, for their own safety.”
“Fascism taps into, exploits, and institutionalizes a deeper instinct. The practice of creating dehumanized classes of people and then murdering them is older than history. It emerges again and again under all political systems. Our own is not exempt.”
“Slowly slowly catchy monkey”
A second human instinct that comes into play in the case of the rise of Fascism (and indeed many other phenomena) is the way humans have evolved to perceive and respond to threats. As ecologist Paul Ehrlich explains in his book “At one with Ninevah” the human animal is very good at perceiving immediate threats (like the snap of a branch that may indicate a predator), but astonishingly bad at perceiving long term ones (like a gradual rise in temperature).
This observation of course is the lesson of the frog in the cooking pot. Present a population with a clear and easily identified threat to their safety — like an invading army — and their response is immediate and dramatic. Present the same population with a more insidious and slow-moving threat — like creeping authoritarianism — and hardly anyone notices, until of course it is too late.
The shrewdest politicians know not to go around snapping branches. As such Fascism doesn’t typically overtake a society in one dramatic move. It does so by degrees, over time. Remember that Adolf Hitler was duly elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933 by an open democratic society — albeit one that was deeply troubled. He only unveiled himself as Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934 after he manipulated his way to absolute power from within.
You can’t easily take away all the freedoms and protections of an open democratic society over night. But you can do it if you erode those freedoms and protections piece by piece in a manner which [mostly] flies under the radar of their threat response. You don’t have to fool everybody, just enough so that anyone who does raise the alarm can be labelled as over-reacting or somehow being against the common or greater good.
And if you can get these two instinctual responses working together — that is, create an “out group” that appears to pose an immediate threat to the “in” group and which includes anyone who questions or raises an objection to what you are doing — then you can, quite literally, get away with murder. That is Fascism 101.
Which brings me to the pandemic.
“Don’t mention the war!”
Let me start by saying that I am LOATHE to write anything about COVID-19 or the pandemic. Despite being actively engaged in academic research on it for some months, publicly I have maintained my silence apart from one or two tentative comments on other people’s social media posts. I have no stomach for contention and this is by far the most contentious issue I have ever witnessed. I sit in disbelief at the state of the public discourse around COVID-19 and the pandemic. What the hell is going on? Why is society so polarized over issues like vaccines and lock-downs?
Like most people I am terrified of being howled down, or ostracised or ‘cancelled’ for saying ‘the wrong thing’. But doesn’t that possibly make me just like the 1930’s German who watches in silence as his neighbour is hauled off in a truck? Am I possibly one of those “doubters” that Eisenstein says goes along with things for their own safety? And if so what does that say about me or the state of our society right now? I guess one thing it says is that we are human.
This fear that I am feeling as I write is EXACTLY the instinctual response that I described above. I am afraid because I am unsure if what I say will put me in your “in” group, or your “out” group. If you like what I say [no pun intended, but I will come back to that] then the forest ape inside me can relax and you may even share your bananas with me. (Don’t forget to click “like” and share!) But if you don’t like what I say I will certainly be ostracised. And no human wants to be ostracised. THAT is written in our genes.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything, it is that when humans are faced with a crisis we are sitting ducks to these instinctual vulnerabilities I have been talking about above.
The previous quotes from Charles Eisenstein about Fascism are actually taken from his recent essay series on the pandemic. His insights into the way we have responded to it and why make compelling, if somewhat disturbing reading, and I encourage you to take a look at them [1, 2, 3, 3.5, 4].
This pandemic, and the polarisation, public brawling and growing civil unrest it is causing highlights just how vulnerable humans are to our ancestral programming — even humans in advanced, open, democratic societies. And while I entirely agree with Eisentein that this problem is “older than history” we must not ignore the fact that there is a very new and very powerful force at work in the 21st Century that is greatly amplifying our problems.
The Anti-Social Media
I think much of the blame for the all-out brawl that has replaced civil public discourse in the world right now must be laid at the feet of the so-called Social Media, and Facebook in particular since its users comprise fully 60% of the world’s internet-connected population. (Let it sink in for a moment that one man (Mark Zuckerberg) is the Chairman, CEO and 55% majority shareholder of a corporation that, through algorithms designed to maximise his personal wealth, controls and manipulates the flow of information to about half of the world’s population.)
If the recent revelations by Facebook’s ‘Civic Responsibility’ whistle-blower Frances Haugen don’t scare the pants off you then I don’t know what will. And I am not talking about the revelation that Instagram is bad for teenage girls (as serious an issue as that is). I am talking about the revelations that Facebook knows from internal research that its social media products are dividing and destabilising societies, and are even being used by some political regimes to facilitate genocide. Yet it does [almost] nothing about it (especially outside the US) precisely because reigning in the AI that is fuelling our bloodlust is bad for its business. (You can find the Wall Street Journal article that broke the story here, and Frances’ 60 Minutes interview here).
The AIs that choose what’s in your newsfeed, internet search results, and entertainment playlists, and that decide everything from the prices of your online shopping to which Uber driver you get are — we are assured — amoral. (Although I recommend you watch the Netflix documentary Coded Bias on this issue). The algorithms don’t care about your personal well being, the health of your local community or the proper functioning of your democracy — they only care about finding ever more effective ways of gaining and holding your attention. And they do this by hijacking those same unconscious emotional responses that master manipulators have always done. (Watch The Social Dilema for an enlightening explanation of this).
So while the algorithms themselves may technically be amoral, the consequences of their application are anything but. And when those consequences are societies at war with themselves over how to best deal with a pandemic, or political parties that are forced to take more negative and extreme positions in order to get any online engagement, or creeping authoritarianism in response to deliberately manipulated social unrest, or even genocide — then the moral weight of the matter becomes very great indeed.
Authoritarianism: not the saviour we need, but the saviour we get?
If the COVID-19 pandemic is viewed as something of a dress rehearsal for the next global crisis, then we are in for a hell of a show! And not in a good way. Because the fear-driven division, “othering”, social unrest and creeping authoritarianism embodied in various government responses to the pandemic should all be ringing loud alarm bells amongst the citizenry.
And indeed these things are ringing alarm bells for many. But I fear one of our problems is that much of the citizenry is Missing In Action: trained (in the western world at least) for about 3 generations to believe that they are consumers not citizens; for 2 generations to value everything from Grandma to nature reserves in terms of dollars and their contribution (or otherwise) to the economy; and most recently trained to believe that the only things that a real and worthwhile in the world are on the screens of their smartphones. I know this is an unfair and perhaps cynical generalisation, but as an observation of broad trends I believe it to be true. And it makes us, as a populace, all the more vulnerable to the Fascist agenda when the next big crisis arrives.
That next crisis (or rather series of crises) of course is global climate change, and — as the saying about the future goes — it is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. If you were lucky enough to escape Australia’s summer from hell last year, or the western USA’s summer from hell this year — or any number of other climate-change induced catastrophes of recent times — then you can count your blessings. But dangerous climate change is here. We are already counting bodies, and destroyed buildings, and displaced communities, and starving children. And the toll is only going to continue to mount. You may not have personally experienced one of these crises yet, but every year the probability grows that you will. Like COVID-19, you may not have personally caught the disease, but your life may have been upturned by the impacts of the crises, possibly very severely.
Climate change is an existential crisis for humanity. And more pertinently, if it hasn’t already done so, it may well soon present itself as an existential crisis for you personally. As we have seen, humans don’t always respond well to existential crises. Psychological research shows us that people who feel vulnerable and confused will all too readily submit to a strong authority figure that promises to save them, and then having done so will feel emotionally threatened by anyone else who does not similarly submit, even taking pleasure in the domination or punishment of those ‘transgressors’.
Sound familiar? It should. Because it is happening right now in the context of COVID-19. Let me state clearly that I am not saying I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic is global Fascist conspiracy. But I am saying that the pandemic displays many of the tell-tale signs of Fascism: the immediate threat posed by a new virus; the authority figures offering us salvation; concerted public information campaigns leveraging public fear to create an “in” group (the vaccinated) and an “out” group (the unvaccinated); and the overt censorship and suppression of any information that does not fit the authorities’ preferred story. When I heard the NSW Health Minister angrily describe lockdown protestors in Sydney as “filthy” I almost fell off my chair. Was this Sydney 2021 or Berlin 1934?
The problem I am trying to highlight is not the virus itself, it is the way we as societies are responding to the challenges it presents. Like the economic and social hardships that delivered the Germans into the hands of the Fascists in 1933, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the social and economic hardships it has brought, have brought us to the very precipice in 2021 and I am deeply concerned that we could easily tumble over the edge. In January 2021 The United States — the self-proclaimed bastion of freedom and democracy — came within a hair’s breadth of coup. Could there be a more stark example of how vulnerable we are?
Well in fact, yes, there are many! According to Freedom House (an independent watchdog that monitors democratic freedom worldwide) democracy has been in decline worldwide for the past 15 consecutive years and in 2020 fully 75% of the global population experienced a fall in their democratic freedoms. Poland, Hungary, Russia, The Philippines, and Venezuela are just some of the many countries that are right now in the grip of authoritarian regimes who, having come to power by legitimate means, are now actively dismantling their democracies.
As climate change brings crisis upon crisis to more and more people around the world, a frightened and vulnerable populace, unknowingly manipulated and divided by big-Tech’s algorithms, may well seek solace in authoritarian leaders who offer strength, certainty and ‘salvation’ in return for apparently modest concessions of personal freedoms. It will be Germany 1933 all over again, but this time there will be an app for that!
The very human solution to a very human problem
It’s a depressing scenario I know, and all the more tragic tragic because it doesn’t have to be this way. If I gave you the impression above that I somehow think our human nature and its embedded instincts spell nothing but trouble for us then rest assured I believe the opposite to be true. I have written previously about the beauty and strength of human nature and the hope that this gives me. For just as the roots of our current predicament lie in the vulnerabilities of our shared humanity, so also I believe the way out lies in its strengths, if only we will embrace it.
One academic who is inviting us to embrace a fuller and deeper expression of our humanity — and who is also warning of the dangers of a rise in Fascism in response to the climate emergency — is Jem Bendell. Professor Bendell shot to prominence in 2018 when he published a paper concluding that the collapse of modern society as a result of climate change was now inevitable. The paper was initially rejected by an academic journal, not because it was factually inaccurate or his conclusions were wrong, but ostensibly because the reviewers felt such a negative conclusion was “unhelpful”. In fact the paper struck a chord with many — including myself — precisely because it voiced what many of us were already thinking but felt we were not allowed to say. To date the paper has been downloaded more than a million times and has had global impact, spawning the Deep Adaptation movement and being influential in others like Extinction Rebellion.
As a scientist studying the degradation of the environment, the collapse of ecosystems and the loss of our biological heritage I was required to dispassionately stick to the facts. It was “unscientific” to talk about my deep distress at what I was witnessing and documenting. If I was feeling angry, depressed or in grief about the senseless and wanton destruction of the natural world I was required to keep that to myself and not allow my emotions to cloud my judgement. The job celebrated the expression of parts of my humanity — my passion, dedication, creativity and intellect — but it forbade me to express other parts of my humanity. The job — like the system it was part of — was essentially inhuman.
The reason Bendell’s work appeals to me — and the reason I believe it rubs some academics up the wrong way — is because he approaches these extraordinarily difficult subjects from a really odd position, namely that of a whole human being. He talks about emotions. He talks about intuition. He even dares to talk about spirituality. Not because he isn’t a serious academic, but because he knows that we also are all whole human beings, and things like emotions, intuition and spirituality are an integral part of the human experience and have a huge impact on the way each of us sees the world, behaves and reacts to problems like climate change. To deny this — as ‘the system’ mostly does — is to do violence to our humanity and takes us down a very dangerous path. His most recent paper points out some of the personal psychological traps that our very human academics, policy makers and political leaders can fall into when confronted with crises like climate change, and warns of the dangers to society if we don’t individually and collectively face up to the difficult emotions that these crises present.
I believe that for too long — at least 10,000 years too long — much of humanity has been in various forms of denial about our humanity. The very word “humanity” has come to mean only the ‘good’ things about us (love, compassion, kindness and empathy for example). The ‘bad’ stuff — greed, envy, jealousy and murder — has been “othered”; shunned, and defined as being not us, often blamed on external contagions like the Devil, or evil spirits or mental disease. Modernism in particular has proved to be a double-edged sword, cutting and dicing the natural world — and ourselves along with it. The dominant culture does violence to itself — and everything else — without even recognising it, or if it is recognised it is rationalised as being necessary for “progress”.
But progress to where exactly? My assessment is that we are progressing towards collapse and the loss of everything we have fought so hard to build. Not just our physical infrastructure — like the coastal erosion that is beginning to undermine the foundations of the beachfront cafe I am sitting at as I write this. But our social ‘infrastructure’ as well. True progress in terms of human rights, equality, freedom and democracy. These things are also under threat. My great fear is that if we aren’t awake to our vulnerabilities in times of crises, in a misguided attempt to save one form of progress we may actually be willing to sacrifice the other — all because we have forgotten how to be fully human.
