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- Preserving our sanity amidst the consuming madness of the times
- Removing the mask of the insecure babyman
- The internet: from digital democracy to digital dementia
- Doubt as an asset, certainty as an affliction
- Fascism, collective insanity and ourselves
- Navigating disinformation, uncertainty, individualism and the poison apple of conspiracy
- If nothing changes nothing will change: the Voice referendum
- What can we learn from disaster communities?
- New year, a time to embrace the uncertainty of it all
- We could be non-binary
- Adaptive resilience vs safety paternalism
- Left wing, right wing? What just happened to politics?
- Covid, class and the addiction to certainty
- Neoliberalism, the Life World and the Psychopathic Corporation
- Democracy is about our bodies, not just our minds
- What’s your motivation: is it yourself or the change you’re making?
- Mind over matter: The world of abstraction is driving us to destruction
- The real threats to our liberty and survival
- Avoiding the abyss of conspiracy theories
- The difference between a legal system and a fantasy novel
- What’s a conspiracy and what’s just common garden variety corruption?
- Unpredictability, humility and an emerging anthropandemic
- The trilemma – climate change, economic collapse, and rising fascism
- Happy New Normal for the decade ahead
- The race to the bottom in australian politics
- Fires, liars and climate deniers
- Talking about lock-on devices – an article in ‘The Conversation’
- The Ponzi scheme is teetering
- Regenerative culture a key part of the blockade experience
- Staying sane in the late Anthropocene
- Extinction Rebellion
- Major parties have failed on climate, it’s time to rebel.
- Elections In The Late Anthropocene
- It is the Greens that are defeating the Nats and it’s all about your preferences
- Australia’s powerhouse of democracy and innovation is in the Northern Rivers
- Is identity politics a problem for the left?
- The climate emergency and the awful state of Australian politics
- Democracy and rights under threat in corporate police state
- Liberty, freedom and civil rights? Do any of us understand these things anymore.
- The forest wars are back, time to mobilise
- …more commentary
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- A Flood of Emotions – Sydney Ideas Event
- Participatory democracy in the COVID era – SCU podcast
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- Bob Brown Is Taking “Shocking” Anti-Protest Laws To The High Court
- Anti protest laws could arrest nannas, seize tractors
- “They blinked first”
- Colin Barnett quick to protest against ‘activism degrees’ – The Australian, 16/10/2014
- ‘Degrees in activism’ put brake on growth – The Australian, 15/10/2014
- Magistrate throws out vexatious police case against CSG protesters
- Outrage over school PR ‘by stealth’- The Northern Star
- CSG clash a certainty
- Communities use new tactics
- Gas group attacks lecturer
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Fascism, collective insanity and ourselves
Never in my lifetime has the palpable risk of fascism been so high.
People who have lived through the violence and mendacity of fascism describe a common pre-curser: a collective collapse of reason, a retreat from rigorous evidence-based thinking, and emotionally healthy compassion. Fascism is a collective mental illness, a societal psychosis. It thrives on uncertainty, fear and disenchantment with established institutions, and a collective loss positive purpose in society.
Fascism also changes its costumes, it won’t always announce its arrival with military uniforms and swastikas. The current threat is coming from charming manipulative narcissists and psychopaths seeking election. How can huge swathes of the population become actively or unwittingly supportive of mentally and emotionally unhealthy leaders. The answer is in the question, the rise of fascism is a very complex mass mental illness.
Emerging fascism beguiles us with its unorthodoxy, irreverence, and temporarily ignorable risks, but latter stage fascism quickly metastasises into a monster of such violence, insanity and hatred that is suddenly too terrifying to safely challenge.
Trump exemplifies the disarmingly comical, irreverent, anti-establishment, bumbling face of demented narcissism and has achieved a cult following who cannot see the ugliness he represents. The same applies to Millei in Argentina, Erdogan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel and more. Add this to the established fascist dictators in Russia, North Korea and China.
Whilst Trump and Millei are the delusional grandiose narcissistic sub-variant, Putin, however represents the full psychopathic, cold, calculating, compassionless fascist archetype.
But the collective mental illness of fascism is,much bigger than those that lead it, where Trump may fail, the real risk for the USA, and by association Australia, is what type of fascist leader emerges after Trump.
So much for the risk, but what is our personal role in all of this?
I doubt that any of the good readers of the NGT would deliberately support fascism, but sadly, many of us run the risk of unwittingly helping to contribute to the conditions that enable it.
We are all disappointed with ‘democracy’, with politicians, government and maybe even mainstream society in a wide variety of perfectly justifiable ways. Many are suspicious of science, academia and experts in a variety of fields like medicine for example. This scepticism and dissatisfaction is normal. There has never been a golden age in which government and bureaucracy were guided entirely by the public interest or without corruption. But as we look back across history, violence and despotism is all too common, and the pursuit of a rational civil society always a challenge.
Numerous thinkers, activists and humanitarians have bequeathed to us the bare bones of workable civil society with which each and every generation hopefully works continually to identify and fight corruption, injustice and environmental destruction.
The first mental attitude that fosters the conditions for fascism is an overly cynical dismissal of the admittedly flawed systems of civil society that we have. It is easy and perhaps personally gratifying to repeat inane truisms about how bad ‘all politicians are’ but beware, these words do nothing more than provide deep cover for the very worst among them.
It is equally tempting for many to draw false equivalences between the clear and present danger of Trump fascism for example to the unconvincing, significantly flawed and unsatisfying alternative presented by Biden and the Democrats, or in Australia our fatherly but risk avoidant Labor PM. As disappointing as our centralist politicians may be, they are our current best alternative to fascism.
Similarly, we can all find cause to critique our legal system and our judiciary, but by and large the professionalism and independence of the judiciary, and our concepts of due process are actually one of our most important bulwarks against fascism.
Our collective disenchantment with official institutions should activate us to hold government to account, to demand justice and better environmental management. This is traditionally the work of communitarians and the left of politics and it is vital and never ending.
What is frightening is watching so many people retreat into a despair and confusion that dissolves all meaning, all communitarian motivations into a vortex of madness, magical thinking, conspiracy theories, and the dangerous belief that ‘anything’ would be better. Fascism is very much worse ‘anything’.
This atmosphere of insanity, the collapse of meaning, watching friends disappear down wormholes of bizarre thinking is all part of the very same collective mental disorder that is the fuel of emergent fascism.
Fascists are masters of the false solution. They take the overwhelming human fear of uncertainty and replace it with promises of certainty, of ‘cleansing’ the system, of a new start for society.
The problems of our world are real, the evidence of the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the inequality crisis of late capitalism, of official corruption are all on display. We don’t need to look for hidden evidence of a different secret crisis, controlled by a different set of secretive shadowy figures to know that there is much in our society that needs to change.
Whether it is fascists or Marxists or spiritualists offering us their all or nothing resets to our current predicament we need to see these ‘solutions’ as the power and control fantasies that they are.
History is path-dependent, we are standing in it up to our eyeballs. The path forward always involves accepting exactly where we have gotten to thus far, assessing what opportunities exist in the adjacent possible to pursue useful and constructive change and walking that long and difficult path out of the swamp we are bogged in collectively.
Our currently uninspiring centralist leaders are useful rearguards fending off fascism, whilst the real work of social change lies ahead where we must painstakingly forge our survival, our planets future and our ongoing and never completed pursuit of social justice into the world that we and our children have no choice but to keep inhabiting.
The silver bullet of fascism, conspiracy theory or revolution always turns out to be made of lead and gunpowder, the only monsters it slays are the innocent. Fascism is a delusional psychotic disease of the collective human psyche and no matter how it emerges its trajectory is always towards an orgy of violence and hatred.
We are in this together my friends, and the scientists, the experts, the boring old centralist politicians, the well-meaning greenies, the genuinely compassionate people in our community organisations, trade unions and churches, the medical professionals and judges and academics and what’s left of the ethical journalists all have a role to play and something to offer. Please don’t swap these sometimes disappointing characters out for the snake oil salesmen of the internet. By the time fascism is obvious, it is much too late.
This was first published in the Nimbin Good Times, February 2024