We co-create culture. Then it rains back down upon us with a tyrannical force. Naturally, we wonder why we would ever co-create such a monstrosity. How does this creation serve us?
It doesn't serve us, and we receive daily reminders about ways in which culture militates against our shared interest. We are a monstrosity-creating socio-mechanism. A tyranny-secreting super-organism.
Whether we apply mechanistic or biological metaphors, we enter an epistemic space where there's always room for clarification. But we typically enter this space when we can't bother with petty clarifications. This is our nuclear moment in the war of Self vs. Self.
In this moment, it helps to remember that “the purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID).” As Stafford Beer observed, there is:
No point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.
One of the things we do as a surperorganism or socio-mechanism is create “cute monsters”. This statement expresses both a metaphorical truth and a lived reality skillfully depicted by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in The Fascist State of Mind, the ninth chapter in Being A Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Below, I share my eight-part summary of this chapter, now without a paywall. For similar readings of important texts, subscribe today.
The Fascist State of Mind - Chapter Summary
Part 1: Definitions
The chapter begins with definitions that help de-intellectualize the study of the Fascist State of Mind (FSM) and frame the phenomenon as a reaction to the failure of the Enlightenment view of the human condition:
Benito Mussolini: “Our program is simple. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many. It is not programs that are wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and willpower.”
Antonio Gramsci: “What is Fascism? It is the attempt to resolve the problems of production and exchange with machine-gun fire and pistol shots.”
Fritz Stern: “…a conservative revolution…the ideological attack on modernity, on the complex of ideas and institutions that characterize our liberal, secular, and industrial civilization.”
Bollas: “Where the Enlightenment had partly emphasized the integrity of individual man, twentieth-century Fascism extolled the virtue of the state, an organic creation driven by the militant will of the masses, a sharp contrast indeed to the federal republic encumbered by checks and balances dividing power so that the people remained individually free to speak their minds in a pluralistic society.”
Part 2: Daring to See Terror and Genocide
Next, the chapter turns to a blind spot in the Freudian view of the “internal federation of complex checks and balances” and “endless series of compromise solutions” in pursuit of happiness and “a good enough life”. Like many thinkers of his time, Freud deferred recognition of the terror and genocide that often result from breakdowns of these checks and balances. For example, he never mentions the massacre of 75 percent of the Armenian population in 1915, and he only makes a single reference to the history of pogroms.
Genocidal violence is not easily inscribed in the symbolic order of Western thought. Arnold Toynbee collected a volume of essays testifying to the atrocities against Armenians, but the institutional order couldn’t parse this reality. Nor could it prevent the hijacking of the memory of the Holocaust to deny the continuation of genocide. More generally, the institutional order can’t grasp that, in the words of Hannah Arendt:
Terror is the realization of the law of movement: its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind unhindered by any spontaneous human actions.
Once the FSM designates a dehumanized target, the violence follows not only Arendt’s “law of movement”, but also the law of escalation whereby the number of acts of violence increases steadily.
In genocide, a person is killed for who he is, not for what he does, and dehumanization serves as an essential mechanism of justification. For example, the dehumanization of the bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto may have helped Stalin justify the elimination of bourgeois element in his death camps.
Part 3: Warrant for Extermination
Bollas points to a defining feature of the fascist state of mind: warrant to exterminate. As Wilhelm Reich and Hannah Arendt, Bollas argues that, in each of us, there is a fascist with a highly identifiable psychic profile and a warrant for the extermination of defined categories of human beings.
Sadly, psychoanalytic theories of fascism often reveal more about the theorists than they reveal about the FSM. Instead of explaining fascism, they simply equate it with insanity, forgetting that liberalism too can coexist with the FSM, and that the FSM is a potentiality of every human mind. (See also Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler.)
An important mechanism for the development of FSM is the tendency of the internal parliamentary order toward diminished representativeness, with differing parts of the self projected onto others.
The FSM disowns its humanity and vulnerability and projects these qualities onto others as weakness. The narcissist kills off the loving dependent. In Mikhail Bakunin’s 1869 Revolutionary Catechism, we read:
All the tender feelings of family life, of friendship, love, gratitude, and even honor must be stifled in the revolutionary by a single cold passion for the revolutionary cause.
The FSM organizes people into groups dominated by leaders. The gang doesn’t tolerate internal opposition. Arendt writes:
Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition. It rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way.
FSM allows people to decouple genocide from ordinary life. Nazi doctors transferred their guilt from their ordinary self to their “Auschwitz self”, which numbs itself by renaming what it perpetrates as it follows the “vision of a total cure”.
Part 4: The Total Ideology
Possessed by a total ideology, the FSM eliminates all opposition, divorces itself from experience, and defends against self-interrogation and doubt, which it regards as weakness. The FSM latches onto symbols of ideology and spirals into a self-reinforcing simplicity as it freezes the symbolic order and forecloses representational freedom. This de-semiosis radically simplifies the functioning of the mind and imbues it with a “marshall sense” and a readiness to exercise the warrant for extermination.
Aware of the pathological functions of certainty, Freud wrote in The Future of an Illusion:
An enquiry which proceeds like a monologue, without interruption is not altogether free from danger. One is too easily tempted into pushing aside thoughts which threaten to break into it, and in exchange, one is left with a feeling of uncertainty which in the end one tries to keep down by over-decisiveness.
In Nazi Germany, this pathological function of certainty fueled a dizzying sense that all things are possible and nothing is forbidden. It also opened an infinite moral space for “natural violence and domination”.
Invariably, the moral void created by the destruction of the opposition begins to make its presence felt. At this point, the FSM must find a victim, and the state of mind becomes an act of violence. The mind splits off the dead core self and projects it into the victim, whom the Fascist must treat as a disposable nonentity.
Once the victim is exterminated, the Fascist denies the destruction through delusional narcissism and purges his mind of the memory of the act. The purge makes possible the birth of a forever empty self with no past and a future entirely of its own creation.
Part 5: FSM as a Cleaning Process
Bollas traces the theme of purging through Ecce Homo, Nietzsche's semi-autobiographical work written during bouts of vomiting. The book is preoccupied with “the question of nutriment”, which encompasses the purity of both the food and cultural products we consume.
In Ecce Homo, Bollas sees Nietzsche's “idealization of the self as an empty and therefore pure container”. The FSM protects this purity by vomiting up “noxious internal objects”. Examples of this phenomenon include the use of concepts such as pure Christianity, pure science and pure psychoanalysis.
The FSM idealizes itself as a cleaning process, and in pursuit of purity, it seeks perpetual war. But while it celebrates noble war, it delivers death camps as containers for the extermination of pollutants.
Part 6: The Circuit of Depersonalization
The person who submits to domination passes his circumstance to another victim, and this “circuit of depersonalization” ultimately leads to a dispossession of oneself. This loss of humanity leaves in its place a skeleton idolized for its capacity to murder the self in the service of a higher-than-human cause. As the chief of the SS explained to his top commanders in October 1943, they cannot waver in this service due to the mere necessity of human sacrifice:
Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses lie there, or when 500 courses lie there, or when a thousand corpses lie there. To have gone through this and, apart from a few exceptions caused by human weakness, to have remained decent that has made us great.
Part 7: Intellectual Genocide
War is a new kind of peace. The fascist is self dispossessed, self-murdered. The concentration camp is a place where our dispossessed human parts are dehumanized. The other is a disease and killing is the remedy. Our greatness is that we can kill and remain decent.
The process leading to the FSM is unremarkable and easy to detect. “Intellectual Genocide” serves as a precursor to the genocidal act.
In “Commitive Genocide”, the FSM distorts, decontextualizes, denigrates, caricatures, character assassinates, changes the name of and categorizes the opponent into an aggregate.
“Omittive Genocide" operates through the absence of reference, an erasure of the opponent from the symbolic order.
The most gifted practitioners of intellectual genocide distinguish themselves not only by viciously attacking others but also by becoming objects of endearment, cute monsters and loved madmen.
This "joke" is what establishes FSM. These "impossible loved objects" are exonerated from responsible opposition. Their likeability and clownishness become weapons — preconditions for the establishment of fascism. We have no way to react to FSM in a way that doesn't collude with it.
The non-collusive witness's irrepressible reactions to the FSM — speechlessness, dissociation, sense of deadness — is what makes them victims of operant fascism.
Part 8: Vicious Circle
The only way out of the victimhood is to collude with the cute monster. It's a vicious circle, in which the solution perpetuates the problem in a case study in Nietzsche’s ‘eternal recurrence’: Purification through violent expulsion leaves a void of tranquility sustained by the liquefaction of the opposition.
Under the circumstances, self-defense means to nurture the inner core that the FSM can’t touch. The rest of the personality will need to adjust to survive. After survival, recovery will require remembering.