Why People Support Fascism, part 3

Understanding the beliefs underpinning fascism is how we avoid perpetuating it.

Some Trump supporters really do have a malicious intent, and truly desire to do harm to everyone they hate - which often is anyone who isn’t like them. People can learn to hate others from consuming propaganda that stokes fear, but it requires a certain type of personality for a person to actively embrace malice.

Narcissism, or narcissistic tendencies, damages a person’s capacity for empathy and causes people to truly believe that they are superior to others. As a result, they are psychologically unable to relate to others with the same respect and care that they demand for themselves (I explain why here.)

But many Trump supporters aren’t consciously malicious, even while they actively vote for policies and politicians that directly cause harm to innocent people.

How can this be? One reason why people can have an unconscious desire for fascism even while it goes against all of their stated values is if they have stunted psychological development, emotionally remaining children even as they become adults.

It is normal and natural for children to center themselves in the world, to feel entitled to be taken care of and kept safe without needing to reciprocate and do their part to take care of others. Children in adult bodies haven’t transitioned from that childish orientation in the world into true adulthood, which means they still emotionally desire a strong authority to tell them what to do. (I describe that in more detail here.)

But probably the single biggest reason why people who are otherwise normal and even kind (to those who they care about, anyway) would find themselves actively supporting malicious people and policies, is simply because they have internalized toxic beliefs from the families, religions, and cultures they grew up in.

How bad ideas perpetuate themselves throughout a culture

Enculturation is the process of cultural programming that happens to every single human child, as we develop and grow and absorb the ideas and worldview that we are surrounded by. As children we evolved to be sponges, learning how we should act and think about the world (and ourselves) from every word, deed, interaction, and observation we experience.

And as humans we evolved to be shaped by the people around us, in order to form cohesive, tight-knit communities that could work together in order to survive and thrive. Our social coherence is our evolutionary superpower, along with our big brains that gave us complex language and culture.

But the downside to this is that when human beings grow up in a toxic, oppressive culture, they absorb that toxic way of thinking and being and perpetuate it, by passing it on to their own children. It doesn’t matter if we are conscious about this or not - most of this transmission happens below the level of conscious awareness.

No human beings are exempt from this process of enculturation, as long as they are raised in the presence of other humans. It doesn’t matter how independent or resistant a person is. Every person who grows up in a racist and sexist culture - regardless of their skin color - is going to internalize that racism and sexism, at least to some degree.

This is why being an anti-racist is not something you just "are" or can just choose to be, but something a person must actively choose to DO, by doing the work of examining their own subconscious biases and beliefs in order to deconstruct them and eliminate them from their psyche, piece by piece. This work is vital to the future of humanity because it is literally the only way to transform a racist culture into one that isn't racist. Otherwise we ourselves end up perpetuating the cultural malaise and pass it down to the next generations, despite our best intentions.

Good intentions simply aren't enough - they're never enough on their own, and must be acted upon to matter. This is why "being colorblind" is a lie.

How we deal with our internalized beliefs determines whether or not we are a fascist

Every single person in a racist society has internalized racist beliefs, which means that every single one of us (regardless of how awesome we are) is capable of saying or doing something racist - even without realizing it. What matters is not that we make such mistakes, but rather how we respond when those mistakes are brought to our attention.

If someone calls us out for “being racist”, what they are trying to say (however clumsily) is that something we have said or done is racist. They are trying to point out to us what is in our blind spot so that we can see it and think about it and act differently next time.

Such feedback can be a gift if we choose to let it be, because by definition a blind spot is something we cannot see. We all, without exception, have blind spots and the only way we can see them clearly is if they are reflected back to us by other people. This is literally the only way for us to learn and grow from the unconscious mistakes we inevitably will make as we go through life.

So when that feedback happens, we can either double down on our actions and beliefs and blame those who try to reflect back to you what they're seeing, or we can choose to instead grow and learn from the experience by choosing to see ourselves for a moment through their eyes, even if we don't fully agree with their perspective or appreciate their methods.

Literally no one in a racist culture started out perfectly anti-racist. It's something we've all had to learn by acknowledging those other perspectives and choosing to think and act differently going forward. When it comes to dismantling racism and transforming the culture we live in, we're all being called to walk the exact same road. The only difference between us is how we respond to that call.

Being a fascist isn’t something that we intrinsically are (although as I explained in previous essays, there are personality traits that lend themselves to that way of thinking much more than others) - it’s something we choose to be, through our lack of willingness to challenge the toxic ideas we were programmed with from birth onwards.

Racism and sexism aren’t the only toxic beliefs that permeate our culture.

Why do people believe that poor people are lazy, when the owning class and their yachts and vacation homes spend more time golfing and shopping than the average worker works? This is just one example of many culturally-perpetuated beliefs that are completely disconnected from reality. And they aren’t just benign delusions either - beliefs such as this actively serve to harm countless millions of people, contributing massively to the oppression that most people face.

The assumption is that if people weren’t forced to work a job in order to eat and have a home, they wouldn’t work at all - because they are fundamentally lazy. What's true is that people have to be forced to work shit jobs that pay shit wages, because otherwise people would (obviously) choose not to. And that's what the rich are afraid of most of all. That if given a choice, people will no longer willingly let themselves to be exploited. And why should they? Do the rich somehow have a "right" to exploit people who aren't rich?

This idea of the lazy worker is fundamentally based on the idea that some people have a God-given right to be rich, and that it's the "duty" of everyone else to accept their place in society and work for benefit of the rich. It's really that simple. Every single one of our "founding fathers" believed that. They didn't even try to hide it, because it was such a given in the cultural worldview.

The idea that the working class (the peasants) are supposed to work for the profits of the owning class (the nobility) has been around since feudalism. And most people who believe in this country's purported value of "equality" don't have any idea just how much they are still buying into those old, toxic ideas, and they simply don’t realize just how much the notion of equality clashes with the underlying assumptions they've been enculturated to believe by the very same capitalists who have always controlled them.

This is classism, yet another toxic “ism” that is perpetuated by our culture below the level of conscious awareness or examination. Other examples are:

• ableism, where people subconsciously believe that disabled people are worthy of less respect than able-bodied people (this has been proven in neurological studies),

• ageism, where it is taken as a given that children should have no rights of the their own, and that parents should be granted complete control over them as if they were property,

• and speciesism, where it is taken for granted that humans have the right to utterly destroy entire communities of other living beings (such as clear-cutting a forest) for any reason whatsoever, if they “own” the land (which means the underlying premise is that the entire natural world is the property of humans, ie. slaves).

The common thread behind all of these toxic beliefs - and the very thing that makes them toxic - is the underlying premise of superiority, and a hierarchy of value (and therefore power).

A hierarchical worldview sees those higher up as having the right to “rule over” those at the bottom - to have more power and wealth than them, because they are entitled to it. This is fundamentally toxic because it changes the relationship of humans to each other and the natural world from one of care, consideration, and respect to one of domination, subordination, and exploitation.

The former type of horizontal relationship leads to a mutual thriving, which ultimately benefits everyone, because all living beings are interconnected on this planet. The latter directly causes harm, misery, and suffering, and diminishes the very fabric of life itself.

So we need to ask ourselves, what kind of a world do we want to create? And if the answer is a world of happiness, pleasure, joy, and beauty, then we have no choice but to examine the beliefs we subconsciously carry and eradicate those from our psyche that would move us to create the opposite of the world that we desire.

Beliefs drive our actions in the world.

The reason why we can’t just stop at asserting our values and call it good, is because our values don’t drive our behavior. It’s entirely possible for people to act in a way that is contrary to their own values, and in fact this happens more often than not.

Living in integrity with our own values requires examining our beliefs, which mostly exist in our subconscious, and therefore exist mostly out of our conscious awareness entirely. These beliefs fundamentally shape how we see the world and how we view our place it in it, which means they dictate how we interact with the world around us.

For example, most of us have the conscious intention to be a good partner and create healthy relationships with people. But so often we find ourselves enacting unconscious patterns in relationships that have the exact opposite effect, because of all the things we subconsciously picked up from our parents and early home life.

Toxic beliefs and the patterns of behavior they create (such as domestic violence and verbal abuse) are passed down through families from generation to generation, precisely for this reason. They have a profound impact on how people act in the world, regardless of how people consciously desire to act. Subconscious beliefs trump conscious intentions every single time.

Our beliefs are cognitive pathways laid down in the brain, mostly from a young age. But luckily the plasticity of the brain means that it’s always possible to rewrite those pathways, and change how we see the world. Unfortunately, this rarely happens automatically, and usually requires a conscious effort on our part.

But this effort is not just worth doing, it is perhaps the single most important thing we can ever do. By challenging the toxic beliefs we were imprinted with as children, we change the beliefs we will unconsciously imprint our own children with. This is how we stop the cycle of violence or abuse that we suffered from - not through willpower and simply choosing to act differently, but from examining the beliefs underpinning those behaviors, and changing them within our own psyche.

This is how we change the overall culture, and therefore the future for our children. This is the only way we can ensure that humanity doesn’t continue repeating the same old mistakes in new ways, over and over and over again.