Fascism - permission to stop feeling guilt and shame?
I read this and it kind of joined up a bunch of dots in my own thinking, even if it was via the frame of old and wrong Freudian psychology.
I'd been trying to understand why fascism is on the rise, and why people I like and once respected are so easily drawn to it. I don't mean they are marching around with swastika armbands, yet, but they are posting and sharing hateful shit on Facebook, shamelessly.
The explanation given in Alex Danco's blog makes me think the appeal of fascism is that it gives people an opportunity to stop trying to hard to be a nice person; instead of feeling shame or guilt or discomfort, it gives them permission to pretend that they don't feel those difficult emotions and don't have to care about the feelings of others. They can wallow in "they shouldn't be so easily offended", "they need to learn to take a joke" when they are making "jokes" that suggest other people are subhuman and deserve less rights.
If you buy into it, you can watch people, just like you, protesting peacefully and being beaten up by the police, and instead of feeling scared that the police will come for you like that one day, you can decide "no, they deserve that treatment". Because if you think about it too hard, it's uncomfortable to reconcile the Good Guys are now acting like Bad Guys. You can rationalise it away and get on with existing without having to feel discomfort any more.
It's like the reversal of that Brene Brown quote; people are choosing resentment of others over discomfort.
To avoid falling down the funnel of fascism, we need to remember to "choose discomfort over resentment" and hope others around us do, too.
