Feb 25
The Difference Between the Fascists… And the Rest of Us
Why the Impulse to Control Other People's Lives and Choices Is Sweeping Our Societies
You don't have to look very hard to see it: the old poison of fascism, spreading through the world again. This time, in many variants. There are the religious ones — what Americans call "Christofascism," sometimes. The political ones, like Trumpism. The ideological ones, with their paranoia about the genocide of the master race. On and on they go. And the question should be asked: what's all this about? How do we deal with it — not just at the political level, but at the human one, as people?
Let me ask that in a different way. What's common to all these strains of fascism, racing around the globe?
There's a certain way to sum up modernity, modern life. It's often thought of as a cliche. But while some cliches are "thought terminating," as the internet likes to say, some are…true. Because they're thought provoking. Timeless. Something like north stars. This one goes like this. Hey, you live however you like. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone — it doesn't bother me.
You've heard that before. We all have. Now. Take a moment to see just how much threat that basic belief of modernity is really under. It's what's really disappearing from our societies. Because the far right, which is the only right remaining, really, has become adept at triggering people into believing they're under profound, constant, existential threat. Over and over again, it triggers the primal fears — of annihilation, abandonment, of being engulfed. And so our societies, increasingly, are giving up on this simple belief — hey, you live how you want. As long it doesn't hurt anyone — doesn't bother me.
All this needs to be — by us thoughtful people — interrogated, examined, reflected on. Because something is very, very wrong here.
Let's go back to the fundamental principle of modernity. You live how you like — doesn't bother me. If it doesn't hurt anyone — go for it. Why is this such a profound, beautiful, wise…not just belief…but attitude, perspective, stance, way to live? Because it encapsulates the values of democracy, and is how we enact them. If and when I say this to you, act this way towards you, what am I really doing? Well, I am bringing many values to life. I am granting you freedom. I am respecting you as an equal. I am offering you dignity. I am saying that truth matters, because you can live yours.
When I take this stance on life, I am enacting the basic values of democracy. It is so, so crucially important for us to really understand and remember all that in times like these. Because more and more people don't believe any of the above.
Instead, they believe something that, seen through the eyes of modernity, is truly and utterly bizarre. Hey — you. You random stranger, you person that doesn't have anything do with me, you that I've never met before. I don't think you should be able to live the way you want.
Me? I want to interfere with your life. Think about how genuinely weird it is to really believe that. Here you are, thinking about people that you've never met, never going to meet, have nothing to do with you in any way whatsoever — that your role in society is to limit their choices. That's your job, task, primary responsibility. You're never going to meet these people — not once, not for an instant — but for some reason, you've got to stop them living the way they want. From making their own choices.
In other words, you have decided to stand in the way of the most profound modern value of all. Self-determination. That's not just a "democratic" value, by the way. It is a modern one. It took millennia for the belief in self-determination to even emerge. For most of human history, self-determination has been forbidden. You're born into a caste, and you do that kind of work, marry within it, live in its assigned place, and so forth. Then came Enlightenment. Ages of Revolution. Ages of Democracy. This took centuries of pain, war, strife. And only then did self-determination come to be at all.
It takes work to think to yourself "I've got to interfere in that person's life!" You see, the thing about self-determination is that it's a gift worth giving. Because it frees up your time, energy, resources, attention, too, for genuinely worthy things. Hey — what are you going to do, contribute, create, build, with your one brief life? The more you're obsessed with interfering in someone else's life, the less you have to give to that quest.
So this belief in interfering with other people's lives — people you're never going to meet, never have met, who don't concern you in any way whatsoever — it's utterly perverse. It is backwards in this profound sense — it makes us all worse, because it limits everyone's potential. Even those who believe in it, because there they are, wasting their time and energy on…trying to control, dominate, and limit others.
Now. That's a lot of theory, so let's do a couple of examples to make it concrete. This stance — I've got to interfere in those people's lives — it's racing across our societies like some kind of weird mind virus. The mind virus isn't wokeness, folks, it's this desperate, beleaguered belief that I've got to take those people's freedom, equality, dignity, away. And all that is becoming a very real political quest to remove people's rights, en masse.
The examples by now are everywhere. There are books being banned in schools. There's the erasure of the LGBT. There are trans people whose self-determination is being punitively legislated away. There are women who the Supreme Court just made second-class citizens. All these people and groups are having their rights taken away. And that is something we should never, ever see in a modern society. We shrug and accept it — but we shouldn't. The loss of rights for one is a loss for all, because everyone is worse off, like I said, when society becomes a negative sum game of me stifling your freedom.
And yet this is where we are. The question is: why? Why would anyone — anyone — believe that some person they're never going to meet, ever, is posing a threat to them, even though they're a thousand miles away…just because they're gay? Or that some poor kid living in the same neighborhood is a massive threat to them just because they're trans? Or that women being able to go to the doctor and get a procedure she wants is a major, major offense? You see how bizarre it is to believe this stuff? And yet people do. More and more people.
It's hard to really get this point across, so I'm going to give you an example from my own daily life. When I take little Snowy up the street to the cafe, there's a dog there that he plays with. A funny little Maltese. The dog's human is a trans woman. I know that because after a time getting to know each other, she told me. Only after I told her how the gay community protected me growing up as a bullied little kid. She's funny, kind, and warm. Who is she a threat to? In what way, exactly?
It's absurd on its face to say that people making choices — peaceful ones — are somehow threatening you. And yet society has turned against trans people in a particularly vicious way. And I see how that affects my new friend. She's guarded, sometimes. Haunted, at others. We'll just be talking, and a faraway look comes into her eyes. I feel for her. Because it is emphatically and absolutely true that she is just another peaceful person living her own life, who isn't hurting anyone.
And you know what? I adjust my own behavior, too. Sometimes, I see the gang at the cafe, and there's my new friend. My old greeting used to be: "hey guys!" And now I can see that makes her uncomfortable. So I say "hey people!!" Or "hey everyone!!" What does this cost me? You see, society is now full of people who will loudly proclaim, angrily, that they'll never call someone by their chosen name or pronoun. And to them, I say, that is wrong. It wasn't so long ago that someone in a powerful. majority — and this is in many countries — could call someone in less powerful minority…something that today we'd all find unconscionable. It wasn't so long ago that anyone in a certain group could call anyone in another one "boy" or "girl." In a demeaning way. That norm changed, and we're all better off for it. And it's vivid, living proof that it's totally OK to call people what they want to be called, because, well, that's a form of dignity, equality, truth, and freedom, too.
But people are against even this smallest of acts. Again, why? What difference does it possibly make to you to call someone what they want to be called? And this is where we come, funnily enough, to the crux of the matter. Bad faith.
You see, when I ask people this, they'll literally…make stuff up. Hey, it's too much work! Oh, it offends my notion of biological truths, as if there aren't plenty of girls named boys' names these days, like, oh, I don't know, Taylor Swift, who's only the world's most famous singer. I don't see you out there telling her to have a a "girl's name." Because it's ridiculous. Or people will say "that person isn't really who they claim to be!!" And I ask them how they'd feel if someone said they weren't really…a man, woman, straight, credible about their most basic and elemental traits. If someone said, hey, you're really just a subhuman to them, over and over again. It's absurd that it's come to this.
I raise that story for a reason. I'm not a trans activist. I'm not any kind of activist. But the way our societies are turning on groups of people is becoming ugly and grotesque. It always has been, but we are in a very specific context. We have stopped making progress as a world, which means the bad guys are winning. And in that context, watching societies turn on groups, basically calling them subhumans, unworthy of existence, to be cancelled, erased, attacked, denied rights and belonging, is deeply, deeply wrong.
None of us should want to interfere in anyone else's life. None of us. Remember the objections I just highlighted, that people raised about something as simple as…calling people what they want to be called? What's that really called? Bad faith.
You see, when I say "nobody should interfere in anyone's life, as long they're not hurting anyone," of course, the far right will turn right around and say, "but they are hurting me!" To say that someone is hurting you is a serious claim. Nobody should take it lightly. So let's examine this one. How is kids…reading books…hurting you? You? Don't be ridiculous. How is grown adults choosing to love on their own terms hurting you? How could it? How is someone choosing to be a certain gender actually harming you? How is someone being different in any way — a peaceful one — religion, creed, attitude hurting you?
To this, the far right will reply with basically four claims. One, the religious one. They're hurting my God. LOL — if they're…uhhh…a God…then I'm pretty sure that nothing can hurt them. A condition of being a God is omnipotence, hello. Absurd on its face. Two, some overblown claim never met with real evidence. Gays are groomers! All trans people are rapists! Kids reading books turns them gay! LOL. None of that is remotely true. Again, prima facie absurd, and offensive to boot. Third, the chain of harm. Well, if those kids read those books, they might get the wrong ideas, and end up hurting me. OK, let's deal with that if and when it happens, because in a democracy, we don't prejudge people for thought crimes.
But the Big One that's surfaced recently is "they're hurting my feelings." LOL. Really? People living peacefully are hurting your feelings? How…can that…be? How can people you have no relationship with whatsoever hurt your feelings? Are they out there insulting you, belittling you, demeaning you? Are they threatening or intimidating you? No and no. Hurt feelings aren't a little thing — they matter intensely. And for that reason, this claim is particularly odious — it makes a mockery of the idea that emotions matter in a society, which they do, very much so. But there is almost no case, if we think about even for a moment, in which people living peacefully can be hurting your feelings.
Those cases do exist. But what they do is prove that this claim — "Those people living their own lives are hurting my feelings!!" is bad faith. You see a famine, and people starving — that hurts your feelings, because emotions are contagious. But in the same way, people joyfully living their own chosen lives can't be hurting yours. Instead, you must be making a claim about your own judgments about those feelings — you're resentful of their happiness.
See how all that works? It was Sartre who was the great thinker of this idea — bad faith. Let me leave you with a quote of his that's particularly stunning.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Sartre understood the truth all those decades ago, in the ashes of war and hatred. "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert." All of us should re-read that one a few times, and memorize it, because this is what today's fascists are still out there doing. They're out there shouting at the rest of us that they have to interfere in our lives — our lives, our lives. They have to control, limit, dominate, take away, our choices, freedom, dignity, truth, right down to actual political rights. Why? When pressed, they offer absurd arguments that are textbook examples of bad faith. It hurts my feelings when you're out there happily living peacefully! That's not a hurt feeling, that's resentment, which is a judgment. And all that bad faith? It's just what Sartre said it was: an attempt to "intimidate and disconcert."
We shouldn't play into their hands, my friends. We? The rest of us? We have to remember that nothing has mattered more than this principle, which is what modernity is. You live your life — go right ahead. It doesn't bother me. In your potential expanding, unfurling, soaring, mine does too. This is what peace and democracy are made from, the raw clay of their forging. And we should be standing shoulder to shoulder today, with the hated. Defending them from the worst of the hate and poison the fascists have to sling at them. Because that is how we really — and only — win. Right there, deep down in the soul.
Umair
February 2023
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