A lot of people have a sentiment not just of stagnation, but that things are actually going downhill, getting worse over time.
Despite technology having improved, it now takes 30 years to afford a house.
In a digital age where it’s easier to share information than ever, education comes with gigantic student debts and leads to unpaid internships and an unstable job market.
The social media that was supposed to connect people has left everyone more lonely and disconnected than ever.
Healthcare costs are through the roof, and at the same time most people’s health is in a miserable state.
Obesity, being able to afford a caffeine addiction, cheap telescreens to spy on our every movement while trying to turn us into phone zombies, and the mountains of microplastics that are accumulating as a result of massive amounts of cheap consumerist crap, are declared to be the signs that life is awesome, and that everything is going great.
We are constantly told that the economy is growing, that we are all getting wealthy beyond belief, that everything is getting more and more amazing by the minute.
But people don’t feel so great, life feels like a black mirror episode.
So this leave 2 options:
Option one, is to admit that the system isn’t working well.
That it is in fact producing boatloads of cheap consumerist crap, making lines go up, creating people who can afford private epstein islands and volcano lairs, that it is in fact increasing the production of debt, of bombs, and of addictions, and that this is actually not a good thing.
The other option, is to find a scapegoat, and blame them.
Declare that everything is their fault, that they are the reason why people are not happy even as more gambling apps are being developed.
The first option would mean changing things, and less power for the people who rule over us.
So the second one, which preserves the status quo and allows things to continue going down the same path, following the same trend, is the one that is chose by the media, the politicians, and the ruling elites.
Differing scapegoats are being targeted and blamed for everything that is wrong with modern society.
Trans people are different, a minority, and most people don’t really have much knowledge or any personal experience with someone trans, so that makes them OK-ish scapegoats.
But at the end of the day, even very bigoted people have trouble explaining how harassing trans people is supposed to make their lives any better.
But if the whole issue is not a tiny fraction of the population using the wrong bathroom, and it’s not the system itself, and it’s not the billionaires at the top, then who is left?
Competing workers, that’s who.
Within the logic of capitalism, where there are no unions, there is no class consciousness, no cooperation, no helping each other, and making life better for each other…
Well other workers are seen as people who compete for jobs and drive wages down.
People who compete to buy things like groceries, gas and housing, and drive prices up.
So that’s why we see the two main scapegoats being DEI and migrants.
In case it was not clear for some people, DEI outrage is even more about the idea of people “stealing jobs” than the whole migrant thing.
As most jobs continue being mechanized and the hope is to have LLMs do most of the other jobs, there are going to be more and more workers left unemployed and wondering “who the hell took my job?!?”, so I would expect more scapegoating of things like DEI and immigration by the ruling overlords.
Here are the next steps to keep going in that fascist direction:
- DEI hatred becomes open white supremacy
- Nationalism and hatred of immigrants turns into ultranationalism, and other nations being seen as competitors to be taken out
- It’s declared that women need to stop stealing jobs too, and instead be forced into birthing rape babies in order to serve national interests
- Continued market economy, but with closed borders to migrants and tariffs on foreign goods or import bans, trending towards ideas of autarky
- Looking at places like Greenland and Venezuela as potential options for more Lebensraum
- More cult of hard work and poor people being accused of being lazy, slogans like “Arbeit macht frei” making a comeback
- More deportations, more detention camps, more mass incarceration, more convict labor and exploitation, more surveillance to look for any potential anti-regime activity, more violent repression, militarized police, brutally killing people in the streets, more endless wars, more death penalties
The lines between the individual and the community are already being redrawn.
Wealthy people are no longer really seen as just individuals. They have accumulated too much power already.
They are now seen as the job creators, the investors and entrepreneurs who decide the future, and the people who pay to fund the police and the prisons.
Wealthy people have merged with the economy and the nation in people’s minds.
It’s very common to hear that since tax cuts and subsidies and wars are good for the wealthy, it’s going to be good for the economy, and good for the nation.
The trend towards fascism is kind of an inevitable result of capitalism over time.
Take something like healthcare.
The humane thing to do, would be to treat people like human beings, and provide healthcare to people who need it, based on a medical diagnosis.
When instead you want to have something inhumane, that prioritizes the profits of wealthy people over human lives and human health, when you want a system where hospitals are dumping patients in the streets, where people have to ration insulin, and where getting sick will bankrupt people even though they are paying through the nose for insurance every month…
Well, you have to develop a pretty vile, cruel, inhumane ideology in order to support it.
In the capitalist ideology, the other human beings who need healthcare stop being seen as humans in need of help, and instead are seen as competitors.
Thus the whole “I don’t want to pay for a competitor’s healthcare!” thing.
Since the capitalist ideology can’t blame capitalism itself, or the pharmaceutical companies, or the health insurance companies and so on for the high price of healthcare, the other people also trying to access healthcare are scapegoated. They are declared to be the ones at fault for such high prices, and the idea becomes that if were just left to die, then prices would drop and it would be cheaper.
And then once the capitalists promote the Malthusian laissez-faire potato famine ideas that cutting all welfare and letting competitors die would probably improve things, that moves the overton window enough for the fascists to show up with ideas on how to take out competitors more efficiently.
If evicting people from a house is normal in order to make space for someone else who is said to deserve it more… Then why not evict people from the country to free up a job, or why not evict people from Greenland to have more space?
Once the surveillance and the brutal police repression, and the constant wars and giant military has been normalized, well why not have another war for the good of the nation? Just a short one, not an endless one, just a tiny little blitzkrieg!
Thus proceeds the slow descent from capitalism into fascism.
It’s not really possible to keep a capitalist system with a giant military industrial complex that generates private profits and lobbies for more war without trending that way.
It’s not possible to keep a capitalist healthcare system where profits are put above saving human lives, without normalizing deaths for profit.
It’s not possible to normalize a housing system based around homelessness, evictions, and ever increasing rents for private profits, without moving the overton window towards deportations.
You can’t have an ideology of “money makes right” without people slowly realizing that it means “might makes right”.
Everything that would involve treating people more humanely, with less cruelty, would mean less power for the elites. So it’s always declared to be incompatible with capitalism and free markets, bad for wealthy people and thus for the economy.
Wealth inequality grows, the wealthy own almost everything, and everyone else is already under a giant pile of debt. So to keep growing the profits of the wealthy who already own everything, capitalism has to morph into fascism.
The only other option is to go in the other direction, removing the profit motive from wars, removing the profit motive from mass incarceration, removing the profit motive from housing, removing the profit motive from healthcare, etc.
In a capitalist system where a neighbor is not treated with love or kindness or even basic human decency, but is instead left to die so others can have more… Well that kind of heartless, callous attitude, where deaths for profits are normalized, leads to fascism.
I don’t know how to get people out of that shitty horrible mindset of considering fellow workers as “stealing” from them, seeing them as competitors and aliens instead of fellow human beings who are also working to try and improve their lives.
I’m not sure how to get people to notice that the border fences and the extra deportations have not actually improved their lives in any way, that housing and grocery prices are still going up, and wages still stagnating or even going down as things switch to a gig economy.
I try to explain it to people, but most do not seem to grasp that deporting the workers who build homes is unlikely to reduce the price of housing, and that the people who own all of the real estate and are filling their pockets with passive incomes are the ones to look at.
Many look at the trillionaires doing nazi salutes with adoration in their eyes, many talk about wars as a good thing, request more prisons, more people behind bars to be tough on, and homeless people being bulldozed away, treated like things.
It seems incredibly hard to get through to the “I’m not paying for a competitor’s healthcare” crowd and get them to notice that any insurance scheme already does that, and that a couple of billionaires having the best healthcare in the world doesn’t actually help THEM and their family.
Many even seem reluctant to imagine people having even the most basic human rights.
Many don’t even really seem to care about whether their own lives are improved at all in any way, as long as they can take out their rage on someone else by using state violence as an intermediary.
Appealing to a better nature does not work, and appealing to self interest also does not work, because many people are too angry to think.
People would need to calm down in some way first. If they were less angry, I’m convinced that many of them could be reasoned with.
But I don’t really know how we could deal with this mass anger we are seeing.
Perhaps widespread campaigns to offer free hugs should be on the menu? Should people be encouraged to try and share more funny cat videos again? I’m open to any ideas.
