Fascists' Crumbling Tower

There's way, way too much capital-H History happening these days that I could write about. The thing is, all of it, every damn world-historically-awful thing the Trump regime and its authoritarian allies are doing, the millions of people participating in world-historically-large No Kings protests (thank you to everyone who did!), the climate and biodiversity and other world-historically-existential crises that are still compounding—it all exemplifies the profound importance of the usually implicit ways we think about things in general and how they hang together to make the world work. I mean, of course. Because that central topic of this blog, which, to be technical, is basic comparative metaphysics, frames how we all think about literally every thing.

Is the universe constituted of fundamentally separate individual entities and natural kinds defined and made real by determinate self-contained essences measured by timeless universal ideals? Or is that merely some humans' simplified mental/linguistic map, and the universe's complex and dynamic territory is actually constituted by intertwined and mutually shaping processes and systems, defined and made real by their relations with one another through time? Empirically, as established by an overwhelming weight of converging scientific and experiential evidence, it's the latter. But the world is being run—off a cliff, one might say—by people who mistake their maps for the territory.

There are some limitations in using that map-territory analogy to explain basic comparative metaphysics. Mostly, it works quite well, conveying the stripped-down abstraction of one broad way of seeing things and the fuller realness of the other. But not everything ...maps perfectly. For example, we think of maps as pretty flat. But the more that people think in separations, binaries, and especially static and idealized essences, the more they arrive at (what I think most people would spatially analogize to) a primarily vertical world-model. With themselves at or near the top, naturally. A lot of oppression and suffering flows from this rigidly vertical kind of thinking and the systems and structures it builds.

Lately, we're seeing more and more evidence that this separating, essentializing, and vertically hierarchical map-worldview is the deepest core of right-wing ideology and resentments, though it can show up to lesser degrees in other political orientations too. Conservatives, moderates, liberals, leftists, and others do sometimes reify their concepts and perpetuate extractive hierarchies, but never as consistently and thoroughly as the far right. Right-wingers often mislead about this with their words but hardly ever with their actions. None of their other professed views or material interests explain why they do what they do nearly as well as this vertical hierarchy maintenance and restoration. The only policy that MAGA, manosphere, Christian nationalist, and technofascist authoritarians adhere to with any consistency is that people and things of lower status exist for people rightfully of high status. The top matters more. High-status people are like the real individual characters on the main stage of history, or possibly the directors, and all other people are at best in the audience, crew, or supporting roles. The whole rest of nature is the set, inert and passive, there to be controlled and used.

This vertical hierarchy pins everyone and everything down into a seemingly neat, simple, controllable order that's often claimed to be "natural." In this order, lower status people should not be able to "victimize" rightfully higher status people by insulting or constraining them in any way, while higher status people should have full license to harm, command, and even kill lower status people with impunity to maintain their relative status. Low-status people must respect high-status people as superiors to earn chances at high-status people "respecting" them as human beings. As the internet-famous "Wilhoit's Law" puts it:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

To right-wing Americans, rightful high status is, of course, strongly associated with zero-sum competitive conformity to "timeless, universal" in-group ideals that just so happen to boil down to white, male, and physically and neurologically normative identity.* Efforts to weaken those associations and widen high-status access, even within a still fairly vertical ("meritocratic") order, are fought by status-enforcers** using all available means, including violence.

Consider: why else would Republican officials and their supporters blow up the deficit, harm farmers and rural areas, decimate small businesses, kill countless people including babies, raise energy and living costs, shrink GDP, and contradict so many other values they purport to care about, just to "trigger libs" and uselessly transfer wealth upward to the already-wealthy in their big ugly bill? Why else would they crush the religious, speech, and other constitutional freedoms and "states' rights" they purport to care about just to obsess over policing binary gender role infractions that don't harm them in the slightest? Why else would they purport to care about "personal responsibility" while being aghast at the prospect of even minimal accountability or oversight for their in-group? Why else would they undermine their own health and the national prestige they purport to care about by demolishing the West's pursuit of knowledge? Why else would they be resegregating management and civil service to install ideologues whose incompetence harms Republicans as much as anyone? Why else would they be so eager again to threaten the national security and public safety they purport to care about by bombing brown people overseas, expanding a police state here, and promoting stochastic terrorism? Why else would they so eagerly invite violations of the "law and order" they purport to care about as long as the criminal chaos is coming from white collar fraudsters, anti-American insurrectionists, or racist gestapo? It all revolves around hierarchical status reinforcement. That's the order that matters over all else to them, politically, psychologically, and existentially: vertical rankings. They don't care if they materially lose, so long as the Other loses more; that's a "win."

• As a reminder, if your media sources don't recognize this clear context and instead take Republican lies about their supposed motivations at face value, it's important to cut them out of your information environment so your brain doesn't melt too.

I think a decent and growing number of folks recognize this overall dynamic in various ways. Unfortunately, far fewer are informed about its foundations. Right-wingers' vertically status-centric worldview could not exist without the underlying, culturally-supported misunderstanding of things in general, including people, as fundamentally separate and essentialized and mapped to black-and-white ideals. In other words, their worldview is an extreme form of the substantialist map-metaphysics that has largely dominated Euro-Western cultures for centuries. If our meaning and well-being are instead deeply intertwined with one another and with regenerative natural systems, little of what right-wingers do makes much sense.

The real world, however, is neither vertical nor flat, but a dynamically entangled mesh of mutually co-constituting processes at many coexisting scales. In the real world, power-to and power-with matter as much as or more than top-down power-over. There's more to existence than zero-sum hierarchical status. Which is why little of what right-wingers do makes much sense.

See? With basic comparative metaphysics as a unifying theory, their senselessness starts to make sense. It's all interrelated by their rejection of interrelation. Right-wingers are unable or unwilling to envision a different, more regenerative and less vertically flattened existence. They can't see it, even though process-relational existence is just plain empirically true as well as globally popular and trending. They've gotten stuck distrusting the integrating half of their brains. Their insistence on absolute certainty and top-down control inevitably leads instead to incoherence and unstable brittleness because it contradicts the interdependent complexity of the actual reality they work so hard to suppress.

Again, this is why I take a cue from right-wingers themselves to go further upstream to intentionally fight this battle for reality where it's really happening. It's beyond politics. It's even beyond culture. It's about whose existence we're in. Luckily, that's highly favorable ground for the large majority of people who reject total hyper-individualism and rigid hierarchy and who place any value whatsoever on relationality and regeneration.

We can defeat fascism if we align and organize. Basic comparative map-versus-territory metaphysics is a powerful, accessible tool to help us do so. With that empirically-grounded knowledge, we can leverage our commonalities and valuable differences; clarify what we need to unite for and against; avoid many of our own self-defeating divisions and reifications; guide process-savvy, multi-scale, multi-solving strategies; and bolster our convictions that a better world is growing in the cracks of the collapsing old one. I also suspect a meaningful fraction of right-wingers do still have some genuine care for those less-hierarchical values that they profess but fail to follow through on, in which case tailored appeals showing how process-relational reality better supports those values might help broaden their vision. Not too shabby for one concept.

There is indeed order to our process-relational universe. It just isn't particularly simple or vertical order. Ergo, it isn't as easily evident or acceptable to the most insecure, control-demanding humans as the false map-view is. Our process-relational world is far beyond the capacity of any human or artificial intelligences to completely comprehend or command. It overflows even our best maps. Yet that doesn't render our knowledge-seeking futile. The bigger and stronger a network of regenerative relations we can cultivate, the less wrong we'll get and the better we can navigate the world-historically-important issues that confront us. True progress won't come down from on high; it will be bottom-up, diagonal, inward, and outward, toward rhizomatic and regenerative forms of interconnection. Eventually, fascists' vertical tower of power will crumble.

Please comment and share!

*There are certainly right-wing, extremely map-metaphysics-adherent worldviews in other cultures (e.g. the misogynistic Black Hebrew Israelites who used to harass people by DC's Metro Center station... ew). Difference-oppressing right-wing authoritarians in places like the Middle East substitute for whiteness but seem to usually keep the rest of the vertical associations, though Aspie supremacists like Elon Musk keep the rich white male supremacy but swap in a different neuro-normativity. The maps of map-metaphysics differ but share overall similar central flaws.

**Status-enforcers aren't always those at the top, of course. They may be trying to gain advantage through appeals to the favor of those above them. They may be trying to avoid being at the bottom, related to a psychological phenomenon called last-place aversion. Many of these Serena Joys are as unable as those at the top to imagine a less-vertical reality, even though they'd benefit from (awareness of) being in one. This underscores the need to get people out of epistemic closure and humbly engaged with a diverse range of perspectives.