Rapture vs. Regeneration

Last weekend, The Guardian published a banger of an article by Naomi Klein (the good Naomi) and Astra Taylor about "the rise of end times fascism." I want to riff on it here for three reasons. One, I'm a bit of a Naomi Klein fangirl who considers her first big written work of the Trump/Musk regime an Event. Second, there's an almost uncanny alignment between the two alternative futures she and Taylor preview and the two alternative directions of thinking about reality that drive this blog. (In short, are the things that constitute existence fundamentally separate and defined by self-contained essences, unambiguous either/or binaries, static ideals, and hierarchies of mattering—the simplifying map-metaphysics view that has long dominated Euro-Western culture and provided load-bearing support for its extractive supremacisms? Or are they never-fully-isolatable processes, mutually co-constituted with their dynamic relations—the better-supported view held by diverse cultures and subcultures worldwide?) Third, I think the article illustrates the value-add of being able to go upstream from politics to surfacing these practical, everyday metaphysics frameworks that we're all applying any time we think about any thing.

Reading the article in full is a solid half-hour time commitment, so although I do recommend it, I'll summarize and excerpt it here. Its blurb is a good preview: "The governing ideology of the far right has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism. Our task is to build a movement strong enough to stop them." The article then meanders through far-right strands that might seem to be in tension. You've got the dream of "priority-pass" corporate city-states, backed by people like J.D. Vance benefactor Peter Thiel, "carving up the world into hyper-capitalist, democracy-free havens under the sole control of the supremely wealthy, protected by private mercenaries, serviced by AI robots and financed by cryptocurrencies." You've got the MAGA "mass-market" bunker nation mentality, hardening and expanding national borders, punishing and expelling the impure, and violently extracting resources under the authoritarian rule of a warlord: "super-sized prepping." You've got family bunkers and prepper goods being hawked on right-wing media. You've got Christian fundamentalist visions of the Rapture. You've got Elon Musk, for whom "Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence." And you've got the rest of the Silicon Valley cultists embracing ideologies that are, even at their most benign, "shot through with dangerous racial, ableist and gender biases about which parts of humanity are worth enhancing and saving – and which could be sacrificed for the supposed good of the whole." What unites them is a supremacist script "in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive."

Klein and Taylor argue that the apocalypticism of these ideologies is something meaningfully new, at least in terms of controlling governments. Twentieth-century fascists at least envisioned an in-group golden age after the bloodbath. Now, however, "[a]live to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others." Echoing this blog's points that our understandings of reality define the outer boundaries of what we imagine possible, they call end times fascism "a darkly festive fatalism – a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy."

On the bright side, the authors argue that this novelty "opens up powerful possibilities for resistance. To bet against the future on this scale – to bank on your bunker – is to betray, on the most basic level, our duties to one another, to the children we love, and to every other life form with whom we share a planetary home. This is a belief system that is genocidal at its core and treasonous to the wonder and beauty of this world. We are convinced that the more people understand the extent to which the right has succumbed to the Armageddon complex, the more they will be willing to fight back, realizing that absolutely everything is now on the line."

After we help one another learn about and face the depths of depravity we're up against and the existential threat it poses to everything we love, the next step, they say, is to "counter their apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. A story capable of draining end times fascism of its gothic power and galvanizing a movement ready to put it all on the line for our collective survival. A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound."

I could have written that!... if less eloquently. That's because it's a story of embracing the unruly process-relational terrain of our lived reality, rather than trying to flatten it into a single, barren, decolorized and static map stripped of nearly everything except domination and subjugation.

The step after that storytelling (though of course all steps intertwine) is building a movement. Klein and Taylor quote activist and author Adrienne Maree Brown on the need for new alliances that bridge across deep differences. There's an order of operations to that alliance-making process in which welcoming allies broadly is a prerequisite for building a world of accountability. "Instead of asking: 'Do we all share the same worldview?' Adrienne urges us to ask: 'Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Then come this way and we will figure out the rest on the other side.'" This approach is far more radical and transformative, and at the same time far more achievable and strategic in this moment (if more demanding of grace), than approaches that insist on one true vision of how the world is and should be.

Beyond that, however, Klein and Taylor's article is rather short on the practical how of spreading awareness of what we're facing, countering with a better story, building a movement, and ultimately defeating the fascists. For sure, both authors have done and written a ton on those topics outside of this one article. Nevertheless, I'm going to use the opening as an opportunity to propose that going upstream of politics and culture to basic comparative metaphysics is well worth adding to the toolkit for all of these steps.

On spreading awareness of what we're facing, relatable stories and the fascists' own statements and actions are the best materials to share. Yet they often leave people bewildered at how anyone could believe such things, or disbelieving they truly do. Fascists' supremacist script of collapse and survival of a chosen few builds on and could not exist without underlying metaphysical assumptions of separateness and hierarchical essentialism: over-certainty about map-metaphysics, mistaking it for the territory. The story that they've gotten stuck inside that worldview and genuinely don't believe non-hierarchical interdependence is real (or realistic), or that complex emergence or relational values matter, can help people better wrap their minds around how detached from reality the fascists are, and why. Their certainties and their uncaring about others aren't just psych0-emotional indulgences, though they are that; they're also cornerstones without which their sense of reality and thus identity feels existentially unmoored. That clarity is useful.

On telling a better alternative story, among other assets, process-relational thinking illuminates the broad diversity of on-ramps that can bring people into facing the same general direction together across a variety of lanes. The power of metaphysics is that it's zoomed all the way out to encompass every thing. From that viewpoint, the converging alignment of physics, Earth sciences, biology, medicine, cognitive science, social sciences, "relational turns" in the humanities, Buddhism, ubuntu, thousands of diverse Indigenous knowledge systems, and strands both ancient and growing in Abrahamic faith traditions, provides both intellectual and emotional ground to align our politics as well. It helps overcome the phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, where people mistake majority opinions for the minority or vice versa. Map-metaphysics may seem dominant to the point of inevitability, but process-relationality is where we originated and where the bandwagon is headed. Really, anything anyone values that's not reducible to dollars or domination can be an on-ramp to rejecting fascist flattening. This zoomed-out view also underscores that alternatives are more than possible. They're already here. And where map-metaphysics offers a false promise of simplicity, putting it on a two-directional gradient opposite process-relationality offers its own accessibly simple sorting mechanism that most people will put themselves on the less-wrong side of. Many just need to know that the other direction is a valid, rational option.

On building a movement and deploying it to defeat fascism, process-savvy, organizing, and right relations are key to shifting possibility-spaces in the right direction. Many people across many disciplines have already done lots of consideration and testing of wide-ranging solutions to advance transformative change and regeneration. Process-relational thinking directs our attention to integrating and cultivating these interventions. Networked solidarity can also provide windows for cross-ideology teaching and, more importantly, learning.

We are, as the fascists recognize, facing existential crises. They can't be addressed at the same level of thinking that created them. Existential crises demand leveled-up existential understanding. We are in a time when we have to make hard choices, but they don't have to be about who to save, taking existing systems and paradigms as given and unchangeable. Instead of sacrificing people and places, and ultimately our planet, we can jettison reality-denying and culture-bound supremacist extractivism. It's not too late to build a world where all belong and matter.