We're In a Winnable Fight Over Reality

If you're as tired of the onslaught of awful news as I am, here's some good news to hang onto: the ability to distinguish the map from the terrain of reality (i.e., everyday comparative metaphysics) is one of the most accessible, practical, and powerful tools we can use to guide understanding and action in the fight against right-wing authoritarianism. We accumulate more support for this tool every day. What's more, it's a tool authoritarians can't possibly steal for themselves. Reality is empirically on our side, and we can make that matter.

A quick terminology note before we dive in: I think the left-right political axis is getting a little creaky. Right-wing authoritarianism is also just a lot of syllables. So, I'll refer to the collective of MAGA retribution cultists, gangster capitalists, Christian nationalists, and tech edgelords currently dominating all branches of the United States government hereafter on this blog as fascists. Of course they're not perfect analogues of prior fascists, but they're close enough: they all seek to have, or more often to submit to, "authoritarian power that would defeat and destroy feared otherness." I also want to distinguish them from self-identified conservatives like the folks at The Bulwark, who can handle nuance and who actually want to conserve some things other than unearned hierarchical privilege. If my use of the term fascist bothers you, either you're a bit of a pedant, which, fine, whatever; or you're probably aligned with fascists, in which case you need a less-wrong understanding of reality more than most.

Now on to the substance. First, a quick refresher, or intro for anyone who skipped the prior post. A bogglingly huge but under-discussed convergence of evidence confirms that people broadly think about reality in two directions, and build institutions and cultures accordingly:

• One direction, dominant in Euro-Western cultures for millennia, sees reality as made of fundamentally separate and self-contained things. These things are defined mainly with reference to determinate essential attributes or membership in idealized natural kinds, which matter more than changes, relations, or "accidental" idiosyncratic deviations from those ideals. Along with binary logic, this direction of (mis)understanding provides load-bearing support for other perceptions of how reality works like homogenized universalism or view-from-nowhere "objectivity," reductionism, quantification primacy, siloing, individualism, othering, all-encompassing hierarchy, control, and zero-sum competition. However useful this separate-static-simple-supreme (substance or particle) model has been for some purposes, it's been proven to be just a simplified conceptual model, or map.
• The other direction, cultivated in most cultures and confirmed empirically over and over again by modern sciences, sees reality as made of mutually co-constituting processes for which dynamism and change are as fundamental as stabilization and continuity. Relations among these processes matter at least as much as any pre-determinate essence; boundaries and attributes often depend on past and present context and perspective. In short, things are relational processes. Along with multi-valued logic, this process-relational (more weave- or wave-like) direction is associated with other perceptions of how reality works like contextually situated knowledge, pluralism, complexity, emergence, unknowability, integration, reciprocity, and care.

OK, cool. So how can that actually help navigate our current conditions of social-political-ecological collapse? I've found there's no more consistently useful tool than this broadly bi-directional gradient to understand, first, why fascists think and act like they do, and second, what the rest of us can do about it.

On the first point, there are countless examples of how strong commitment to map-reality, and corresponding resistance to process-relational reality, underlies fascist ideology and action. It's rarely consciously that; for sure, their more direct commitments are to white male supremacy, extractive capitalism, and the thrill of cruelty, and so those and their associated psychological factors often have more explanatory and predictive power for specifics. But those are utterly dependent on general assumptions of either-or separateness, essentialism, and the rest. And those more abstract assumptions in turn depend on the legitimizing intellectual patina and social support they have in our culture, outside of fascism.

Once you know what to look for, you'll find map-metaphysics underneath basically everything the fascists do.* If fascists began even a little bit to understand themselves and everything else as diverse, dynamically relational processes whose being and well-being are entangled non-hierarchically with that of different others, they'd be ex-fascists. I'll limit myself to six-ish extremely condensed examples here, but there will certainly be more in future blog posts.

• In late March, the Trump/Musk/Miller regime issued a royal decree—whoops, I mean "Executive Order"—declaring race an essential "biological reality," rather than a social construct that's been used to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement. They previously declared gender to be an unchangeable binary defined by oversimplified genetics and demanding adherence to hierarchical ideals. Abundant evidence to the contrary is deemed invalid and irrelevant to "objective" Truth. These anti-scientific examples of turning Euro-Western conceptual constructions into essentialized absolutes in order to assert domination could not happen without underlying, simplifying map-metaphysics assumptions about how the world is composed of neatly separate, largely static entities and natural kinds.
• One thing that understandably confuses many people about our present moment is what Naomi Klein (the good Naomi) calls the far-out to far-right pipeline, associated with "Make America Healthy Again." These crunchy conservatives have a lot of seeming overlap with lefty hippies, at least aesthetically. However, it's their hyper-individualism (extending to the patriarchal nuclear family), fetishization of purity, and eugenic disdain for those deemed undeserving that align them with fascism. Like other flavors of fascist ideology, this entails rejection of science: for example, it's well established that health simply cannot be understood as a matter of pure personal responsibility. However, acknowledging that would require embracing mutual interdependence, complexity, and other elements of process-relational thought that these folks have been convinced to consider less "realistic," or to "matter" less—words that often hint at metaphysical underpinnings.
• Another thing that understandably boggles decent folks is how fascists accuse others of hypocrisy while indulging in it themselves constantly. There's a sense in which they're not exactly being hypocritical or incoherent, though. They sincerely believe in elite impunity because the competitive binaries of dominance and subjugation, deserving and undeserving, define their worldview. "Rules for thee and not for me" reinforces the dominance that's core to their reality. Accountability existentially threatens it.
  • This also ties in with fascists' frequent use of projection and the DARVO tactic of abuse (intimate authoritarianism). Imagined victimhood based on bad faith false equivalence justifies more-than-proportionate action to regain the rightful dominant order.
• Fascists are even fine sacrificing their own well-being, and that of their supporters, as long as others' well-being takes a bigger hit, to reinforce "natural" divisions and their hierarchical and zero-sum order of mattering. A win's realness is defined by someone else losing, which is more important than net gain. I disagree with the money-reductionism of this post—one of the nice things about process-relational thinking is that it offers a pluralistic truce for those who think class or race/identity are the key to understanding U.S. politics—but it's a helpful overview of Trump embracing material and personal harms to his supporters. It also illustrates indirectly why map-metaphysics is more useful for understanding fascists than either taking their own word for what they're doing, or dismissing them as just absurd and insane. The delulu has a generally predictable structure.
• Map-metaphysics also underlies AI worship and its allegiance with fascism. I'll concede that some technologies under this label have the potential to become powerful tools for good under some circumstances. However, Silicon Valley executives and other techno-fascists are confident that everything is simple enough to be controllable by algorithms that they, and they alone, can and should control. That depends entirely on a metaphysical-level rejection of complexity, emergence, and to a large extent, even other people's minds and capacities for agency, as components of reality that fundamentally matter. As future posts on this blog will explore, Silicon Valley ideology is highly science-rejecting as well, in case you were confused why Musk has irreparably blown up the world's scientific infrastructure.
• And then there's evangelicalism's faith/identity without works salvationism and anti-empathy us-vs-them nonsense. Enough said.

So how does process-relational thinking help the rest of us respond more effectively against fascism?

The Breitbart Doctrine, attributed to proto-fascist blogger Andrew Breitbart and further popularized by Trump strategist and criminal fraudster Steve Bannon, is the idea that "politics is downstream from culture." While Breitbart was, and Bannon is, an overflowing bag of wet gangrene, this insight is basically correct. That's part of why turning everything into culture war has helped enable the world's worst people take over politics in the United States and elsewhere. To defeat them and take back possibilities for flourishing coexistence, the rest of us have to go further upstream. Politics, and culture, and even morality and some psychology, are in an important sense downstream of how we (mis)understand reality. The hidden metaphysical assumptions we apply all the time, about how reality works and the nature of things that constitute existence, provide the ultimate constraints on everything else. They define the boundaries of our imaginations of the possible and the "realistic." Surface and shift those foundational assumptions towards process-relational reality and you can achieve transformative progress: not just in the fight against fascism, but towards genuinely better and more regenerative futures that do remain possible. In the next post, I'll start introducing more of the practicalities of operationalizing this upstream move of reasserting reality.

And after that, maybe a quantum physics break? Process-relationality helps us better understand all domains of reality, and seeing that in action outside of what's considered the political sphere can put us on more solid and favorable ground inside of it. Plus it's more fun. 100% guaranteed to be free of any stretching beyond what's mathematically and experimentally established, which is, y'know, not a guarantee you can get every place that talks about quantum physics.

*Even those most fervently committed to map-metaphysics have to acknowledge processes and relations to some extent. In fact, the rest of us could learn from some of the ways fascists have leveraged sociopolitical process-savvy and in-group relationality to gain power. The difference is that they acknowledge those things only to the minimum extent doing so instrumentally benefits them in map-metaphysics terms, and in service of trying to terraform the terrain into their preferred maps. Separateness, stasis, simplicity, and supremacy are still always the primary drivers.