Why Fascists Love Cancer and Hate Volunteerism

I'm working on a mind-blowing cognitive neuroscience post, but it's taking longer than I'd hoped to wrangle it into a reasonable length. So, in the meantime, I thought I'd use a couple of recent examples to briefly illustrate how the far-right's empirically incorrect map-metaphysics worldviews explain political choices that many observers are finding otherwise incomprehensible: the irreparable destruction of America's anti-cancer research infrastructure such as the National Cancer Institute, and the cruel mid-program shutdown of AmeriCorps, the independent federal agency for national service and volunteerism.

I'll note at the outset that both actions are blatantly illegal, as these programs are statutorily mandated by Congress. The "DOGE" process-strategy of lawlessly destroying things faster than courts or other institutions can respond and reassert any rule of law is consistent, and sadly effective. But why are they destroying these? Don't they understand returns on investment? Didn't AmeriCorps used to have bipartisan support for its essential contributions to disaster recovery, community economic development, and other, otherwise unmet human needs? Wouldn't Republicans, especially of the "Make America Healthy Again" (MAHA) variety, prefer not to die of cancer?

I'm seeing more bewilderment about the war on medical research online, including from commenters and analysts who are usually more insightful about conservative motivations. Meanwhile, the lower-profile but still horrifying shutdown of AmeriCorps is boggling minds at my own nonprofit day job. We're having to do all sorts of budgetary reworking to cover the loss of contractually obligated federal funds so as to not leave dozens of lovely and hard-working people jobless, stipend-less, and benefits-less with no notice.

Like just about everything else right-wingers do, these actions aren't smart or rational, but they do fit into a fairly internally coherent mental and cultural model of how things work. Right-wingers are all, pretty much by definition, committed to a simplistic model-world made of entities that are fundamentally separate, independent, static, essentialized, and hierarchically arranged along universal ideals. Understanding that model is vital to predicting and fighting their moves. Below, I've broken out some components of this (mis)understanding of things, though there are others, and all components are deeply intertwined.

• "Efficiency": The paper-thin excuse for DOGE's existence and actions is that their hacks promote "government efficiency." They claim their illegal clawbacks of a few million here, a few million there, are returning scarce resources "back to the American taxpayer." It's well established that the immediate savings of these DOGE cuts are not only miniscule fractions of a percent of the overall federal budget, but also illusory, in that both people and the government will accrue higher net economic costs. In what sense can any of this be called efficiency? Well, you have to restrict your analysis to zoomed-in, narrowly described and decontextualized snapshots of certain columns on the government's ledger. The belief that such isolated, immediate-term, single-perspective, quantitative analyses are the most real and "objective" measure of value in any sense is classic map-metaphysics reductionism, confusing these maximally separating and simplistic models with the actual terrain of reality. It's literally impossible to keep the bigger, systemic picture boxed out from consideration without implicitly relying on this underlying metaphysical framework to justify the exclusion. This "efficiency" isn't the primary motivation, but it's presented as such by the regime and their propaganda networks because it does demonstrably fool many simpletons, including, unfortunately, in in mainstream news media.
• Individualism: In right-wing views, if people (at least "those people") deserved to survive cancer or disasters or build wealth in their communities, they'd pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. If they don't, well, them's the breaks; it was meant to be. As Margaret Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society. Deservingness and agency are entirely contained within each individual's essence and aren't matters of systems, structural contexts, or historical trajectories in which a person is situated. We owe nothing to one another, outside the patriarchal nuclear family or other close in-group. It's therefore unrealistic and goes against the proper nature of things for the government to support collective, relational well-being.
• Intrinsic hierarchy of mattering: Right-wing ideologies, whether predominantly religious ethno-nationalist, AI-worshiping technofascist, extractive hyper-capitalist, boorish MAGA, or crunchy MAHA, all posit a rigid, vertical order of being. The (gendered, racialized, abled, and classed) deserving top of the hierarchy entirely defines mattering and the "greater good" for everything and everyone else below. That is, when the top is reaching higher, it doesn't really matter how well anything or anyone else is doing. They're expendable. To this general worldview, the reality of a more dynamic, horizontally or multi-dimensionally networked, diverse, and pluralistic interdependence is existentially threatening. AmeriCorps' lifesaving and equity-promoting volunteerism muddles the purity of this hierarchy of deservingness and undermines its associated just world fallacy. Likewise, government cancer-fighting efforts interfere with the eugenic purification of the nation: right-wingers demonstrably want to "make America healthy again" not by getting rid of illness, but by getting rid of the ill, who they see as weak and undeserving of life and scarce resources. It's better to avoid cancer by individually "virtuous" (whiteness- and wealth-enabled) clean living than by government-supported research or medicine, because that demonstration of "virtue" amounts to deservingness.
• Zero-sum competition: Where isolating individualism, simple binary thinking, scarcity, and conformity to hierarchical ideals meet, zero-sum competition becomes the controlling model of reality and human nature. Volunteerism and service-oriented careers, including medical research driven by care more than profit, show that alternatives to zero-sum competition exist. But in the right-wing worldview, such alternatives can't really exist. Volunteers and researchers must be "virtue signaling" somehow, or otherwise fake. Stomping out evidence of positive-sum relationality terraforms the world back down into something more like their black-and-white map, where one side winning means another side must be losing and vice versa. The zero-sum mindset also feeds into right-wingers' extreme negative polarization against anything their opposition supports. Triggering libs is its own reward in a worldview where there's nothing but dominance and subjugation.

Non-fascists have to fight this worldview and its effects on multiple fronts, on multiple scales, with multiple aligned strategies. One of those strategies should be attacking its load-bearing foundational, metaphysical assumptions about things at the root. We can start by spotting and uprooting those wrong assumptions where they linger in our own thinking. From there, we can work on consistently proving that process-relational ways of knowing and being are not only possible, but already real, rational, superior, and ultimately inevitable.