Leftist ideology preys on the weak, offering balm to lost souls. In fact, “core of both Fascism and Communism as radical ideologies is a sense of alienation” as James Lindsay noted and further opines upon the subject, which is quoted in full full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds.
On alienation and the mythologies of Fascism and Communism. Long post/:
At the core of both Fascism and Communism as radical ideologies is a sense of alienation. In fact, it’s alienation with the injustice of the alienation turned up to 11. This alienation breeds resentment, envy, and radical politics itself.
First, a word about radical politics. What does “radical” mean? It means “at the roots,” or more accurately, tearing out the roots of the existing system to replace them with a new system with totally different roots.
Second, a few words about alienation and the Alien force that alienates. Alienation here ultimately refers to the idea of being made an alien to your own circumstance. That is, there’s a circumstance that fits you, and you belong in that circumstance by some right, and you are removed or estranged from it.
This is usually believed to be the result of having been (actively) alienated because it is generally assumed people would not intentionally remove themselves from their own rightful context. The outside, interloping force that removes the alienated subject from his rightful context and circumstance is an Alien power. It doesn’t recognize the circumstance or people’s rightful claim to it and its inheritance but comes in from outside and imposes itself into and over that circumstance to usurp it for itself.
While there’s a lot of depth that could be added to this (notably talking about Gnosticism in various stripes), now is not the time for that. Understanding this mechanism and belief structure, which is fundamentally dualistic, is absolutely necessary to understanding the underlying mythologies and ideologies of both Fascism and Marxism, which depend upon it fundamentally and intimately.
As a single aside, the Iron Law of Woke Projection is located here. The pathological modes of Fascism and Communism do not actually represent true humanity, as they claim, but are an Alien power that alienates people from their inheritance in other forms of societal organization. This, though, is what they accuse the mainstream society outside of their cults of doing. The Iron Law of Woke Projection is an iron law, therefore, because the entire psychosocial apparatus of “Woke” political worldviews is Alien-projection. It couldn’t be otherwise.
Since I usually start with Marxism and lose people, I’ll start with Fascism, which is actually easier to understand. Fascists fundamentally believe that there’s a past state of their own society that was roughly a golden era that is now corrupted and fallen through the corruptions of alien powers. That is, they have a romantic fantasy about their past as a people and the society and fruits they should have inherited from it, but they are alienated from that society and its inheritance by an interloping power Alien to it that has corrupted the system for its own gain and their loss.
So Fascists look back to some mythological, romantic point they believe is in their past and feel aggrieved as a people (collective) from having inherited the fruits of that past. They blame outsiders (political, cultural, or ethnic) for having displaced them from a glorious life they’ve lost due to illegitimate impositions of the Alien politics, culture, or ethnicity. In response, they seek to band together (fasces refers to a tight bundle of thin faggots) to reclaim their lost inheritance through brutal political power and the imposition of the romanticized past state as it is meant to progress to the glorious future they’ve failed to inherit. (Talk about an entitlement complex….)
So the Fascist, ultimately, feels alienated from a glorious society (that never really existed) and the firstfruits of that glorious society. Alienation is at the core of his disposition. Identifying and destroying the Alien who has alienated is his chief political project. All who do not join him are sympathizing with and part of the alienating force and are therefore as much Enemy as is the Alien.
Fascists see themselves as alienated or dispossessed political, cultural, or racial elites who have lost the opportunity for an idealized Received Society the Alien has prevented them from receiving. The Fascist project is to awaken people to a consciousness of this alienation and its alleged causes to get them to band together in the effort to reclaim it. Of course, the most awakened Fascists will have to lead the program, not mere recruits, and they will restore the conditions for the common good and a future Golden Era in exchange for everyone’s liberty. Obviously, this begins (and proceeds) through punishing the Alien and its representatives and sympathizers, resulting in tyranny and mass murder.
Obviously, since there are different ways Fascists can feel alienated from their idealized Received Society, it can manifest in different ways. Three historical examples make the case.
In Italy, the Italian Fascists arose around the idea of displaced Italian Nationalist identity, which was partly based on the internationalist agitations of Communism. In Spain, the Francoists arose around the idea of a displaced Spanish National cultural identity rooted particularly in Catholicism so long as it obeyed Franco. It too claimed the internationalist and cultural (especially anti-religious) agitations of Communism as part of the Alien problem, but it hardly limited itself to purging Commies. In Germany, Hitler and the Nazis proposed a hybrid alienation scheme of German Nationalist identity and a German Racial identity based in the occult ravings of the Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, who, in alignment with pre-existing currents of German antisemitism believed that Jews represented the lowest (spiritual) racial form.
Thus, to simplify, the Italian Fascists under Mussolini sought to restore Italian Nationalist identity and usher in progress under its banner. The Spanish Fascists under Franco sought to restore Spanish Nationalist and Cultural identity through a kind of Nationalist-Catholic reunification program. The German Fascists (National Socialists) under Hitler sought to restore German Nationalist and Racial identity, from which Hitler believed “high culture” sprung, in order to literally complete history. All three were unmitigated catastrophes.
A similar utterly failed experiment was conducted in various ways throughout South America under the banner of (Catholic) Integralismo, or Integralism (reintegration of Catholic Church and state). Its program was different because the Alien was ironically framed primarily as colonialist in nature (that Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses), particularly blaming Western liberalism and Communism as alienating both indigenous populations and the working classes. South America is mostly Communist today as a result, not least because Integralismo gave way to Marxist Liberation Theology in so many cases (e.g., Dom Helder Camara, the “Red Bishop” of Recife). [No, Pinochet wasn’t an Integralist, to be clear, but another sort of Fascist.]
So we understand Fascism as an ideology of (Gnostic) alienation and resentment where there is some idealized group that is a contingency of history itself who has been displaced from its rightful inheritance by an Alien power that must be destroyed.
I’ll be briefer with Marxism, but it is ultimately the same, differently (same energy, opposite direction). Marxists believe that all of humanity is the alienated group, and the bourgeois class is the Alien. That is, certain human beings are alienating all human beings from their rightful inheritance and proper circumstance unjustly for their own benefit.
Marxists do not look back to a past romanticized golden era for their inspiration, as Marx told us in 1852. They look, he claims, “to the future,” but this isn’t quite right and requires understanding Marxism properly to comprehend. Marxists all believe they are alienated from that idealized future, though, through the Alien located in the “oppressing” classes.
Marxism actually adopts the dialectical nonsense of the wildly degenerate Jean-Jacques Rousseau to outline its (Gnostic) theory of man, history, and thus the future from which we allegedly alienate ourselves. Rousseau believed man is imprisoned by the strictures of civilization and is only truly free in his State of Nature (“man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”). Rousseau also liked civilization and all its perks, so he dreamed of completing man by finding a way to live in our State of Nature while retaining all the fruits of society (“savages made to live in cities”).
Marx echoed this sentiment clearly in his definition of true Communism: “Communism [is] the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore [is] the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.”
Marxists believe that all human beings as one giant group alienate themselves from their true inheritance by alienating themselves from who they really are, and they do so through the acquisition of private property (fundamental right to exclude others from your property), which inherently defines each person as an individual who can hold and withhold property from others (which is the basis for all wealth).
People who support the concept of private property are therefore the Alien who alienates all of man from his inheritance, which is his State of Nature while “embracing the entire wealth of previous development.” It is from this preposterous fantasy future Marx believes Communists take their inspiration instead of some stupid, romanticized past era partway along the track. Marxists still romanticize the State of Nature (origin point, Alpha Man) but want him completed (Omega Man) at the same time.
Marx rejects the rejection of private property “as human self-estrangement,” though. That, he argues, defines a low, ugly, brutish, dirty “crude Communism” that doesn’t have any higher culture or “wealth of previous development.” Instead, it abandons these in its mere hatred of private property.
Marx’s project, like that of the Fascists, is ultimately transformative: man must transcend private property, not reject it. Only in that way can he retain “the entire wealth of previous development” and high culture while creating a stateless, classless society in which man is as free as he (always) was in his State of Nature, from which he is alienated.
Marxism therefore mobilizes class conflict by trying to awaken the exploited classes to their alienation and also some of the exploiting classes to their participation in the total alienation of society (think: “feminism is good for men too”). Those who cannot be awakened into militancy or allyship have sided with the Alien and must be destroyed. Maybe two hundred million corpses testify to how destructive and impossible this program is in practice.
Enviro-Communism is kind of the ultimate expression of this evil ideology, frankly, because it posits much more explicitly that all of humanity is the Alien who alienates all of humanity, thus turning everyone into the enemy class who alienates us from an ideal high-tech future where nature herself is in her State of Nature. Communism believes this way generally too, accusing everyone of harboring “bourgeois values” on some level, but not quite so drastically explicitly.
The result in both cases is that the resentful people who conclude their lack of success in life is due to alienation by the Alien power adopt a radical politics intentionally destructive to the existing order. Their objective is to claim as much of the infrastructure of that order as they can (“seize the means of production”) but also to destroy not only everything they cannot but the entire order upon which it is based so they can replace it with their own (which always conveniently place themselves in abusive power they use to alienate people from their own societies as an interloping Alien).
It must be this way because the roots of the existing society are ultimately either the Alien itself or that which allows and enables the Alien to alienate. The politics will always be radical. The power claimed will always be abused. Destruction and mass death will always result.
The reason for these catastrophes isn’t superficial. It’s as fundamental as a foundation can be. Their entire world-concept is based on a theory of illegitimate alienation, resentment, pride, entitlement, covetous desire, and rank incompetence at anything except manipulation and usurpation. The (Gnostic) metaphysics of the Alien is the taproot of these programs, whatever their forms, scapegoats, and excuses.
Marxism and Fascism manifest differently (same energy, opposite direction) because they locate the pre-alienated state in different places and thus bear a different vision for the completed utopian future, but they’re ultimately variations on the same theme. Marxists have a better but more fanciful sales pitch: a world of total freedom and no oppression or injustice based on our State of Nature while retaining the plenty we achieved through our Fall from it. The Fascists boast a more realistic and brutal one: a complete return to a fictionalized Golden Era and the glorious future it promises for our people by kicking out and destroying the interlopers who stole it from us. Marxists, in other words, reject historical contingency while Fascists embrace it and place it in different “received” features like politics, culture, or race.
What being “Woke” means, ultimately, is having “woke up” to this dark fairytale of alienation and committed yourself to doing something about it. That’s why I always say that it’s a “consciousness” and “a way of seeing the world and acting in it.”
That consciousness, necessarily, is critical too, in the sense of Critical Theory. That’s why you could say that being Woke means using Critical Theory. Why? Because as dispossessed outsiders, the alienated people aren’t in a position to challenge (or even fully imagine or articulate) the circumstance that should have been absent the Alien power. What they can do, however, is criticize the Alien power for not being the glorious vision in their dark fairytales, allowing them to pull at the loose threads of existing society and radicalize the people who can be led into feeling dispossessed and resentful of it. This is all parasitic and toxic, but that’s Critical Theory.
Does this help you understand these evil ideologies better? Does it help you see why the “Woke” on both “Woke Left” and “Woke Right” are, in fact, “Woke”?
If you found this confusing, it’s because @jordanbpeterson is right: the whole thing is the result of disordered, narcissistic, psychopathic thinking and traits. It’s difficult to understand because it’s operationalized psychopathology justified through tortured language games.
One slight disagreement is the idea that Fascism is reactionary. While invoking and drawing upon the past, it is nonetheless just as much of a “forward” looking ideology of the collective will directing itself towards a glorious future.
More exploration wokeness and its (pseudo-)intellectual underpinnings on Mr. Lindsay’s New Discourse.
