Waiting for Weimar
How we were wrong about the way Fascism would arise in America.
We’ve been conditioned to expect the rise of Fascism to follow the pattern it took in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. Expecting that there would be an abrupt change with a corresponding total change in the style of society. The most obvious sign being a change in the flag.
That’s not what we find ourselves living through today.
We tend to focus on becoming over being. This is big in seeking enlightenment, bettering ourselves, etc.. It’s also a factor in relation to The Shadow. We expect that things might get worse. That over time conditions, and reactions to those conditions may worsen and that this might lead to bad times.
This is a time of revelation. What appears to be a consistent theme in this process of revelation has been, and continues to be, that things have already gotten very bad. That there are few potential disasters that are not already occurring; if with an unsymmetrical distribution. Short of actual nuclear war; something that’s not been so imminent since October 1962 as I write this on the first of October 2024….
Power players like to herd their prey with threats. Threats, from their perspective, are more of a sure thing than promises. Especially when they have no interest in making the slightest deviation from their “plans” and have even lost the sense that they need to continue pretending, making the most perfunctory covers for their violence and destruction.
Perhaps the hardest, no we’ll get to that in a moment, revelation to take in today is that there is no “social contract” in the eyes of the powerful. Every sign points to their extreme and virulent contempt for anyone and anything that stands in the way of their demented project. The elaborate fiction that there are “leaders” who “devote’ their lives to the service of their “people” is being torn to shreds daily. Infantilization works because reducing adults to a sense of having no internal resources; a caricature of an infant’s condition arrived at by ramping up fear and removing opportunities for agency; infantilization leaves us no option but to believe that our abusers care about us.
Dealing with abuse in early childhood one needs to learn as an adult that such “care” is not love. And that as an adult one is no longer helpless. No longer in need of maintaining the lies of our abusers in place of developing our own internal truths. Abusers, succesful abusers, believe their own lies. They must make their victims believe them also to maintain what would otherwise be plainly visible as a monstrous situation. They use violence to “weaken” their victims to hide the fact that their own lies have hollowed them out and left them empty and miserable. Lies nested within lies.
Lies nested in lies.
One “advantage”of having had to deal with this dynamic “at home” is that one develops a sense of how abusers work. Part of this, the hardest part, but also hugely important, is the way such an upbringing channels one into entering the “family business.” One feels what it’s like to stumble into no longer simply being a victim of abuse, but finding one’s self committing abusive acts ourselves. The way the blind spots cover the horrors. The way pain felt can so easily be transferred into pain inflicted. The vertigo of falling….
The Shadow exists whether we recognize it or not. It’s easier to double-down on the lies than it is to recognize how these forces can overpower us and take us down. Complicity…. When we begin to recognize that we are not simply victims of abuse but part of a long chain of abuse this awareness can be forced down, repressed. Maintining victimhood is the ultimate “License to Kill.” Recognizing our complicity and then taking steps to break the chain….
Insights, not discoveries.
We’ve lived bathed in a toxic soup flavored so as to make it palatable by trotting out the language of supremacy and power. Everything “worthwhile” the result of somebody’s “discovery.”
At the heart of the breakthroughs concerning Thought has been that these insights were not trotted out as discoveries. Discoveries owned and providing a license to exploit. What Krishnamurti and Bohm did was to recognize insights and then to recognize how Thought attempts to control us by derailing, defusing, short-circuiting insights by tempting us to “take credit” and believe, “I did that!”
All we “have” is attention. All “I” can “own” is what “I” do with “my” attention. Cause & effect, unlike what ballistic calculus would have us believe, is not a bargain intention makes with what-is. The only true “causality” is that what we allow ourselves to truly see changes us. “Just like that!” As Krishnamurti would delight in saying!
Ego is ready to jump back in, saying, “Yes! And whatever we can “see” will “manifest” as changes “in the world!”
There is no quid-pro-quo. All we can expect is that we may see more clearly. Be less likely to compound misery by inflicting suffering. What happens to creatures is not mediated by any wish-fulfilment-fairey. What has been done has consequences and those will play out as they must. All we can do is stop, or at least slow down, our contributions to the cycles of abuse that have overwhelmed our world.
“Pragmatism” is a lie. Making bargains concerning “lesser evils” is always a form of deflection. “I refuse to recognize my Shadow and insist that ‘My Pragmatism’ is a sign of ‘My Knowing.’ A sign of a power I wish to ascribe to myself.” It fails miserably every time, because whenever we accept a lie; and any attempt to grab onto power is a lie, proven by every descent into their bunker by everyone who has ever tried to wield power in this way throughout history. Whenever we accept a lie we abandon whatever strength we might be capable of and condemn ourselves, and the world, to destruction.
Power, as we ascibe it as something that can be used to force the world to meet our demands, is a lie. Power exists. Energy released in unbelievable quantities over eons of time are a fact of the universe. We exist, everything exists, in the spaces and times such power allows us. The orginal misunderstanding regarding power might have been the result of the way Ego tends to project its desires onto the world. Seeing power acting upon the world and ascribing it to “Maxi-Me’s.” Gods invented to make some kind of sense out of the way human awareness and dominance erupted in the Neolithic and on into early history. It seems to me that this belief in power weaponized our Edifice of Thought.
Our belief in Power as a means to get what we want has poisoned human agency. Any potential turn towards Love and away from abuse is easily de-railed as we ttempt to use power, “just this once!” for “good.” This…, anti-pragmatism? Is just another lie.
Our obsession with power is fueld by our sense of our own weakness. What the powerful most fear is exposure that they are the weakest of all of us. Made pathetic by their mania.
Creatures have no powers. What we do have availble to us is strength. A creature holds a certain energy that animates us. A creature can be more or less energetic. More or less strong, capable, fortunate. Creature-hood implies a relationship with the energies available to one and as creatures we have agency. We can act within these relationships.
Fortune can never be guaranteed. As soon as we attempt to hold onto fortune, the result of chance and circumstance; we destroy it and ourselves along with everyone and everything.
In our state of weakness, resulting from our belief in power, we abet in our continued ifantilization. Even when we recognize evil; the only possible outcome of our belief in power; we insist that continuing to be led by fear and projection is the only way to be. We either fall into pragmatism and claim, “It’s complicated.” Or we insist that power is simply in the wrong hands, “If only I had power!” or some variant. Failing to recognize that every “ism” is equally bankrupt in its expectation that power can be held; we “revolt,” turning the wheel over but doing nothing to change the direction of our destiny.
There are glimmers of resistance to abuse. But in every case they are limited and constrained, chained, by a refusal to disavow this belief in power. We tend not to cage and eat dogs in this country. China tends to spend its wealth on infrastructure, for the people. Iran is saying No to genocide. Russia holds up the US’s hipocracies. Norway, is mining the deep sea; and, along with Demark and Japan are progressive and kill whales.
The pattern is obvious. Without dropping our insistense that, “We know what to do with power!” We condemn every reflex away from abuse to failure as the overall condition of the world deteriorates under the combined onslaught of different flavors of this ultimate lie.
Stop waiting for Weimar. All the horrors the different flavors of abuse use to frighten us into continued obedience are already here. Stop waiting to show what you would do if Weimar was here. We’re already doing it. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
I recently verbalized what it was that I have wanted since my awareness dawned as a young child. All I wanted, all I want, is for someone to recognize the horrors and simply stop.
All I wanted, all I want, is for someone to recognize the horrors and simply stop.
As an adult. As adults. However unsatisfying it may seem, I can only urge that we each do what we can to recognize the horrors and then to stop our part in it.
Ego loves to jump to “conclusions!” To that I also say, “Stop.”
What keeps us weak, as opposed to developing the strengths we are capable of, is our refusal to take this simple yet profound step.
It’s up to each of us to find what this stopping means to us. How we might accomplish it. Just know that this time of revelation reveals this to be our only non-futile option.
Stop.
Stop.
I love this, there are many revelations to pursue here.
I never considered the relationship between the endless con of "becoming" and the increasingly dark story we're telling ourselves, prompted by the many fear-mongering tactics of the gutted ones holding so-called power, which is only violence. Dystopia becomes the shadow version of Heaven.
A merger with "Heaven's" expanded ego and a merger with a dystopic "family business" are different forms of a similar resistance to revelation.
But like Kennedy said, we can't help fearing where the fear itself will take us. In some ways, the democrats are peddling a form of optimistic delusion and the trumpers are peddling a form of dystopian salvation -- merging with the family business, even if only as pawns. I see what is happening in Haiti, where gangs have decimated every shred of decency, and I don't want to go there.
The question of whether we're living through an abrupt change in the style of society is a good one to raise. As you say, perhaps not. But there are tipping points into madness for some people that the rest of us might not experience as such (at first). If too many of the illusions of a heavenly America are torn to shreds too quickly, then a tipping point is possible, and then the empire's exported terrors come rebounding home to an unnecessary degree, adding chaos to chaos. I would like this empire to fall as gently as possible so as not to add havoc to havoc. Sometimes a loss of a single lynchpin -- such as the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision -- reifies the dystopian fairy tale, and then the horrors of Haiti spread here too.
Sometimes I wonder if we "deserve" to face the exported terrors (the shadow we created)? But I think that's part of the morality of a dystopian tale. Maybe it's necessary to hold the system of corruption aloft a little longer, not because we believe in it or are merely seeking the higher end of a sinking ship, but because it matters how this empire falls. And a morality tale that includes barbarians sacking Rome from within and without can't help anyone anywhere. If this edifice of thought lands abruptly, then I think its diseased body upon explosion will pollute everything at once. And then the self-fulfilling prophecy of dystopian stories may create an abrupt change in style of society. Already I see ominously black versions of the US flag flying on Maga porches along the dirt roads. Dirty forms of the same old flag.
But there's something new and tremendous in what you say to this point. Non-participation. A revelatory state of mind that is no longer taken in by any of the bullshit, which sees (as clearly laid out here) the connection between the corruption of a smiley faced version of empire and the putrid and abruptly altered face of a dystopian empire. Although I don't want the second, I do recognize the revelation in this essay, that they are two sides of the same coin. I'm leaving it suspended. Election day nears, we'll soon find out whether it matters or not.
But the main thrust of what you're saying is that we have to face the fact that we're not heroes in waiting, right? Because that keeps us in the orbit of Self as Power, just as the election keeps us in the orbit of governmental power. In the same way "power" isolates the individual as an external force operating on Others, heroes are more or less atomized power units, units of violence, as we have imagined them. Power and heroism constantly tempt the individual to "become" an automated force of history propelled by currents of power.
The essay also leaves this question suspended -- what does it mean to act rightly in the absence of a somewhat dystopian/heavenly story of the hero's journey?
I think your essay landed on the single most important question -- what does it mean to cease participating at the root level? Not as an escape from the world. To step out of the world our stories are creating all at once, without the lines of old narratives chaining us to repetitive scripts?
I think non-participation refers to a very specific thing -- not being fooled (being constantly in a state of revelation). What we do or don't do matters less than our refusal to get lost in the lies of either form of fascism, whether the smiley form or the dystopian form.
I was threatened recently by an old friend who has (like Ionesco wrote) turned into a rhinoceros of fascism, merely because I told him he was kidding himself and that he was telling himself a bedtime story, believing himself to be the modern cavalry coming to save us all by burning down the whole village, me included. He couldn't take the revelation. He became somebody I never expected.
My wife told me that a friend of a friend of hers was recently held at knife-point with her whole family in a rented house in the Dominican Republic. They cut her neck a little, and she was bleeding. If the drama had escalated it was obvious she'd be killed. But she suddenly felt an upwelling of unanticipated empathy for the man holding her by knifepoint. She did not avert her gaze from him -- it was a revelatory gaze -- and she lost her fear and stared at him with unanticipated, unimaginable kindness, with sorrow and pity. And quickly, almost immediately, the whole drama quieted, and the men left them all alive.