{"id":248,"date":"2012-07-01T04:27:13","date_gmt":"2012-06-30T21:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/?p=248"},"modified":"2012-10-18T23:12:51","modified_gmt":"2012-10-18T16:12:51","slug":"on-genetically-modified-fascism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/on-genetically-modified-fascism\/","title":{"rendered":"On Genetically Modified Fascism"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to\u00a0be expected that advances in physiology and psychology\u00a0will give governments much more control over individual\u00a0mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.\u00a0Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying\u00a0free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be\u00a0incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or\u00a0acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have\u00a0wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine,\u00a0from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and\u00a0the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable,\u00a0and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become\u00a0psychologically impossible. . . .\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2015\u00a0Bertrand Russell,1953<\/p>\n

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In The Scientific Outlook [PDF]<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Russell does us a great service decoding the complex and varied DNA of genetically modified fascism (as opposed to Rousseau’s state of nature giving rise to the organic social contract). \u00a0Two things really jump out at me, and both give me hope and inspiration. \u00a0Relatedly, I’m a huge fan of Ralph Nader’s vote with your dollars mantra, which I ironically heard defended yesterday on NPR by an American Enterprise Institute brain-truster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The first springs from my trust in the DeTocqueville version of American Exceptionalism, as opposed to the omnipotent Wilsonian version. \u00a0While it’s true that the great vampire squid is ever seeking to suck capital and livelihood from our people while aggregating power in service of authoritarian control, the American ideal, the dream, or what-have-you, is sitting fat on the other side of the scale. \u00a0By this I mean the people fighting in the new frontiers, constantly opening new gateways for the flow of information. \u00a0The American dream, as I see it, exists because of the recalcitrant nature of American’s founding \u2015\u00a0people refuse to be restrained in thought or commerce. \u00a0While the political maelstrom portrayed in the mainstream media resembles Marx’s grand play, there’s plenty of folks on the left and right silently fighting to defend the autonomy of their communities. \u00a0Places like New York City, western Massachusetts, and even Wyoming (as I recently learned) are constantly disaffected by the grand play, and while the fascist state fortifies in Washington, the people are hoarding the means of production to fight another day. \u00a0This gives me great hope.<\/div>\n
The Germans can sit on their new financial throne in Europe, enforcing austerity upon the Spaniards and Greeks, but they won’t win the long run by punishing their allies, regardless of the natural justice of the credit-debtor relationship. \u00a0Further, the centralization of financial power does nothing to improve productivity; it merely extends the credit lines of power, which one day will come due. \u00a0To clarify my point, it’s a house of cards. \u00a0While the Batan death march of globalization sends\u00a0decrepit pigs in\u00a0concentrated animal feeding operations<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Iowa\u00a0to China in the name of efficiency, the Chinese are merely a few years behind us in realizing their folly. \u00a0My hope springs from the belief that the timeframe it takes for the developing world to wake up to the long-term damage of rapid commercial expansion is shrinking.\u00a0Information flows faster than ever before, and it is the intrepid Americans, as the Pony Express, that accelerate its movement.<\/div>\n
This is all to say that Nader is correct: the best weapon in our democracy is the dollar. I’d be curious to know whether he agrees with my next thought, which inverts the dollar democracy concept and flies in the face of my own conscience. The Supreme Court upheld the Citizens United case as a First Amendment issue. \u00a0That is to say, the spending of money for speech is codified in our Bill of Rights. \u00a0Is it possible that this decision is actually in service of our cause? \u00a0Is it not our obligation to protect the ability for anyone or anything to “vote with their dollar” in our democracy? \u00a0If we take it away in this case, is it not likely to be taken away elsewhere? \u00a0While it’s unfortunate that corporations are people, too, fundamentally it is just another layer of the great cake of people. \u00a0In America we are free to organize by any number of institutional means \u2015\u00a0churches, municipalities, political parties, limited liability partnerships, and yes, corporations. \u00a0It is by that freedom that we also combat evil, combat those same corporations. \u00a0The corporation itself is not constituted as evil, though the people who run it and the interests of the boards which govern it may be the devil himself.<\/div>\n
The\u00a0varied constitutions of fascism, like the various layers of institutions represent just a cross-section of possible\u00a0genealogical\u00a0outcomes. \u00a0Just like religions, I see biogenic evolution at work. \u00a0I would also argue that there is human-induced genetic modification present in these mutated forms of faith and government. \u00a0Fundamentally, the eugenics freaks of right-wing Norway and the New World Order fly under the same banner. \u00a0They are temporal organizations of thought and power which can be disassembled rapidly and often collapse naturally, generationally, through the evolutionary force which compels survival of the fittest. \u00a0Bad ideas lose, and the old order is supplanted by the new, healthier order, and the great enabler of this process is information and possibly the human version of the “weak” force \u2015\u00a0human nature’s predilection toward the good.<\/div>\n
Anyhow, as principled left-libertarians, it is our duty to defend and proliferate the good, while also supporting the legal framework and freedom of speech mechanics which make our nation powerful in the first place. \u00a0As W.E.B. DuBois reminds us, there is a duality in our nature. \u00a0While on the one hand we hate the evil which persecutes and oppresses us, we also possess the same weapons within, and so we must be responsible to ourselves and to the good. \u00a0And so it goes, our eternal struggle.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to\u00a0be expected that advances in physiology and psychology\u00a0will give governments much more control over individual\u00a0mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries.\u00a0Fitche laid it down that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-definitions","category-wisdom","post_format-post-format-quote"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zschleyin.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}