82
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
82 points (96.6% liked)
Chapotraphouse
14284 readers
762 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
There's two kinds of fascists.
There are the people who become fascist because capitalism and imperialism and colonialism are in their material interests. These people need to defend the empire from decay, and they range from educated to very educated. They know exactly what they support because it benefits them, materially. They're petite bourgeois, they're settlers, etc. I think we can assign some determinism here, their beliefs are just a product of their social class and material conditions. Education can only help so much here.
Then there are the people who become fascists because they have false consciousness, and these people range from poorly educated to miseducated. They have no idea what they support, they don't understand their own material interests, and they simply fell into these beliefs because of social conditioning from the first group of fascists. In some cases, the material conditions themselves will force them to rise above their social conditioning because they'll educate themselves, but usually someone else needs to step in and educate them. They really do benefit from education, though, because they just need to be informed.
I don't know if culpability is ever actually useful to discuss in either of those cases. It doesn't really change what we have to do.
The first group are the strategists and puppet masters. The second group is cannon fodder.
I'm not sure I agree about the first group. Education in the west isn't about informing us about how the world actually works. Its a propaganda system to inculcate the belief that whatever you see in our society is "natural" and can't be any other way. Yeah, some know exactly what they're doing, but considering college kids can't read, I can't agree that the highly educated actually "know" what they're doing-they're repeating what they've been told, they're regurgitating their indoctrination. Some know exactly whats up, but I don't see how a population of illiterates became fascists because they actually understand material interests beyond "gimme gimme I want everything and I want it now". They're selfish because their ideology rewards it. There might be some unconscious things at play, they know they benefit from imperialism, but probably can't articulate it.
I do agree that their beliefs are simply the byproducts of the ideological system they're immersed in. And that is a determanistic thing. People are not as "free thinking" as we'd like to believe. Theres some saying out there that only something like 10% of people will ever break from their cultural conditioning and go their own way in life. Strangley correlates with the ~10% true literacy rate... Most people just seem to go along with whatevers around them. Not sure what to make with that observation though...
Idk, I'm just rambling at this point.
Even if they can't articulate these material forces in words their education gives them the correct sense of their place in the world. This cohort can correctly identify that they benefit from the empire, even if they wouldn't describe it in those terms.
Call that indoctrination if you like, but what this means is that further education can not fix them. Making them more educated will only make them more loyal to the empire because they'd have an ever better understanding of their own place within it.