From Granola to Fascism Without a Wrong Turn

This was an excellent essay tackling purity logic which is represented on both extremes of any argument. At the extremes, both sides feel they have the best line on what everyone should do, and if you become as enlightened as they are you'll feel the same way.

Thus they feel free to push you as hard as they want to so that you come to the same epiphany they've had.

The Zen fascist doesn't want to punish you out of hatred. He wants to cleanse you for your own good. He has done the work. He has achieved a higher state. And he would very much like you to achieve it too, whether you want to or not. - Zen fascists will control you...

Both the counterculture and the authoritarian right are obsessed with purity. The targets differ wildly — the body, the race, the culture, the blood, the food, the mind. But the cognitive shape is identical. And that shared shape is the on-ramp. It's how you can get from granola to fascism without ever feeling like you've made a wrong turn.

I've never thought of it exactly like this, that both sides are coming from the standpoint that they have the most pure beliefs and they should bring them to you. Though Moral Ambition does address this when the author suggests that to form a coalition now you must agree with whatever the most enlightened, or militant depending on your point of view, person in the room supports. You can't just form a group that looks at bike safety on the roads, you must also support any other progressive ideal with the same fervour, or the coalition breaks up.

The sixties were intoxicating — new therapies, new drugs, new ways of thinking about consciousness and the self. If ordinary human life was an artificial constraint, then removing the constraint was liberation. That felt good. It felt progressive. It felt a lot better than dying in a pointless war Vietnam.

What nobody wanted to examine too carefully was the hierarchy buried in the logic. If some people had unlocked their potential and others hadn't, that was, structurally speaking, a claim about superior and inferior human beings. The language was therapeutic. The underlying architecture was hierarchical.

I saw this all the time in my church background. Someone would have their literal come to Jesus moment, myself included, and then they'd preach about how much more spiritual they were and you just hadn't figured it out yet. But of course you should listen to them because they were so pure and you'd get there eventually.

I even went through a phase like this and hurt people who mattered very much to me.

It also made something explicit that the Human Potential Movement had kept implicit: that your suffering was your fault, that your failure was your fault, and that transcending both was a matter of will and clarity[4]. This was purity logic applied to the psyche. The contaminated mind — limited, victimised, stuck in old patterns — could be cleaned. The clean mind was free.

Capitalism wants you to believe you picked your life, but when your school has been underfunded because it hasn't met performance goals and your parents have to work multiple jobs at minimum wage, and your city is spread out so it can't afford the infrastructure it has...did you choose to be at this school or this family, or did the system saddle you with a weight around your neck making it hard to succeed?

Manufacturing Happy Citizens talked about this as it addressed the science of happiness¹. Most of it tells you that you're personally responsible for everything that happens to you and ignores the structural parts of society that make it easy for some to succeed and others to never have a chance².

Neoliberalism also wants us to fall into the myth of individual action³ because group action has the chance to make real changes. But if we believe that a simple social media post has the power for change, we'll never take the harder next step to get out in the street and take a true risk that has the chance to affect structural change.

Then the rich tell themselves that those with less are going to be inspired by their success and do more to succeed⁴, which makes it their duty to succeed and show it off⁵. I saw this all over in The Third Door. The author continues to tell readers to just find another way to succeed, while he has the financial support from his parents to drop out of school and spend a year trying to get interviews with famous people. He can drop everything and get on a plane to fly across the world, while skipping his final exams, because the guy who invited him was famous and successful. Alex Banayan is entirely out of touch, telling himself that he's a self-made person, while you watch him spend any penny he has on terrible risks, knowing full well that his parents have more than enough money to support him and he's taking no real risks.

But because of the myth of the self-made man⁶, he can tell himself that he did it all himself.

The wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline that became visible during COVID — the yoga teachers sharing QAnon memes, the organic food enthusiasts finding themselves on Telegram channels with people whose other interests they would, under other circumstances, find alarming — wasn't spontaneous radicalisation. It was targeted. The pipeline was built, deliberately, by people who understood that a person who already distrusts pharmaceutical companies, already believes in hidden knowledge, already thinks they've seen through one layer of official reality, is most of the way there.

Conspirituality was a whole book on the pipeline from wellness to conspiracy theory. You believe that you're doing something good for yourself, which is noble. But then you start to trust yourself and whatever guru you latch onto. You weigh their enlightened opinion above any scientific work that would contradict it. In fact, you may even give it more weight if it goes against established scientific consensus.

These gurus often hold to their ideas despite evidence. They happily ridicule scientists who change their opinion in the face of new evidence. They cling to their own superiority, convincing followers that their righteous unchanging belief is clearly right...because it hasn't changed.

We should celebrate changing your mind when you learn something new and view rigid adherence to a view as a sign of moral and mental weakness.

The Enlightened Moderate

The enlightened moderate is also a scary place to inhabit. This position would say that both sides have something worthwhile to say and we should listen to both sides. This avoids making any hard decisions and gives space to views that are harmful to humanity.

While I'm happy to listen to other views, I draw a line when it comes to racism, sexism, and other beliefs that treat humans as lower value beings because of physical traits they can't change. Nazis suck, and engaging in discussion with them turns life into a Nazi bar. Some shit you have to stamp out.