It's Meant To Grind You Down: Authoritarianism Feeds Off Despair

We are inundated with the unbearable. And it takes a toll.

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Seven workers for the aid-group World Central Kitchen were killed by Israel while delivering food to starving Palestinians. Aspiring autocrat Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the matter, acknowledging it was a tragedy while acknowledging “It happens in war.” Rather than resulting from a misfired munition, it appears this took place with multiple targeted strikes. WCK and other aid groups have already announced that they will pause their efforts to get supplies to Palestinians, which isn’t likely to disappoint Netanyahu and his inner-circle.

This is yet another appalling development in a long line of appalling developments. In recent days even Israel itself has admitted to indiscriminately killing Palestinians whose only “crime” was crossing an invisible and unannounced boundary. In doing so, an innocent bystander instantly became a “terrorist” and their death supposedly warranted. If you’re on social media, the results of this terrible operation are omnipresent. We see pictures and video every day of children starving, of the dead and the suffering. Meanwhile, what we hear from the Biden Administration is contradictory at best and damning at worst. And, even as there have been international calls and resolutions for ceasefire, the killing continues.

Here at home, our culture grows more ill. In Donald Trump, we have a former president who has already tried to overthrow the government lashing out more violently than ever. He attacks enemies, real and imagined, lacing his speeches and statements with worsening rhetoric. He freely borrows from proto-fascistic language originating in America’s white supremacist past. When appealing to his followers, he consistently assures them they are facing an apocalyptic situation that only he can prevent. Dark forces are everywhere, preparing to herd them into camps and abuse their children. It isn’t enought to vote against them or to send money. They must be prepared for political violence and widespread bloodshed.

We are living in period of destabilization and radicalization. These things go hand-in-hand. As America’s hegemony falters - or, rather, as global capitalism finalizes its cannibalization of the American hegemony and seeks other means of proliferating, dragging us into a new era of oppression and exploitation - we were always going to see more and more discord here and around the world. This is how Russia invades Ukraine, how a terrorist attack in Israel spirals into ethnic cleaning and threatens to spill into a larger regional war, and how we’ve come to face an existential crisis in seemingly every corner of our lives. There is no way to avoid it anymore. Everywhere you turn is more and more evidence of worsening conditions.

It is likely that you, as you read Dispatches From A Collapsing State, as you read other similarly minded writers and analysts, are well aware of the actual nature of what is happening. You feel it, you see it, you understand it. And, because you have been able to recognize that there is a shift taking place, you are probably exhausted. This takes a toll, after all. You see clearly the direction this country and the world are heading in. And you feel the proper, significant weight of the moment.

If this were a just world the ethnic cleansing in Gaza would have never commenced. Our leaders would address the obvious and historic inequality that causes our decline. Human dignity would be paramount and conditions would improve. We know this. We’ve studied the past, we’ve studied ourselves, and we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this crisis is avoidable and addressable. And with every passing day that it worsens we are haunted by a pressing fear that this is the world as it is and as it will be.

That feeling, unfortunately, is at the very core of authoritarianism.

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Authoritarianism is a disease of the human heart.

It is not limited to a time or space or region. It is a byproduct of trauma, a consequence of atrophying of imagination. It is an awful, awful shadow that can fall upon us without so much as warning.

The essence of the authoritarian appeal begins with powerlessness. When it finds hold is when there seems no alternative to brute force and cruelty. It disguises itself as cold rationalism, telling the hopeful convert that any hope for a better world is misguided unless it comes at the expense of others. When the purveyors of Nazism and Fascism radicalized their followers, it was with a simple declaration: the nature of the world is brutality, and it is past time to accept that awful fact and wield it like a weapon.

You are meant, and I am sorry to tell you this, to either embrace that weapon, run from it in fear, or be smashed by it. Those are the conditions of widespread authoritarianism. You are to live in trying times and fall to them. You are to believe that the only lubrication for this machine is blood. You can supply someone else’s, sacrifice your own, or choose to turn away from the process and let the strongmen handle it for you. That is it. Violence, destruction, or submission.

If that sounds like an abusive relationship, that’s only because it should. Authoritarianism is widespread, systematic abuse spread among millions and billions. It seeks to crush your soul and cure you of any empathy or hope you may have. It wants to rid you of any imagination you have for a better, more human world and replace it with a calloused thirst for vengeance. It tells you the world may not getter better for us all, but if we are to steal the lives and resources and very life of others, you might find a pitiful facsimile of sustenance.

It manifests in many ways. Ideology, as I try and explain, is a story that helps smooth out the harshness of wants and needs. As I explored in The Midnight Kingdom: A History of Power, Paranoia, and the Coming Crisis, this is why authoritarianism rides on the back of religious, nationalist, and racist mythologies. It can appeal to you in any fashion it desires, clothing itself in eugenic crusades, religious necessity, manifest destiny, or the soothing promise of a violent higher power that looks, feels, and acts on the behalf of you.

Part of the reason authoritarianism bleeds into the liberal center is because it also communicates the inability to move beyond the present without oppression. It says, this world, as it works, is the only world we can have. There is no reforming it. There is no improving it. The only means of survival is widespread and tragic conflict, and anyone who things differently is naive and weak. To move the wheels of history an embrace of cruelty is necessary.

You don’t have to take the armband. You don’t have to pick up the rifle. You don’t have to stand at the entrance to the camp and personally inventory the human casualties. The idea that you have to participate is part of the convenient mythology of authoritarianism. It makes it almost imperceptible as long as we’re not forced at the point of a gun to get blood on our hands. This, for those keeping track, is why American oppression has been largely hidden. In the rise of globalism, we were told to focus on our ourselves and our wealth and the luxuries of empire. Earn, spend, live. Meanwhile, just out of our sight, the empire rolled throughout the world, opening new markets, stealing resources, and, unfortunately destroying lives.

Now, you are being given the opportunity to turn away. Become tired and worn out. Seek salvation in distraction and, once more, solace in baubles. As you look around the world, as you watch drones and AI and advanced weapons brutalize men, women, and children, as the state gathers more and more resources for its own defense and advancement, you are given a stark choice: risk your lives or simply look away.

What is hidden in this maelstrom is hope. Hope is savaged. Hope is sullied. Hope it treated as blasphemy. But authoritarianism is weak. Brittle. Terrified, honestly. It operates on a thin, thin tightrope because it depends on acquiescence. It can only win if good people do nothing and allow that shadow of the soul to spread.

The antidote to authoritarianism and fascism and nazism and all the forms of oppression and exploitation is hope. A defiant and revolutionary belief in the possibility of things getting better. In things changing in the interest of human dignity and democracy. It strikes a blow to authoritarians and fascists and Nazis to look at these disasters and feel the magnitude of the tragedy and believe, in spite of what you are told and fed, that it does not have to be this way.

I say this: authoritarianism is not just a Republican problem. It’s not just a Russian problem. It’s not just a problem as millions of people are being destroyed. It’s not just a problem as elections are stolen and rights and liberties are being aggressively eradicated. Authoritarianism is a trajectory. A momentum. You can vote and you can root on politicians, but this is not an easy out. The very basis of the post-war American project has been authoritarianism because it is the current installation of the capitalist project hellbent on subjugating peoples and fitting the entire world into a mold of hierarchical control.

The beginning of your resistance isn’t going to the ballot box. It’s making a personal and spiritual choice to see both the world as it is and how it could be. To defiantly protect your hope and belief that you deserve better, that everyone deserves better, that better, in spite of what you are told by authoritarians and institutionalists, that better is not only possible, but worth the fight.

This is not easy. I can’t lie to you and tell you that it is. But democracy is simply an expression of the amazing ability of humans to hold those two things simultaneously. A recognition of the brutality of these systems and the glimmer of a better tomorrow. It is a candle whose flame is under constant assault by the cold winds of savagery, and yet it continues to flicker.

Do not let it extinguish.