The Fascist Switch

Let's take a look at two gestalts through which one sees poltics. One is the Designer. The Designer is the one who looks at political life from the design perspective and decides how to redesign it as he sees fit. To get there one moves, like the circle in Flatland, out of the plane in which people lie and takes a vantage above. An adolescent perspective, it becomes a totalitarian tendency if it persists into adulthood. If a cult of personality is involved, or a General Will, then it is also the fascistic species of totalitarianism.

The other gestalt is the Individual. This is the gestalt in the plane of human life and with no design vantage. Here one sees only a sea of individuals surrounding one, and one doesn't conjure up an elevated design platform upon which to play master of puppets. This is the libertarian perspective.

The Designer, the fascist, is of leftist economical philosophy. As human nature is given free rein to flourish, economic inequalities develop amongst individuals. The Designer necessarily opposes these inequalities and supports egalitarianism because he wants to change the way the world is and inequality is the way the world is. Therefore, given the nature of freedom and humanity, fascism is essentially leftist.

Inside us, there is a switch between the Designer and the Individual. If you turn off the switch, you come to see only an aggregate of individuals with no General Will. It becomes clear that the Designer is a narcissist and an oppressor with no regard for the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The importance of protecting the individual from Designers and preventing the rise of statism becomes obvious. This realization causes the switch from liberalism at 20 to conservatism at 40.

The connection between fascism and leftism (or "liberalism") now seems to be fourfold:

1. The philosophical connection that fascism must oppose economic liberty.
2. The inherently totalitarian intent of leftism, its sharing the vantage of Designer with fascism.
3. Philosophical and psychological nihilism shared by leftism and fascism. This is the belief that, other than envy, nausea and self-loathing (if those can count as values) no values normally upheld by people are inherently real. Hence the Designer's intent to undertake the exciting political design project of replacing these fake values with the new ones of General Will unity and egalitarianism.
4. The historical connections explained by Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism.

Many who have the switch turned on inside themselves - who take the Designer's perspective - don't realize that this is a delusional perspective that may simply be switched off. The Designer is a hypnotic state with an off switch. These people have a duty to turn it off when they discover this state of affairs. The Designer has already killed 100 million and immiserated many more, so the duty is considerable.