Fascization | Depression in power

Fascist figures like Trump and Siegmund seem so attractive because they offer activation instead of powerlessness - but this is exactly how fascisation resembles a depressive structure. Photo: Imago Images/Unsplash [M] Hardly anyone seems undamaged at the moment. Everyone is kind of crazy. And those who still think they are sensible have usually simply retreated into privacy from which they regularly shake their heads at the desperate state of the world and the images of war, protest and catastrophes are accepted like the change in the weather. The powerlessness is covered up with life goals, personal growth, vacation plans or, if you can, saving for stocks and acquiring property. Their lifestyles still seem largely intact, but upon closer inspection most of them are in crisis, the family is shaken, the love relationship is marked by perseverance, the people are broken and condensed into independent coping mechanisms. It is the normality of a life in the precariousness of the constant crisis.

There used to be a bet that the insecurity of living conditions could perhaps be the ground on which people would be ready for an end to the civil order - a good end, of course. The broken nuclear family biographies could have given rise to other types of relationships; the end of homeownership from house projects in gentrified cities; from the circle of political friendships an alternative bond of meaningful social relationships; The broken stereotype becomes a real diversity, a real otherness. “Another world is possible” was the political slogan at the millennium. All that remains is the threatening suspicion that the world will actually look very different very soon, whether due to climate catastrophe, AI rule or new varieties of fascism.

During what feels like the end of the world, life in its social mediation continues quite normally. As I said, you can plan vacations, save for your pension or gamble on the stock market, you can turn on the television or stream of your choice and get the program you want. One of the biggest recent successes was the reality show “Love is Blind,” the US original of which is currently running in a new season. In it, the singles, damaged by the alienation of the world and the yoke of dating, long for a "deep emotional connection" and are crammed into so-called pods, where they cannot see the other person, but can get to know each other's souls. And then they have to get married. It is quite easy to see that with the enormous success of this series format, the most regressive form of love, marriage, is returning to the stage. Apparently, in these uncertain times, which leave them with little hope for anything better, people want back the misfortune from which social liberalization had just led them out.

Why do people anticipate the loss that seems to threaten them in the face of the coming devastation?

There is something symptomatic about this “blind love” – otherwise it would not be such a mass-successful format. Although it is constantly protested, it is not the dream that is finally being lived out here. Rather, it is an anticipation of the nightmare that one was running from in the outside world. To escape the catastrophe, they lock themselves up and just want to marry anyone; It should be “forever” – the troubles of life should finally be over. And in a way, the blind love of those who turn away from the world is like the blind rage of those who want to see it burn. The question is, why do people already anticipate the loss that seems to threaten them in the face of the coming devastation? Why do they abandon the claim to a liberated or at least better life and cling to a deceptive remnant of the existing ideology? These questions point to a real pattern that runs through the supposedly declining liberal society. And perhaps the answers contain an explanation for the regression that is now considered fascism everywhere: the destruction of freedom and equality that people want - as absurd as it may seem.

After years of trivializing and misdiagnosing the rise of the right as populism - to make it appear like a democratic phenomenon - or a shift to the right - to make it appear like a sudden movement from outside - people have recently jumped to describing the current situation as fascism. There were discussions about the appropriateness of the term for a while, but now left-liberal circles seem to agree that anyone who doesn't want to talk about fascism should just keep quiet.

This is certainly not just wrong. I myself wrote years ago in this newspaper about the signs of the fascistization of culture, for example in the most popular German film “Fack ju Göthe”. In this work, the imposter teacher Zeki Müller (Elias M'Barek) bullies and fights his way into becoming a student and audience favorite. When a student collapses under bullying in the film, Müller initiates a proto-fascist initiation rite in which everyone takes off their clothes, shouts and unites into a community that welcomes anyone who takes their place in the order. In the same text, I noted about the success of "comedians" like Luke Mockridge and Chris Tall that their infantile, rascally humor was a result of their over-identification with the humiliation and peer pressure of their school days - and Chris Tall's incitement to the audience, "We're going to burn the place down today - so it's basically a Chris Tall night!" was the logical continuation of this.

Meanwhile, subtle interpretations are not needed to recognize contemporary fascist tendencies. Where, in view of the multiple crises between climate, war and capitalism, emancipation seems nowhere in sight, people are once again aggressively falling on the consolation of nationalism, with trade wars and "America First" or with the AfD's "It begins here" in war-ready states of ethno-pluralistic communities. Against: The enemy is marked, deported, locked in camps or has to freeze or drown at external borders; Breaking the law with a system, government by executive order, synchronization against equality, “normality” is invoked with brutality. But despite all the superlatives in the description of these circumstances - be it to finally wake up the public or at least to sell a newspaper - the explanation of these conditions falls by the wayside. Whether it is fascism or not, this dispute helped in many places to overcome the painful question of why people want misanthropy, violence and harshness so much.

Fascism supposedly frees us from the role of victim by offering social perpetratorship, which at the same time is supposed to relieve us of any moral scruples.

The basics of fascism theory include the insight that fascism is a crisis phenomenon in the liberal-capitalist order. In the face of the generalized crisis, fascism has a basic mechanism to make itself attractive: activation. Fascist ideology transforms diffuse social suffering and powerlessness into blind activity. He supposedly frees himself from the role of victim by offering social perpetratorship, which at the same time is supposed to relieve one of any moral scruples. Yes, he ultimately turns the superego instance of instinctual renunciation and culture itself into an enemy against which one can vent the aggressions of social humiliation. When a Trump or even an Ulrich Siegmund acts as a figure of redemption, it is as an avenging angel. And it is not for nothing that the path of contemporary fascism led through the “culture war” and the devaluation of progressive ideas and politics. While every reasonable objection to the equal rights of people is derided as a "moral dictatorship," freed from morality, the law of the stronger returned, making it attractive to feel strong. Strength in fascism comes from those who participate, i.e. who allow themselves to be activated.

Fascism, one could say, is an extreme form of anticipation of catastrophe. Before a civilizational collapse crumbles the thin veneer of equality between people and before the earth becomes so uninhabitable that life becomes a fight for survival, the fascist community takes its own freedom. She realizes what threatens herself. It makes the violence and fear a brutal reality that was always lurking on the horizon in capitalist society with its order of double freedom - free from direct rule, but also free from all possibilities of changing anything about the indirect rule. What it promises to preserve is, paradoxically, a kind of self-determination: sovereignty, the sacred cow of the right. And be it that you have to pay the price of obedience and loyalty. There is something manic about this activation - and precisely in this it has an inner connection to depression.

The pattern of anticipated catastrophe is not only found in the anticipatory obedience of companies that abandoned their diversity code; science, whose research proposals were quickly free of offensive terms; the public events canceled due to fear of AfD criticism; of politics and the media, which move from castigating the illiberal to invoking a defensive community. It can be found in another social phenomenon that at first glance seems far removed from the fascist cult of strength and toughness: depression. For the year 2024, the Health Atlas of Germany states that 12.39 percent of people in Germany were suffering from depression. However, the diagnosis of such a “widespread disease” often includes the idea that depression – as an illness – is already the problem. Here too, the clear findings all too quickly obscure the actually important questions.

This is why mental suffering has received enormous attention in recent years, but at the same time there is no understanding of its causes. For a long time, the lifestyle topic of mental health was trending on social media, but it either degenerated into one of the levers of self-optimization to be happy and healthy, or became a paradoxical status symbol. So depression is seen as something hindering that needs to be overcome, using tricks and hacks. Or it is integrated as part of the personality. Perhaps your character type tends towards melancholy and is therefore at one end of the spectrum between empathy and narcissism that is often quoted in social media? As a mostly positive counterpart to the toxic narcissist, introverted empaths are characterized by affection and compassion, but are quickly exhausted in social situations and therefore tend to isolate themselves.

It is a mistaken assumption that personalities are just like that. This ability to empathize can be the result of character maturation processes. Or you are empathetic because you had to be, because you had to learn to stabilize the social structure on which you are dependent because of an emotionally abusive or violent parental home, perhaps with addiction problems or other mental illnesses. On closer inspection, narcissistic personalities also turn out to be a reaction to underlying trauma, a stabilization mechanism and a way to exist at all. The fact that there is a spectrum in between shows that they are two sides of the same coin.

Being able to understand characters not as givens but as surface phenomena also offers access to depression. This is also an expression of a deeper trauma, and a very specific one. What people “with” depression learn first: depression is not their suffering that they have to fight against. Rather, this represents a kind of protective mechanism of the soul that is intended to protect against even greater suffering or “death”. This counterintuitive mechanism is like a self-imposed attack on the ego, which is still better than the threat of external destruction. The fear of retraumatization and existential destabilization leads to a strange mixture of activity and passivity, active passivation, neither fight nor retreat, but rather playing dead in order to survive.

Just as manic destruction is a facilitating activity in fascism, depressive self-destruction is protection through the anticipated invulnerability of the ego. And what connects these two mechanisms is that anticipation already realizes what is to be feared. In contrast to fascism, there is at least an awareness of depression that it somehow requires treatment and, in the best case, does not simply go back to normal. So what would be the expectation if one were to seek treatment with such a disposition? Generally speaking: deal with the underlying trauma. And that roughly means changing the conditions so that the anticipatory defensive reaction is no longer necessary.

Now, of course, this is not about mere psychologization. Society cannot be understood as if it were the character of an individual. But the other way around, it can be said to a certain extent that our character develops a structure because the structured relationships are its model and its basis. And so it is true that combating symptoms cannot change much about the underlying suffering. It is well known that it is not for nothing that the basic claim of the left is to "overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, and contemptible being" (Marx).

However, this imperative itself has become such an abstraction that it is hardly possible to do anything meaningful with it - especially not in circumstances that appear neither immediately transparent as man-made nor at all changeable. This condition is part of social powerlessness as well as the depressive feeling that there will never be a way out of the hole into which one falls. Therapeutically it makes sense to find a way out of this hopelessness, but not with perseverance slogans or false hopes; not with populist politics and betting on the next mass protests that should finally bring movement to the situation; not with the claim to dismiss criticism of one's own movement as denunciation. The remedy, however, is to explain why and to what extent powerlessness is not the problem, but rather an expression of the fate. Depth psychology or psychoanalysis may be suitable for the depressed patient. The means for emancipatory change in society is ideology criticism.

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