Black Pill Bacillus
Image taken from Shaun of the Dead, as it’s much less gruesome than most versions of the zombie. Shambling dead bodies are a recurring image in 20th century folklore and 21st century pop culture.
For a time in the aughts, pop culture couldn’t get enough of zombies. Between the Max Brooks’s World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide, the television show The Walking Dead (an adaptation of the comic of the same name), and no end of films and video games, it was a pop culture phenomenon with little explanation. There was some theorizing that the ascendant type of undead reflected political fears – the effete, sexually promiscuous and damnably European Vampire was the liberal-as-object-of-fear, while the mindless, unwashed zombie was the Republican-as-object-of-fear. (Being a fan of Mark Fisher, I lay claim to the ghost as the proper leftist: neither properly present nor absent, and largely impossible to completely get rid of.)
While this dehumanization is something to be avoided, I do think that the metaphor of the zombie is useful for understanding the mechanisms of fascism, not the least because the zombie – in the modern conception – is often the product of a plague and the Republican Party is very clearly the party of plague. They also all seem to follow different rules in their different iterations: the zombie in one book or film or game was completely different from those in all of the others, yet they were recognizable as zombies, and just about never did the surviving humans actually call them “zombies.” Which, of course, makes the fact that just about every zombie movie is a childish, exterminationist fantasy a touch ironic: the media invites the viewer to project themselves onto the protagonists, but the human-shaped-but-morally-fine-to-kill enemy has many of the qualities of the people most vulnerable to this fantasy.
I want to discuss the idea that fascism is a kind of mind-virus. That is what this piece is going to concern.
This is important. Sometimes people don’t realize they’re on the wrong side right away. Image from “That Mitchell and Webb Look”.
Up until a few years ago, most discussions of fascism were limited to the discussion of fascism-in-power, the practice of fascism as exercised by state actors. There was little discussion of how, exactly, it got to that point. There were, of course, some: I’ve cited Umberto Eco’s excellent essay “Ur-Fascism” several times on this website, and I largely think that’s a good starting point, but it isn’t necessarily an end-point. I’ve also referenced “The Bastard Manifesto” episode of the podcast Behind the Bastards as a good resource, though it is much newer – part of a more recent trend towards dissection and analysis.
Notably, that last resource also takes the standpoint that hierarchy functions a bit like a virus.
In this piece, I don’t really want to concern myself with definitions of Fascism. There are many people who have tried to condense the information down and lay it out for the public. Much of it boils down to an attitude that emphasizes the exercise of active and direct violent power as an end in and of itself (with attendant exclusionary racial, sexual, linguistic, and national ideas.)
The title for this piece is partly derived from an alternate name for Y. Pestis, the bacteria that causes the black plague.
The infectious agent, though, is separate from the disease that it engenders. SARS-COV-2 causes the COVID-19 disease-event, it is the thing that makes it happen, but it is not COVID-19. Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death, manifested in Bubonic, Pneumonic, and Septecimic varieties. Different diseases from the same cause.
I think that the analogy of fascism-as-mind-virus can work the same way. Its different manifestations – whether Italian, German, Spanish, Chilean, or American – are a result of this same agent infecting people with different cultural backgrounds operating in different political systems. There are different social constructs for it to infect, and so a different outcome occurs. This doesn’t mean that there are different causes.
When looking at patient(s) zero, D’Annunzio certainly cuts a more interesting figure than Mussolini, but his legacy is somewhat more complicated. Notably, he is perhaps the only person that might be described accurately as an “anarcho-fascist”.
Now, while we could argue that there were movements with Fascist characteristics beforehand, the broadly acknowledged Patient Zero for Fascism was in Italy. Whether you pin it on Benito Mussolini or Gabriele D'Annunzio is largely immaterial. Both men became ultra-nationalists around the time of World War II – Mussolini, beforehand, was a socialist, while D’Annunzio had a syndicalist co-writer for the constitution of Impresa di Fiume (the bizarre episode in the early twenties when D’Annunzio – a narcissistic poet and war hero – captured the Croatian seaport of Rijeka and ruled it as a pirate principality for four years.) This does not mean that Fascism in any manifestation was leftist: it borrowed from leftist thinking in some ways, but it corrupted what it took, and most of it was simply window-dressing.
One of the more common accusations from the American Right is that the “Nazis were socialists” or the “Nazis were leftists” but the fact of the matter is that fascist economies – in Italy, in Germany, and most of all in Chile – were dedicated to privatization, to the point where it begins to look more like the armed robbery of the body politic than an actual political movement.
LBJ was objectively a monster, but he was correct enough when he said that “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
I bring this up first to dispel a common myth – that fascism is somehow left-wing – but secondly to lay the groundwork for an important bit of analysis: someone infected by the mind-virus must be left in such a state that they do not recognize that they are being robbed. They must be put into the mindset where it becomes good for a private entity to capture something that had been previously state-run and use it as a tool to extract wealth.
Here we have a division, one well-documented, between the Fascist leader, the Fascist leadership caste and the rank-and-file, I believe. The leadership caste is simply the elite of the prior order gone full mask-off: consider the American Business Plot of the 1930s, when business leaders tried to encourage Major General Smedley Butler (previously mentioned here) to lead an uprising against Roosevelt (a supremely bad choice on their part; I shudder to think of what might have happened if they had done their calculus a bit better and approached MacArthur.) They attempted to make Butler into their desired leader, because they thought he could mobilize the aggrieved veterans in support of their project.
The leader and the rank-and-file fascists are not necessarily part of the leadership caste, instead they are the people who swallow the lie, who come down with the most severe cases of the mind-virus. In the viral metaphor, the leadership caste are asymptomatic carriers, the leader is patient zero, and the rank-and-file are those infected later.
While some fascist movements are staunchly pro-Clerical, others will go so far as to murder an archbishop during mass.
The symptoms of the infection are blind devotion to the leader and a violent hierarchization – generally along racial and sexual lines. Racial minorities are cast as inferior, and I have yet to see any evidence of a fascist movement that is sexually egalitarian. This is not to say that it’s not possible: both race and gender are social constructs, and my thinking is that fascism will co-opt any social constructs that it can to produce a sharply hierarchized space; hence the sharply pro-Catholic attitude that it took in Mexico and Spain, which was not a possibility in other parts of Latin America (such as El Salvador) where it became somewhat more anti-clerical (at least to the point of gunning down an Archbishop saying Mass.)
This violent hierarchization leads someone infected by the mind-virus not just to dominate others but also to submit: there is a reverence for those above and nothing but despite for those below. For many people wrapped up in it (so far as I can tell), this involves both self-loathing and self-aggrandizement. For the leader – and those near the leader who aren’t part of the cynical fascist leadership caste – it’s purely the latter. For most rank-and-file types, there’s a large admixture of the former.
Where do we see this today?
The “Neo” in “Neo-fascist”
Right now, in the U.S.A, there’s an upwelling Fascist movement. This is the group that’s represented by the insurrectionist right actors involved in the event I’ve (admittedly inaccurately) called “the Vape Store Putsch”, and I’m going to keep riding that joke. There are others, though.
The title of this piece as a whole — “Black Pill Bacillus” — refers to a strand of the online incel movement (previously mentioned here), which I’ve written about previously. In this movement, which fed into the alt-right, which feeds into the same ideological base of the insurrectionists, the Black Pill is derived from their appropriation of the “Red Pill/Blue Pill” dilemma from the Matrix (which is a fairly explicit transgender allegory). The Black Pill is described in a Quartz article entitled “The alt-right is creating its own dialect. Here’s the dictionary” by Nikhil Sonnad and Tim Squirrell as follows:
However, taking the “black pill” means seeing that the whole system is broken, and the only solution is to refuse to engage with it at all. This is in contrast with seeking to take advantage of women through psychological manipulation, as advocated by many of those in r/TheRedPill and r/PickUpArtist communities.
So we have three options: the “blue pill” for these people is accepting the world as it is and saying that nothing’s wrong. The “red pill” is attempting to better your situation through predatory behavior. The “black pill” is attacking the foundation of the situation (which, notably, is based on an incomplete understanding, because of the American blindspot with regard to material causes and conditions). As the authors of this piece note “Some of the incels’ idols are seen as having taken the black pill, most notably Santa Barbara mass murderer Elliot Rodger, who is often referred to (only semi-ironically) as ‘Saint Elliot’ for having ‘martyred’ himself to the incel cause.” Importantly, this is not predatory behavior, because in instances of predation, the predator benefits in some way.
I’d say “remember when conspiracies were just harmless and weird?” but they never were.
I see the “black pill”, in a general sense, as the main vector of spread. It’s not simply despair, though despair is a key component. It’s despair married to the mutant epistemology of conspiratorial thinking: you can never fix this, but if you follow these simple steps you can burn it all down.
As noted in the first episode of Behind the Insurrections, one of Robert Evans’s limited series, he and rapper Propaganda (Jason Petty), go over the history (which does, admittedly, privilege Evans’s interpretation, though he does his research and it’s an interpretation I’m a fan of,) of the first fascist power grab documented as such, Mussolini’s March on Rome. In their conversation, they go over how the worker’s movement in the lead-up to World War I utterly failed to stop the war from unfolding, despite their plans for a general strike, and Mussolini’s turn towards ardent ultra-nationalism as a result of the despair he felt at this failure. They used the term “black pilled”.
What does it mean to be “black pilled”?
To understand Incels, just imagine that the “heroes” (quotation marks present due to the whole rape-by-deception thing) of Revenge of the Nerds realized they could just buy guns.
It’s the coincidence of despair and conspiratorial thinking. In the arena of sex and gender, this produces incels, who believe that everyone but them is having sex and they’re a sort of biological runoff that needs to take revenge on everyone else (“Chads”, “Stacys”, and “Beckys” as they term it, in their infantalized vocabulary derived from movies about high school.) There’s a strict, violent hierarchization at work, but ironically it’s a sterile movement due to the tendency of would-be-leaders to engage in ultimately suicidal lone actions (thus becoming martyrs in the process.)
Of course, this coincidence occurs elsewhere, allied with different conspiratorial thinking and infecting different social constructs along the way. The vector for this infection is largely found in memes, these days. This terminology spreads elsewhere, and sadly there are a lot of people at-risk for this current infection.
Consider: the population base for the traditional fascist movements was the lower middle class (the petit bourgeois in Marxist terms, though I have my own thoughts on class,) who were experiencing pressure from both sides as their economic fortunes worsened and the lower classes began to agitate for change. They had a little piece of the pie, so to speak, and were worried about the proletariat coming and taking it (here we see the zombie thing, mirrored: “the poors are going to come and take my stuff and make me poor just like them!”) this is because they can’t see a real difference between themselves and the ultra-wealthy. They have a bad analysis of the world.
This portion isn’t going away anytime soon: consider the insurrectionists from the sixth. No person with a real job has the time or resources to go to Washington, D.C. on a working day, dress up in a stupid costume, and try to storm congress. Those were small business owners and off-duty police and military.
I slapped my forehead when I found out that DW was referring to the “Neo-Fascist Hipster” as a “Nipster.”
But I’m more interested in what seems to be the nontraditional element. So here’s another question: where does the hipster neofascist come from?
In a fairly recent episode of the American Hysteria podcast presented by Chelsea Weber Smith, about – of all things – beards, has an interesting bit to say about this (the podcast also has excellent episodes such as “Falling for Fascism” and “Charismatic Leaders”, which are material to the discussion at hand). This is an additional bit that was posted to go along with the episode on hipsters. It suggested that a portion of the vogue for facial hair among hipsters – who, I would argue, should be understood as an ex-middle class subculture – is a sublimated imitation of their suburban father’s well-manicured lawn. The way that the beard, mustache, or sideburns (this last being the objectively superior facial hair) is shaped and trimmed mimics the thick, rich carpet of grass or well-shaped bush: being unable to afford a house with a lawn, the received urge to imitate the parent becomes an overly enthusiastic consumption of mustache wax, beard oil, and clippers.
As an ex-middle class subculture, the hipster is very much like the petit bourgeois that’s the traditional base for fascism, but they have been proletarianized to a large degree. Their grievance is justified to the same degree that their parent’s possession of wealth is. So they are an overripe base population for infection, and the emergence of social networks and image boards makes it much easier for them to pass the infection along.
The hipster fascist, I would argue, radicalized the boomer fascist that stormed the capitol without a plan.
Endemic Disease
This all is ignoring an important part of the analysis: I make a point to talk about Italy as the first documented fascist movement, and I have referenced American fascism several times, but this current fascist movement isn’t the first and only example of American fascism, nor was the business plot.
Andrew Jackson was (considered) a war-hero who was carried to national power on a wave of class resentment, who used that power to trample democratic norms and commit genocide.
The United States hosts the fascist mind-virus the way that we host the flu. It’s endemic, periodically reemerging. It’s tempting to say that it happens every forty years or so (Andrew Jackson to the Confederacy to the McKinley Presidency to the Business Plot to the Reagan era,) but I am fundamentally skeptical about the idea of recurring cycles in history, and this ignores the pervasive instances of microfascism.
Now, it may seem alarmist, and as if I am saying that the USA is a fascist state, and there are many intelligent people who argue that, I would not go that far. The USA, I would argue, is actually consistently proto-fascist, and that it has occasional flare-ups of Fascism. While I would point to those instances listed above as being important episodes in this history, it’s much more important to understand how it comes and goes.
We talk often about the end of fascism in Germany and Italy, but in Chile and Spain the confrontation against Fascism didn’t win. The fascist governments held power for a time (and drastically increased inequality,) and then relinquished power: democratically, in the case of Chile, and by naming a monarchic successor in the case of Spain (Juan Carlos I, to his credit, did transition to a constitutional monarchy.) This is not to say that the resulting states don’t still bear the scars of their fascist periods, and I would argue that there is a lingering trace of the mind-virus in them, the way that the varicella zoster virus causes chicken pox and then may return later as shingles.
Jackson was bad, but McKinley was worse. Leon Czolgosz did nothing wrong.
In my thinking, the USA has gone through fascist or fascistic periods in the course of its history – some characterized by a weakening of institutions similar to what we’ve seen recently (Andrew Jackson’s disdain for the Supreme Court comes to mind,) but possibly since the beginning, and then the fever breaks and the symptoms go away, but the virus is still present in the population. Sometimes, carriers of the mind-virus even end up in office.
Part of the reason that the attempted coup failed is because prior putsches and seizures of power have succeeded, and I would argue that the apparatuses of the last authoritarian seizure of power in the Bush years is still in place.
Mutant Epistemologies
(Note: after writing this, I decided to produce an expanded piece on the concept of “Mutant Epistemologies”, which will be coming later this week.)
In my thinking, this hinges upon the “black pill”, which I’m explaining as a coincidence of despair and conspiratorial thinking (there may be other aspects, but I think this is the formation.) The mutant epistemology of conspiratorial thinking provides an explanation for the despair and a supposed pathway out of it, but this is a snare. It only leads deeper into the mire.
The flat earth — represented by the Azimuthal projection here — is a classic form of mutant epistemology, but also perhaps not a lack of intelligence but an overapplication of critical thinking.
There’s a fault at the heart of all conspiracy theories: you can’t actually disprove them. This is because they’re not based on logic. They’re beliefs, more akin to a religious conviction than a coherent theory about the world. This is why I label them “mutant epistemologies”, because they’re not the result of bad information (though they do have a lot of that,) but the result of bad understanding. Someone in the grip of one of these mutant epistemologies might take perfectly sound and accurate information and produce an absolutely deluded worldview – it isn’t the computer scientist’s “garbage in, garbage out” problem, it’s a process that produces garbage. Consider the stories about Flat Earth true believers dismissing the results of their experiment because it produced information suggesting that their beliefs were wrong.
Which leads to the first actual piece of advice that I have to offer: do not dismiss these people as stupid, because the problem isn’t that they aren’t smart enough to understand that what they’re saying or doing is wrong, it’s that they are using all of their intellectual resources to justify it.
You can’t beat them with new information – it will be rejected or recontextualized to fit their narrative, – and I think we’ve all determined independently that they can’t be defeated by exposing the contradictions of their line of thinking.
What is to be done?
Look, as much as I’d like to say that we can easily end despair in three simple steps, that would just mean that I’m offering you a new mutant epistemology. We can’t. Not simply or permanently or easily, at least.
I’m an educator by trade. My inclination is to combat this with education. You don’t beat a harmful mutant epistemology by feeding more information into it and making more garbage. You don’t beat it by changing it either. You can’t do that.
Not directly, at least.
I and some other educators that I know have been trying to deal with this problem and the way that has been most successful has been to give people new tools to think critically with and new ways to handle information. As these new tools out-perform old tools and make their lives better in one way or another, they abandon the broken tools that the mutant epistemology did. Those had one benefit: they made the world extremely simple and explained their despair, justifying their immobility and their position in the hierarchy.
But, by making it clear to them that they can change and improve their situation by changing the tools that they are using to approach the situation, they go through the painful but necessary process of outgrowing their old way of thinking.
Look, quoting Sun Tzu is something that finance bros and guys wearing their sunglasses upside down on the back of their head love to do, but “it is best to win without fighting” is still pretty damned true.
This is part of why right wingers are so resistant to and resentful of efforts to teach critical thinking. They see people learning these skills and abandoning the party line. But they’re caught up in an old line of thinking, where you win a conflict by making the other person feel ashamed, and this isn’t really useful. You win the conflict by making the other person not want to fight anymore, and sometimes that means improving their situation.
Sometimes it also means punching a Nazi. I prefer the former, but I’m not about to argue that the latter has no place.