In the late ’80s, a friend of mine had a conversation with a couple of Trotskyist acquaintances, where she got them to admit that there just was no point in having any politics without addressing sustainability issues. Whereas I agree with her about this, there are clearly also political positions which allow for non-sustainable options, such as driving the human race to extinction for the sake of the planet. This is a form of accelerationism and I’ll return to it in another post, but in general, most people are expected to agree that the long-term survival of the human race, or a fraction of it, is something they could get on board with, and to be honest I do think that could be a positive thing. It would be hypocritical for someone with grandchildren to be anti-natalist, although they may have changed their minds since they had children or may have had children against their will or better judgement, so it is possible. Given the current forced-birth movement in the US, this is indeed a plausible scenario, and it has also been in the past. Nonetheless it doesn’t apply to me. Consequently, no opposition to effective measures being taken to extend our long-term survival is consistent with such politics. What I’m saying, to put it simply, is that if you believe people being around in the future is a good thing, you can’t oppose effective measures to manage, for instance, climate change. If you do, your politics are worthless in that respect.
So, suppose you are a supporter of the current fascistic régime in the United States. Leaving aside your support for fascism, for once maybe tolerating that as a viable political position, you cannot support opposition to environmental sustainability. It may be that the current approach to relieving climate change is ineffective, but it’s a reality and urgently needs addressing. You can question the effectiveness of the measures, but you can’t support one of the largest industrially-active nations in the world opposing attempts to do something about it, because if you do that your politics don’t matter. Policies are unlikely to be realised in a post-apocalyptic world.
Other measures being taken are, well I would say equally bad but in fact the sheer scale of the approach to climate change dwarfs the others. However, a major one of these is to erode pandemic readiness and the ability to counteract research into addressing the dangers of a new pandemic if it does occur, because the chances are that it will and that it’ll be more severe if, again, a nation of that size actively avoids doing something about bird ‘flu. Again this just means that many millions of people will die. Whatever leads to this mind set has to be opposed, again regardless of what one’s politics are further down the line from this.
So that’s one thing. What else?
That a lot of what’s going on is a distraction from other things which are taking place too. Trump himself is a distraction. In a sense he doesn’t matter. Nor does Elon Musk. There are not shadowy people behind a curtain orchestrating this either. This has been thrown up by the inevitable and impersonal economic and political forces operating within capitalism. Apparent leaders are insignificant on the whole, and by focussing on Trump we’re kind of playing into what “they” want. Nonetheless their actions are important. It’s also important to be wary about paying too much attention to them. That said, it’d be weird not to talk about these antics.
The very obvious one is Musk’s Nazi salute, and this in fact highlights a lot about the character of world leaders in recent decades. It seems edgelordy – deliberately provocative and extreme and possibly insincere. There are a couple of issues with his behaviour. One is that attempts have been made to excuse it on the basis of being on the spectrum. There are clearly aspects of this which do reflect this, for instance he may have expected his audience to return the salute, which obviously wouldn’t happen, but none of these are adequate excuses. That specific piece of behaviour may be associated with other behaviours, and in fact is, such as calling the caver who refused his submarine to rescue the scout troop in Thailand a paedophile, which demonstrate that he’s not fit to be in the role he’s been placed in, and that in fact is rather a long thread to be pulled regarding others in office. The real difficulty is that Musk is a fifty-three year old man behaving like a thirteen year old boy. This, one might think, is exceptional but unfortunately it isn’t, and it’s not new either. I first noticed this in about 1991 at the age of twenty-three when George Bush senior did himself no favours in the negotiations to prevent the Gulf War and again behaved like a juvenile. The world is being run by little boys. I’m not entirely keen on this characterisation because it seems insulting to little boys, but there’s a strong element of egocentrism and emotional immaturity in their behaviour. As I say, this isn’t new. Caligula and Nero spring to mind, for example. That said, we particularly cannot afford for men behaving like that to be in esteemed positions nowadays with the likes of the climate crisis, risk of weapons of mass destruction use and pandemics ready to rage across the planet.
Then there’s the question of Panama, Canada and Denmark. Panama, sadly, is business as usual because it seems very much to be the continuing pursuit of US foreign policy in Latin America which has been going on for a very long time now. The reason I want to focus here on what’s happening in the North is that Denmark and Canada are both in NATO. I also recognise the importance of self-determination for those living in Kalallit Nunaat, also known as Greenland, and Canada. The history of élite White people’s relationships with these peoples is liable to introduce more than a little nervousness into their reaction to Trump’s idea of Manifest Destiny here. In fact, this is also the case with ICE harassment of the Navajo and I’m guessing others in the past few days, on their own territory. I don’t want to ignore any of this but I do want to focus on Denmark because that’s what’s been made most prominent by the media lately.
Denmark is a NATO member, and famously an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all by the organisation. Clearly the US is a NATO member, implying that by doing this, Trump has attacked his own country, but more importantly the most obvious thing to do next would be for NATO members to declare war on the US. That wouldn’t be a good thing, and there are other practical considerations such as the situation in the Ukraine which mean that having been stimulated to shore up defences in Kalaallit Nunaat, resources may be taken away from other areas. At the moment, many Scandinavian citizens want their own nations to break off diplomatic relations with the US. It’s also worth bearing in mind that in a sense, Trump has declared war on his own nation, and this is very close to being true in the sense that even the people who voted for him are being ill-treated by the government. It’s not just a metaphor that this has happened, and it’s vital that we remember that millions of American citizens, many of whom would never have considered voting for him, are now going to suffer as a result of his election.
More widely, we have Starmer continuing, so far as I know, not to condemn the régime officially. We now have quite a number of wealthy Western nations who have been royally pissed off by their actions and it seems evident that some kind of alliance against them is becoming ever-more practical. Although I have little faith in FPTP, it seems to me now that voting for a party led by someone who has not openly condemned a fascist régime in spite of the likelihood of support from others is unacceptable and tantamount to supporting the fascists. I realise that Starmer doesn’t speak for everyone, but continuing to be a Labour MP or MSP in these circumstances is no longer okay. A breakaway left wing party does seem feasible but right now I feel I’ve reached the point where I can no longer reconcile supporting them with my conscience. And you may say this’ll just let the Conservatives back in, but the fact is that the Labour Party’s whole thing right now seems to be just saying they’re not the Tories, without actually doing much that’s any good. They’ve come out and said their priority is economic growth, which is reason enough to oppose them. But this is what’s happening in Britain, not America.
So I don’t know, other stuff may come up, I may have forgotten stuff and this has been a bit of a ramble, so what’s the take away from this? I suppose to return to my original point: if you support any régime which is actively working to worsen climate change and reduce biodiversity, you are either child-free or don’t care about your children or grandchildren, even if you are a fascist.
Since WordPress has become very annoying, insisting that I use the very fiddly Jetpack app or making it very difficult to use the in-browser editor, I’m writing this on a word processor. I don’t know how well it’ll transfer to the blog.
I’ve spent quite some time looking through various books about how to characterise fascism. The problem with doing this is that on the whole it’s portrayed negatively and criticised, and in a way this is very fair, but it does make it difficult to pin it down. Then it occurred to me that this is quite similar to trying to address the problem of paedophilia, about which I’ve written before. The difficulty there is that people don’t want to look at paedophilia and find it hard to assess and think about coldly and rationally, and again this is understandable, because most people find it icky. Unfortunately this can make it harder to prevent child sexual abuse because it means people misunderstand it. Paedophiles who want to avoid the temptation to abuse children sexually can’t get help unless they offend and the fact that most child sexual abusers are not paedophiles is obscured and that statement puzzles people who aren’t familiar with the problem.
Fascism is similar. Because people find it so horrific, and again rightly so, it tends to get used as an insult and also too broadly. Like most people, paedophilia disgusts me, and I think this reaction is appropriate to fascism too, but that doesn’t help anyone. It’s made it harder to track down a helpful approach to fascism which truly understands it, and just as there are paedophiles who can’t get help to prevent them offending, and the focus for preventing child sexual abuse is possibly in the wrong place and therefore less effective than it should be, so might the prevention of fascism be focussed in the wrong place and therefore be less effective. There’s also an overlap: Trump appears to be a paedophile himself, by his own admission, but again, maybe he just wants to sexually abuse his daughter for reasons of power rather than sexual attraction. It’s also public knowledge, incidentally, that he was involved with certain parties with Jeffrey Epstein, but to be fair so were a lot of other people who are thought of more positively. It doesn’t look good though.
OK, so I went back to a source which I used to find very clear and straightforward in my childhood: Pears Cyclopaedia. Not the 1956 edition from which I learned so much in the ‘70s, but the somewhat later 1962 edition. This has the benefit of being concise and also, having been written less than two decades after fascism and Nazism had been defeated in Germany and Italy, though not Spain or Portugal, it was very fresh in the minds of much of the readership, substantially because many of them had themselves risked their lives fighting it only a short time previously.
One way I’ve thought of fascism in the past is that it’s “business as usual”. That is, if you were somehow to send a leader such as Mussolini, Hitler, Salazar or Franco back to mediaeval Europe, their policies and practices would generally just be seen as normal, bearing in mind the reactionary nature of the attitude that accepts that normality exists. Their status as a non-monarch would be highly questionable of course, but what they actually advocated and practised wouldn’t be out of place. In a way, therefore, fascism is easy to understand. It’s just ordinary politics and as such something we should’ve grown out of in the past few centuries.
Here’s a summary of what Pears says about it. The liberation of thought, opening up of the world and release of business enterprise which took place in the Renaissance led to a new spirit in Europe and such other movements as the Reformation, the rise of capitalism, the struggle for democracy and ultimately the Industrial Revolution. Overtly, this led to a consensus about what ideals should be attained, although the exact methods for doing so differed. This bit is where left and right wing politics usually operated in the post-War period. Maybe not any more. Anyway, the values involved are, according to Pears: faith in reason and the possibility of human progress; the sanctity and dignity of human life; tolerance of a wide range of religious and political views; popular government and the obligations of the rulers to the ruled; freedom of thought and criticism; universal education; impartial justice and the rule of law; the desirability of universal peace. Fascism is the opposite of all this. Emotion rules reason, class inequality is seen as beneficial and the élite has a right to rule over the common people instead of democracy, because such a form of rule leads to action. Justice serves the state, not the people, war is desirable to enhance the power of the state and contrary opinions are forbidden. Most famously, races are unequal. Incidentally, although I don’t know much, I don’t think this applies to Mussolini as strongly as it does to Hitler.
One thing which may have escaped some people’s attention is the reversal of truth and falsehood as found in the recent Presidential campaign, and of course George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Doublethink is the ability to hold and accept two contradictory beliefs in the mind simultaneously. The clearest articulations here are the blatant lies such as the claim that immigrants were eating dogs and cats. My response to this when I heard it, incidentally, was to take it at face value and conclude that either they were not being properly provided for or that it was part of their culture. Being vegan, I recognise that eating dogs and cats is no worse than eating sheep or pigs. I’d hasten to add that I wouldn’t judge anyone for doing either. It turned out to be a claim made by someone established to have unpopular opinions which are not dislodged by any degree of evidence to the contrary, something that some people might call delusions. This is another thing that bothers me: I think the Republican Party and others elsewhere in the world are intentionally gaining votes from the mentally ill, and that again is a form of doublethink because their claim is that foreign governments are exporting the mentally ill to the US. Another claim circulating around is that state schools, known as public schools in the US, are carrying out “sex change operations” on children in the schools themselves without the consent of their parents. These are notoriously underfunded schools. Now that particular claim may not emanate directly from the Trump camp, but this is also important.
When book burning was carried out in Nazi Germany, it wasn’t at the Nazi Party’s behest but was a popular response. Hence this last claim may also be an independent opinion, and this is important because Trump’s victory is supported by the people. Trump may not intend to do all the things recommended by Project 2025, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from being put in danger by it because it emboldens hatred and violence.
I would say I’m telling it like it is here. However, a measured response is important. I do morally equate child sexual abuse and fascism, and when I say fascism I am perhaps lazily including the forthcoming régime. In some cases there will presumably be a literal overlap because child abusers may be protected by the régime. Don’t worry about the imposition of the death penalty for sexual offences by the way. That’s just for queers. Child abusers with the right connections will be fine. We are after all talking about arbitrary justice here. But I’m also Christian and as such commanded not to judge others, and I have known child sexual abusers who are sinners like the rest of us. The problem is that I can’t adopt the attitude of forgiving a child molestor because with a couple of exceptions I wasn’t the person being molested, so it isn’t my place to do the forgiving but someone else’s. I would, however, try to ensure that the people in question didn’t have any contact with children which could put them in harm’s way.
I analysed paedophilia and child sexual abuse elsewhere, and it’s not a pleasant experience having to look that in the face but it is informative. I’ll repeat what I said here because I think there are parallels. The most important thing to bear in mind is that most child sexual abusers are not paedophiles. When we say “paedophile”, we may be using the word very loosely, perhaps without even realising it. It doesn’t, however, make their acts any less appalling. This could also be applied to fascism. Perhaps saying “fascist” is to use the word loosely, and many of the people called fascist are not. Similarly, though, that doesn’t make them any better than fascists. This could apply in particular to people who vote fascist. That may well not make them fascist. They might simply be unaware of voting fascist, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t enabled and perpetrated evil acts.
Another aspect of paedophilia is that it can be a developmental disorder and possibly also the result of brain dysfunction due to a space-occupying lesion. There are two types of paedophiles depending on age range of the victims. Usually people going through adolescence fancy other adolescents. As they mature, they start to fancy older people, although many heterosexual men tend to be attracted to women in their mid-twenties regardless of their own age. I say this non-judgementally although it seems unfortunate to me. This also means that people who are developmentally delayed are more likely to be paedophiles as adults. In other words, paedophilia is associated with learning disability. This must not be used as an excuse to conclude that every adult with a learning disability is a paedophile. Nor should it be used to think worse of adults with learning disabilities who are paedophiles. It should just be calmly assessed as a possibility, and perhaps in some cases with sufficient knowledge to lead to caution. There is an enormous risk of ableism here. The reason I mention it is that sympathy for fascism can be seen similarly. As I’ve already said, some people I know in this country who have voted for fascist parties are in fact learning disabled.
Paedophiles who are also child sexual abusers often have impulse control problems. Here I would focus on the idea of the fascist emphasis on unthinking action. There’s a TV sketch, I can’t remember its origin, of someone trying to defuse an unexploded bomb, doing the usual meticulous and hazardous work and agonising over which wire to cut, then someone else comes along with a giant pair of wire cutters and slices through the whole lot, miraculously surviving. This is how I think of thoughtless action. Politically I have done the same thing sometimes myself. But maybe for some people the impulse is there and resisted, and others cave into that temptation. They might be lucky enough to come out unscathed, but they might end up completely destroying themselves. For the victims of paedophiles, the tragic combination is paedophilia combined with poor impulse control. Maybe the same is true for the victims of people who vote fascist.
Here’s the thing then. Be aware that I’m not judging you harshly in terms of your character because I don’t do that. Also be aware that to my mind voting or otherwise supporting fascism is morally about the same as being a child molester. If you yourself judge child molesting harshly, be aware that I try to restrain myself from judging either group of people, and there’s quite an overlap of course. Look at the following statements:
Supporting fascism doesn’t make you a bad person.
Being a paedophile doesn’t make you a bad person.
Do you agree with the first statement but not the second, both of them, the latter statement only or neither? There isn’t actually much to choose between them, ethically speaking.
Incidentally, support for paedophilia has been a political position in the past. It was advocated by the German Green Party in the 1980s. The Paedophile Information Exchange was part of the National Council for Civil Liberties in the 1970s. We have thankfully now left this behind. We have not, however, left fascism behind.
Okay, here we go then. A lot of stuff has been going around my mind recently and some of you may know that I had a certain conversation on Facebook. Facebook makes us all ill of course, so it’s not a wonderful idea to go on there in the first place. There was some possibly quite heated discussion – it’s hard to tell how it felt to the others, as is the nature of this kind of text-based, distant conversation – during which at least one person disputed my assertion, and at this point I realise I have to give more details.
I’ve tried to take the approach of ignoring current political events on this blog. There’s the obvious danger of division and there’s also the “current” bit, i.e. I’d be commenting on things on which I don’t have the benefit of hindsight or time to think over. Social media generally tends to reward hot takes which can be very harmful. I don’t want to fall into that. However, I can’t really not comment on what’s happening in the US because it seems very likely that it’ll have big consequences.
So I posted this:
The knee-jerk reaction is to unfriend fascists on here. I’m aware of two contradictory things:
I currently think that many people who voted for the fascist in question are easily manipulated and gullible. Using a dominant mental health paradigm, which I possibly shouldn’t, which regards abnormal behaviour as a symptom of psychiatric dysfunction in some way, the people concerned have mental health problems. As such they may deserve compassion. Also, being acquainted with members of marginalised groups (not me but other friends) makes it harder to hate them.
Maintaining contact with these people may put others in danger.
You shouldn’t be forcing people into making this decision, because you shouldn’t have supported a fascist. That is absolutely not okay. I shouldn’t even need to explain this. It’s fine to be irate at the status quo. This is not a justifiable response to that. Nor is it okay to have done this out of ignorance because you have a duty to keep yourself well-informed.
Isn’t it interesting how many White men have voted for him? That’s a generalisation, but it’s also true.
I don’t want to be forced into an echo chamber though.
Please don’t try to justify what you’ve done, because there is no justification. You should be able to see that.
I posted this a couple of days after I realised someone I thought of as a friend had voted for Donald Trump. I thought hard about not posting it. A discussion ensued during which a different person said that Trump was not fascist. In response I posted Francisco Franco’s comment on fascism:
Fascism, since that is the word that is used, fascism presents, wherever it manifests itself, characteristics which are varied to the extent that countries and national temperaments vary. It is essentially a defensive reaction of the organism, a manifestation of the desire to live, of the desire not to die, which at certain times seizes a whole people. So each people reacts in its own way, according to its conception of life. Our rising, here, has a Spanish meaning! What can it have in common with Hitlerism, which was, above all, a reaction against the state of things created by the defeat, and by the abdication and the despair that followed it?
Further, I posted a much longer piece by Benito Mussolini on the subject, which being rather long was probably not ideal. I also used my own very short definition: fascism is the political ideology holding duty to the nation state as the only or supreme duty. This has the merit of being memorable but lacks nuance. Finally, I posted Umberto Eco’s fourteen point characterisation of “ur-Fascism”. , without copy-pasting the content because I think the point here is for someone to work through the list themselves without goading or influence and reach their own conclusions. On reading through the list, once again it’s clear that Trump is fascist. People took issue with this claim and I had various thoughts, and then, today, I remembered “who I was”. I took a political theory module in the final year of my first degree and got firsts for everything I wrote, including the exam paper and various essays, in a department moreover which was probably dominated by liberal democracy while I was of course very left wing. I’m not just a random person posting naïve hot takes on the internet, and when someone disagrees with me on this particular subject, I shouldn’t assume they’re better informed than I am. Therefore the usual impostor syndrome definitely doesn’t apply here, although aging and lack of practice might, so I’m going to double down on this, but at the same time adopt an appropriately academic attitude towards it and do my research as well as drawing on prior knowledge and research which I did myself in the 1980s. For once this is not just someone voicing their uninformed opinion online.
One thing to address is that the word “fascism” is often thrown around as a term of abuse. Tempting though it may be to do this, it’s important to exercise restraint. There are all sorts of political ideologies out there and fascism is one of them. It’s demonised and analysed quite unsympathetically, and I do that myself, but at the end of the day it can be considered on an equal basis with other ideologies, such as liberal democracy, capitalism, neoliberalism, anarchism and socialism. It can just be a simple, straightforward description of a set of political beliefs and values. It’s difficult for me to write this out of fear that someone may think I’m sympathetic towards it when I absolutely am not, but it’s also important to shear off the “slur” aspect of the word. It does describe a political position, and there are questions about Donald Trump, the US Republican Party and the people who voted for him as president three times. Which of those people, if any, is accurately described as fascist? Does it matter?
It’s been claimed also, and this is interesting, that Donald Trump and the people around him are a new phenomenon in politics which don’t correspond to fascism even though they do have fascist elements. The main appeal this view makes is his apparent approval of and admiration for totalitarian dictators without regard to their attributed political leanings. This, I think, makes the mistake of thinking that there are actually any totalitarian socialist leaders out there. This is contradictory. Also, the time when socialist policies were actually pursued in earnest anywhere is long since over, so there is no socialist or communist head of state who can be viewed as such. There may have been such individuals recently – Venezuela comes to mind. However, he hasn’t praised the socialist leader of that country, so actually I stand by what I say: he’s a fascist. It seems to me that that objection is based on the idea of a level and balanced set of political circumstances in the world, which is not so. It’s false balance, basically, like the idea that flat Earthers and people who realise Earth is round deserve equal coverage.
Since this is a blog which has mentioned a political figure who lives in Florida, I should address a relevant issue: Florida wants to require paid political bloggers to register with the government. I don’t know if this became law, but it clearly violates the principle of freedom of speech and the fact that they wanted to do it suffices.
So I stand by what I see as the established fact that Donald Trump is fascist. If his supporters or the people who voted for him are uncomfortable with this fact, they may wish to re-adjust their view of the word. It isn’t always meant as an insult, although obviously I think it’s very bad indeed to be fascist. They may also want to re-think their decision in the light of this discomfort. That is, maybe they shouldn’t’ve done it in the first place. I’ve done things politically I regret too. I’m not proud of them but I do admit to them. I’m not admitting to them here, but I think various readers know what they are already. Next question: does voting for a fascist automatically make you one? Well no it doesn’t. You might be misinformed or ignorant. We’re all ignorant. We all know more or less nothing. That said, we have a duty to keep well-informed and educate ourselves, and to think critically. Schooling may make that difficult and biassed media definitely does, so it’s a struggle, but as I’ve said before there are recommendations in political theory regarding what one should do in the face of imperfect or absent information, namely follow what Rawls advocated for in his ‘Theory Of Justice’. I know I’m repeating myself, but if the Veil Of Ignorance really is as strong as Trump says it is, that basically means you are constrained to cleave either to social democracy or to socialism itself, because you don’t know what position you’ll end up in and for reasons of pure self-interest you would want to be treated equally in such a situation. This is for some reason lost on Trump supporters, but if you really believe you can’t trust the news media, and you really cannot, that much is true, you are constrained to be socialist, that is, if you believe there should be any government at all, and since they don’t believe, for instance, in defunding the police and do believe, as the slogan has it, that “Blue lives matter”, they do seem to believe that there should be government. I’ve been into this before, so I won’t repeat myself further.
Although I won’t be defending fascism as such, it’s important to understand it in the same way as it’s important to understand paedophilia, and one thing to bear in mind is that although it’s a bogeyman to a lot of people, capitalism has actually killed and ruined the lives of a lot more people than fascism, because the latter isn’t as good at recuperating and assimilating as the former and it may not be so good at hiding its evil. Fascism needs people to be constantly afraid of it. Capitalism is more like the soma of ‘Brave New World’: it seduces us through kindness. Fascism has a paradoxical honesty to it. Most people living in a fascist society know full well their lives are trash. Fascists don’t try to sell you happiness or succeed in portraying themselves as the good guys. That said, maybe a lot of people living in a fascist society are forced to kid themselves, at least outwardly, and I have no desire to live under such a régime. I’m trying to be honest, and that honesty has a selfish element as well as an altruistic one.
It’s also important to recognise that it isn’t about the cult of personality. They might want it to be, and the leader might think it’s about them, but like any other political phenomenon, fascism only coincidentally works through a particular individual, when it does. Circumstances and impersonal forces put the person who happens to be in the right place at the right time in a position which looks like leadership. Although it might not lead to the end of a fascist state, that leader’s death or assassination, or simply retirement, just leads to their replacement by another leader. This is seen, for instance, in North Korea. Those leaders are not free to implement merciful policies. Either they’ve been put where they are due to their hatefulness and viciousness or any attempt to be more altruistic will threaten the interests of others and lead to some kind of power struggle.
Unfriending people is merely a tokenistic gesture. It probably achieves little. However, there is a Specials song called ‘Racist Friend’ which illustrates things fairly well. I dislike the song as such because it’s simplistic and self-righteous in some ways. The line is, “If you know a racist who thinks he [sic] is your friend, now is the time. . . for that friendship to end”. The Two-Tone movement, though, was positive in many ways and this line is sung by Black people. As such, it comes across as a sincere and heartfelt plea and to some extent accusation – “how can you be friends with someone who hates me?”. The problem, of course, is that all White people benefit from racism, we’re oblivious of our prejudice, and systemic racism forces us apart with no personal malice or ill will. This is, incidentally, by no means a new idea. Even as a White person, I was aware of it at around the time the Specials were in the charts. Whatever you might think about the claims made against BLM is irrelevant and a form of ad hominem because the ideas existed more than forty years before any of that happened. In fact, woke Black people would’ve been aware of the issue decades before that, and no, I’m not apologising for using the word “woke” in this sense because being woke is a positive thing, about being aware of injustice. We Whites have the luxury of not needing to be aware of the idea.
So what I’d be doing by continuing to be “friends”, insofar as being Facebook friends with someone even is friendship, is wallowing in my White privilege. And yes, I am White, because it comes down to how one is predominantly perceived, but like many White people who may not be aware of it, I have Black relatives and am somewhat aware of my family history. That shouldn’t make any difference of course, but it does make it very personal. I have recent ancestors who went through the Door Of No Return in Gorée Island, and who were in all likelihood raped there by White men so that their mixed-race babies could be born into slavery and profit the Atlantic Slave Trade further. I’m not going to wrap myself in any fake mantle of Black or Mestiça identity because by God you would be hard-pressed to find a Whiter person than me anywhere in the world, but that is there, and even if you too are White maybe it’s there for you too. It could be closer to you than you think.
Because the thing is, the Democratic Party can engage in self-examination and take some of the blame for this situation, and although it’s not a good idea to pursue this too far, yes it is interesting how much control Elon Musk might have been able to exercise, but we’ve all seen where questioning electoral results leads in the US, so this too is best ignored, and regardless of its validity the fact remains that countless millions of American voters chose a fascist over a Black woman president. And yes, some of these were themselves women or members of ethnic minorities, but even the White men who voted for him have done so against their own best interests. I would’ve thought that the fact that their own daughters’ lives are put in danger by the overthrowing of Roe vs Wade would’ve been a good enough reason not to vote for him, but apparently not. Does anyone want to explain that to me? I honestly don’t get it. While I’m on the subject, I also don’t get why the evident Biblical support for abortion is ignored by sola scriptura Protestants.
Another issue is the poor moral character of the candidate. A rapist who says he wants to date his own daughter. I could make a longer list but there’s no need really as each of those should be enough to prevent him being elected. Even if you are a fascist, I fail to understand how you could vote for someone with either of those travesties on his record. It’s hardly even worth saying this by now.
So the guy’s a fascist and by voting for him you’d be approving of that fascism. He’s also a liar, so maybe we can’t trust him to be as fascist as he’s promised he will be, and of course he and his associates may not be competent enough to implement the program. Maybe all he’s trying to do is avoid being punished for his crimes. If that’s so, he’s still managed to terrify the marginalised and enable stochastic political violence against them. We know how this works. His words have already done a huge amount of damage.
Now I’m not in America of course, but in Britain, where Keir “Keith” Starmer was most enthusiastic in his congratulations at Trump’s win. So we have a Labour Prime Minister congratulating a fascist. It was bad enough when Chamberlain appeased Hitler, and no, Godwin’s Law doesn’t apply here and has been specifically rescinded – comparisons between Trump and Hitler are now acknowledged as valid and realistic without any impact on the power of an argument. We have a Prime Minister who seeks to ally our country with the most powerful fascist country on the planet. This is of course Realpolitik, but the population of the US is less than a twentieth of the world’s. Much of the rest of the planet is also under dictatorial or totalitarian control in one way or another, which makes it more complicated, but it just is not okay for him to do that and MPs who stay in the Labour Party after that statement don’t deserve to stay in office. There should in fact be a movement among them to leave and start their own party after that. I don’t see that happening.
There’s another thing to say too. I’ve expressed ire, as opposed to anger, in this post, but perhaps that ire is misplaced. I know several people who voted for Reform in this year’s general election here in the “U”K, and in fact they were by no means the malicious people one might have been led to expect. They were in fact either learning disabled, had clear mental health problems or just gullible. They were dupes. I don’t say this with any degree of pleasure or smugness because it’s not okay that these people have had their weaknesses exploited. I think the same is probably true in the US with Trump supporters. I also want to have faith in people’s wisdom, intelligence and altruism, but these people are able to look at Agenda 47 and Project 2025 and still support him. It isn’t a case of ignorance. I am prepared to believe it’s insanity, and this is where it gets interesting because I don’t simply believe that insanity is a brain dysfunction like angina is a heart dysfunction. I think it means something and has a social context. They’re trying to express something, certainly dissatisfaction with their lot, but I don’t really know what it means. So the question arises of whether I have the will and the strength to attempt to understand what the heck they’re doing. Nonetheless, it’s a basic principle that if someone has a harmful delusion, and the emphasis here is on harm because there are many delusions which need to be preserved because they’re good for mental health, it should never be confirmed by anything one says. What this means for people I’m in contact with is that I would basically use the “broken record” technique, where I continue to repeat “you voted for a fascist” over and over again ad nauseam every time I interact with them. That, though, comes across as puerile and pointless. The alternative is to unfriend them and block them.
But you know this, if you voted for him: you’ve been actively racist, sexist and homophobic, you’ve drastically hastened human extinction and if you have living female relatives you have put their lives in danger. You have done this. I don’t want to hear excuses or attempts to justify the unjustifiable. I don’t know if you knew what you were doing, but this is what you’ve done.
I mean, I don’t know. Please don’t come on here and try to make excuses. I’m not interested in listening any more. You haven’t listened. I want you out of my life. Go away.
When I was a child, I heard a school assembly radio programme which has stayed with me ever since. A man (it would be back then) decided to seek the most powerful person in the world. I can’t remember the details of the exact chain except that it ended with Jesus, which it would because it was an assembly programme in the days before they had fully embraced multiculturalism. That last bit didn’t particularly impress me as I was atheist at the time, although I do also see that given a theistic setting the idea that the Sovereign or other head of state is really at the top of the pyramid might be tempered in a healthy way by their own belief in God, that of the people around them or wider society. One aspect of theism which I think is often missed by anti-theists, and I won’t harp on about this because I don’t want to put anyone off reading this, which is in any case not primarily about religion, but still, is that it can act as a brake on arrogance and narcissism if the person involved genuinely believes rather than uses it to manipulate people.
Leaving that theistic aspect aside though, the chain can be illustrated fairly simply by a concrete set of examples. The Prime Minister can do nothing without her Civil Service and the mandate of the people, and perhaps also the Police and armed forces. They are ideally only upholding the law, and the law may be controlled by lobbyists and MPs with certain interests which defers power again to large companies. These in turn are controlled by their shareholders, which could be seen as a democratic aspect of economics except that many of them don’t act rationally or are, for instance, pension schemes constrained to maximise income and can’t legally make ethical decisions. Then there are the pensioners and employees, that is, ordinary members of society, who enable this situation, but we are ourselves persuaded not just by our own lives but also by the likes of the mass media. They in turn may have agenda but are also trying to sell advertising and papers, and the advertisers are promoting the interests of their companies and so on, in such a way that power and responsibility always seem to be absent from the location, away from oneself already, in which it is supposed to be situated. The buck doesn’t stop anywhere. Power and responsibility flee from the places you expect it to be.
There’s also the question of the people who appear to be in power. Alan Sugar, for example, wouldn’t have got anywhere if he’d sold good quality products which the public didn’t understand or feel a need for, and they could to some extent be manipulated to want it but there are limits. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are either blamed or thanked for a lot, but they were in different countries and were put there by social trends as well as propaganda. Their personalities were undoubtedly important but in another sense they were just people who happened to be in the “right” places and times. The policies they pursued had a lot in common because the time had come for those policies to be realistically implementable. It’s nothing to do with who they were, and this can be seen in the fact that they were leaders in different parts of the world.
And this is the heart of the matter. If all you can do when you get elected is enact policies which someone else would have had to if they had been, surely your power is an illusion? You can propose any policy you like before you’ve been elected, but if they deviate more than a certain extent from what other candidates are proposing, they will lose you the election, and if you get elected you are likely to find yourself unable to enact the policies you propose unless they’re even closer to what we’re all used to. Therefore, even politicians are just figureheads most of the time.
This is why Donald Trump puzzled me. It seemed to me that a billionaire ostensibly working outside the political arena has more freedom and power than a billionaire president of the United States, who has to work within certain parameters and is somewhat more closely scrutinised. Presidents and other heads of state only do what their bosses in the private sector tell them to. Therefore, Trump seemed to be voluntarily surrendering power when he ran for President. I can think of two explanations for this. One is that he never intended to win and didn’t know what to do when he got there, and also didn’t consider it in advance, and the other is that he may have felt he was able to make a difference, perhaps for himself alone but still a difference, because he didn’t understand the nature of the office.
Even a dictator is constrained into behaving in a certain way. Whereas his actions may be vicious and heartless, it’s the nature of the job and whereas it may fit their character and values, they may not be able to behave in any other way and avoid being deposed or assassinated.
This is not a long or sophisticated political or philosophical post. There isn’t really that much to say about it to be honest. It’s just an explanation for why I tend to put inverted commas around the word “power”. In fact nobody has any power at all. History just throws people into particular conditions and circumstances constrain their possible actions. That’s it.
This is from Wish.com and will be removed on request. But are you sure you want to?
Would you like to make money from home in your spare time selling small pyramids to your friends and family? You can use them to preserve food and keep blades such as razors sharp. But the main way you make money doing this is by signing up other people to sell pyramids to their friends and families and passing it up to the person above you in the chain. You will recover this cost by having the people below you send money up from their own recruitments further down. Everyone’s a winner and the only reason everyone doesn’t do it is their negativity and because they’re not trying hard enough. If you fail at this, it’s on you.
Let me take you back to 1977. At that time, I’d just left one primary school for another, and at this new primary school many of the children were involved in a scheme where they sent letters to several of their friends and received picture postcards back from them and the people those friends sent them would send them back, and so on. I took part in this and didn’t receive a single card back, but other pupils apparently did, or at least they were flashing around these postcards from exotic locations like Bulgaria and so forth. Time passed, and in 1978 I left that school. During the summer holidays, I received a chain letter from a former pupil at that school whom I’d only known vaguely and found quite annoying. The idea was to send six letters to people I knew, within a fortnight, who would in turn each send six letters, “and the chain has never been broken” for something like five years. For some reason I got really stressed out by this and in the end my father just photocopied one letter I wrote out six times and I sent six people them. I received nothing back. Also, in the process of doing so, I did some maths and calculated how many letters per generation that would be. In 1973, I think, the world population was 3 500 million, and at some point in 1978 it was 4 116 million. I worked out that if six letters were sent out per person after a fortnight, whose recipients each sent six more out and so on, the world would have been completely saturated within six months. Over a period of five years, or one hundred and thirty fortnights, the number of letters would have reached more than two googol. At that time, I didn’t use the word googol much and instead used the long scale then popular in Europe, so I worked out that it was in the sexdecillions. I still remember the thrill at coming up with the final result, because I liked the opportunity to use one of those arcane words for vast numbers. I also found it hugely reassuring because I realised I wasn’t letting anyone down.
Although neither of them worked, I don’t now know what the point of the second chain letter was at all, or with hindsight how I got so stressed out about it, except to say that I was a very anxious child. The picture postcard thing would’ve been nice if it had worked, but it didn’t, at least for me, and I’ve now become curious about the authenticity of the postcards I saw the other children showing off. In any case, all of these things are now referred to as pyramid schemes or MLMs – Multi-Level Marketing. Since my extensive scribbling with paper and pencil back in the late ’70s at the age of eleven, I’ve been aware that for whatever reason, they can’t work for most of the people involved with them. Whereas they might look good without the maths, the fact that everyone in the world has not participated in Tupperware or Avon means that they don’t for some reason. In countries where income has to be disclosed by law, the usual situation is that fewer than one percent of participants make any profit from an MLM.
I don’t want to harp on too much about pyramid schemes as such because so many other people do so, and do so better than I can, but I will just say a few things before I go on to discussing some other issues connected to them which are quite interesting. I have to admit myself that the distinctions between a pyramid scheme, MLM, network marketing and a Ponzi scheme are not clear, although I think the first three are probably the same thing and they’re called other things because of the bad name pyramid schemes have got. Strictly speaking, pyramid schemes don’t involve selling products, so for instance the chain letter I mentioned would’ve been a pyramid scheme if it had asked each recipient to send money to the previous person on the chain and ask for money from the next level of recipients. The postcard thing probably wasn’t a pyramid scheme because it didn’t directly involve money. MLMs involve products, bearing in mind that the word “product” can refer to goods or services. They might sell essential oils, cosmetics, electricity supply, or something more abstract such as self-help seminars or cryptocurrency. The person one sends money to is one’s “upline” and the person whence one receives it is the “downline”. So far as I can tell, MLMs and network marketing are synoyms. Ponzi schemes are slightly different. They involve people investing and being paid back for their investment by the manager of the portfolio by newly recruited people. All of these are destined to fail for most participants by their very structure, although for the people at the top they succeed, often by driving the downline into debt. They tend to be aimed at women who are home makers or primarily involved in parenting, and there’s a history behind that. They’re also sold as “empowering women”, when of course they do the opposite. Many MLMs have been started by people who are involved in other MLMs and they tend also to have hidden costs such as business and self-help seminars. Some people have been sold MLMs as a way out of poverty or to help pay tuition fees. This will of course have the opposite effect, and in the latter case could cause serious damage to career prospects because then you very probably will drop out of college because you won’t be able to afford it.
Back to my own experience. When I was training as a herbalist from the mid-’90s, another person involved in herbalism hesitantly suggested I participated in a pyramid scheme called Forever Living Products. They were concerned that it would be unethical to try to recruit me, but I did ask. FLP sell Aloe vera-based products, some of which are meant to be taken per os. I have a whole ‘nother blog on herbalism and home ed (there are connections but I don’t want to go off on too much of a tangent) but for the sake of convenience I’ll cover this on here. Aloe vera is primarily a laxative. It does have emollient (soothing) action, so it would probably work, for example, as an expectorant in small doses for example, and will inevitably have other actions, but it isn’t terribly versatile and the mucilage present in it, a polysaccharide which forms a kind of slippery fluid in combination with water, can be found in local, indigenous species such as Althaea officinalis and Plantago psyllium. The latter is in fact probably the cheapest of all herbal remedies. FLP has a division which is said to be the largest cultivator of their plant in the world, situated in North America. The products tend to be sold for a wide range of indications to people who have not received any consultation, often on the grounds that they help you lose weight. It is very difficult to help someone lose weight safely by herbal methods because it acts against the physiological bias of the body, which is to gain weight in healthy circumstances, so in order to help someone lose weight you basically have to make them ill. Obviously there are healthy strategies regarding diet, exercise and psychology which can be productive, but in all probability Aloe vera, like many other remedies, only works temporarily and because it’s a stimulating laxative, which should hardly ever be used. In other words, the way FLP markets its products flies in the face of good herbal practice.
MLMs also distort relationships because they tend to encourage people to sell to their family, friends and acquaintances and cut people out who won’t buy. The chain letter above also indicates a common phenomenon, described as the “hunbot”. Named after their stereotypical tendency to refer to people as “hun”, short for “honey”, on social media, a hunbot is stereotypically a fairly young mother who tends to contact acquaintances, often from the past, just in order to sell them stuff or attempt to recruit them into the scheme while appearing superficially friendly. My male school acquaintance is a mild example of that whom I’m happy to report does contradict the stereotype by being male, and the pressure was rather mild as well, but I never knew him that well and it had been some time since I’d had anything to do with him. All of this also links into toxic positivity, the belief that one must avoid negative thoughts at all times, which can naturally be very harmful and has some link with New Age spirituality.
This brings me to the cult-like aspect of MLMs. I’ve been into the issue of identifying cult-like behaviour already when I talked about it with Trump, but briefly the following criteria can be identified:
Great or excessive devotion to a person, idea or thing.
The use of thought-reform programs to persuade, control and socialise members.
Inducing states of psychological dependence.
Exploitation of members to advance the leaders’ goals.
Psychological harm to members, families and the community.
All these things can be fairly easily identified in MLMs. Members are expected to devote their lives to the process of recruiting people and shifting products, are isolated from potential contrary voices, sent to what amount to brainwashing seminars, exploited to make the upline, and ultimately the very top person, richer and have their perception of reality and relationships with others distorted. For instance, they may use personal crises such as falling seriously ill or being bereaved as opportunities to sell people stuff, be encouraged to cut ties with family members and friends who are concerned about them, and made to blame themselves for their failure when in fact the whole system is destined to fail for almost everyone involved. There’s also emphasis on the wealthy lifestyle rather than the value of the work or products themselves.
As I’ve said, the target of many of these schemes is “stay at home moms”, as the American phrase has it. This is a clue as to how they originated. The MLM capital of the world is Salt Lake City in Utah, and legislation in Utah is particularly friendly to their development and promotion. This is of course also where the Mormons are based. I don’t want to generalise here, but there is surely some tendency for Mormons to promote the kind of lifestyle where husbands do paid work in a workplace separate from the home and mothers spend their time parenting and doing housework, cooking and the like, in the home. This situation particularly lends itself to MLMs. Another aspect of these schemes is their proselytising nature, which can again be seen as inherited from Christian-like religious movements such as the Latter-Day Saints. Many parallels can be made between the evangelical faiths and network marketing, and there are even churches which are religious institutions in purely legal terms, but actually exist to carry on this kind of activity. This type of business also tends to proliferate within churches, and this is where I start to become a little concerned about my own activity.
Again, there’s an issue of demarcation here. This is not Home Ed And Herbs, one of my other blogs, but I can’t really avoid going into the nature of my day job, as was, at this point. Before I do this though, I want to emphasise one thing. There is copious good-quality evidence regarding the efficacy of herbal medicine and I don’t have any real doubts about it. I have plenty of clinical findings which correlate to the aims of the treatment plans my patients pursue with me when adherence is close, such as blood pressure, peak flow measurements, joint mobility, anything you like. And this is in conditions which have lasted for years. I am not questioning any of that. Even so, as already illustrated, network marketing poisons everything it touches and consequently essential oils and herbal remedy MLMs tarnish the reputation of their products in all sorts of ways. They may or may not be of good quality and may or may not be appropriately used. This is the perennial capitalist problem of use and exchange value alienation. That said, there is a serious problem with herbalism as a profession, and it isn’t unique in this, but it has been described by herbalists themselves as a pyramid scheme. Hear me out.
At the time I was qualifying as a herbalist, ninety percent of the students were female, which corresponds to MLM proportions. Nine out of ten students dropped out before the end of the course. It’s basically impossible to make a living as a practicing herbalist and most people who stay in the profession manage to do so by teaching, writing books, endorsing products or teaching CPD. I haven’t done this because I don’t think it’s a good idea to encourage people to imagine they can make a living out of doing this. Herbalism is fine. What it isn’t is a feasible way of making a living and it can only really ever be a side hustle for most people.
This is emphatically not deliberate. Herbalists act in good faith and the pyramidal nature of the situation is not our fault. The problem is that I, and probably many other people, am partly motivated by the desire to make a living and support my family with it. It’s also part of a much wider problem which can be observed elsewhere in the world of paid work, notably the performing arts. Most people who become authors, actors, artists or musicians cannot make a living that way and have to supplement their incomes in other ways. There are probably many other examples. In fact, the proliferation of degrees generally may lead to similar consequences for much of the population in developed countries. I just happen to be able to observe herbalism at close range.
Donald Trump is of course famous for his endorsement of MLMs. He’s been involved in at least two: ACN and The Trump Network. The first is primarily a utility company. Well actually it isn’t, because MLMs are always primarily MLMs. By this I mean that the real drive in the company is always going to be to get more people to sign up rather than on their goods and services, but this is what’s supposed to face the world, as it were. It was accused in 2002 of switching utility services to consumers without consent, which in fact is something which happened to us perpetrated by a different company at about the same time when we first bought a mobile phone, so it may have been common practice at the time. This is not so much to excuse it as to observe that things have been pretty bad for a long time, but I suppose we all know that. Later on, Trump recommended investing in ACN without disclosing his involvement in it. This was while he was president. They were also served a cease-and-desist order for being a pyramid scheme in 2010. As for the Trump Network (I’m not sure how to captalise that, unlike him), it was a pretty standard vitamin and “health” product scheme which he lent his name to, which encouraged many people to join for some unknown reason. It’s probably quite important to learn how that thought process happens, so the fact that this is unknown is rather hazardous.
One of the most remarkable schemes is NXIVM, pronounced “nexium”. This was a somewhat EST-like sex cult which looked like an MLM on the outside and which branded women with red hot irons with their logo, selling them into sex slavery. Its founder, Keith Raniere, used to be in the ‘Guinness Book Of Records’ as having the highest recorded IQ score ever and is now serving a 120-year jail term. It seems to have been a personal growth seminar and commune, and has more cultish characteristics than many other schemes, but even so is quite typical in that the features of proselytism and brainwashing are found in many other organisations of this nature. Incidentally, EST has a website but there’s no way I’m linking to that so you get Wikipedia on that link.
Perhaps rather disappointingly to those who haven’t been watching it closely for a long time, the Body Shop has also been involved in MLM. This paragraph would have to be peppered with a lot of “allegèdly”‘s for me to go into their activities since, and even before, their foundation in other ways, but leaving those aside there is a section of the company called “The Body Shop At Home” which does practice this. And before you go thinking that LUSH is better, whereas I’m not aware of them being involved in such a scheme, I think when it comes down to it if you want to have ethical dealings, you should probably just do as much as possible yourself. I don’t know which cosmetics companies come out of this well really.
Online criticism of MLMs has become a lot more prominent recently, particularly on Reddit and YouTube. There are disputes going on within this and MLM-organised backlashes to it, so it’s all a bit complicated, but one thing I have noticed about these is that they tend to see MLMs everywhere. This doesn’t mean they aren’t everywhere, and the real situation is more, so to speak, ideological in nature. That’s not a criticism incidentally. I don’t think there’s necessarily any problem with coming up with a body of theories and general Weltanschauung to explain social phenomena in the political sphere. However, the views expressed by vocal anti-MLMers do tend to include many things which would not previously have been thought of as connected, in particular religious cults. And the theories do have explanatory power. For instance, the concentration of MLMs in Salt Lake City and the corresponding friendly legislation makes a lot more sense if the two are linked. The issue is that when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Consequently, if you come out of a general perspective of opposing these schemes and analysing them to work out exactly what’s wrong with them, when your purview begins to dilate, it wouldn’t be surprising if you tend to see them in the same way. At the same time, I come from a vaguely Marxist perspective, and likewise I see these phenomena in Marxist terms. Given that a lot of anti-MLMers are American, they may not have had the opportunity to encounter much Marxist theory in everyday life or their education, and consequently they have what amounts to quite a productive ideology which could in theory expand into an overarching social theory which lacks the stigma Marxism has been given in that country. At the same time, at least as far as YouTubers are concerned, they need to think of their audiences and continue to portray these businesses in the same vein, and this is a difficult line to tread. This is where the issue of commercial interests comes to bear on them. Again, like a good Marxist I don’t blame them for that because it’s economic determinism. And in fact it’s working against network marketing and this is a good thing, because as well as being effective and accurate propaganda, the YT advertising algorithm is plonking MLM ads on their content, where it won’t fool anyone and it means their profits are to some extent being funnelled towards people who are working on their downfall. And that’s all absolutely fine. Good for them.
A Box Of Chocolates 