This may be my new preferred term for Fascism. It is better in German but in English can be translated perhaps “Artificial Togetherness”, or “Artificial boundness”.
Here is what I want to assert: the urge to Ersatz Verbundenheit increases pari pasu with the decline in a society of a felt sense of place and meaning. Hitler never intended to return to the old, but to create something new, call it new, wall it in, then herd everyone he could inside and kill or conquer everyone on the outside.
Same with the Communists, who added to this “new normal” the presence of continuous conflict, which created continual fear that one might accidentally be found on the wrong side, which led to people often herding themselves into enclosures with moving walls, but within which they felt relatively safe.
Self evidently there is a sickness at the core of this. It is the feeling of a herd animal left to stray, desperately seeking its pack and the relative safety therein.
Nothing is less natural to human beings than developing and seeking out our own individual moral code. Little is harder than facing, negotiating, and creatively integrating true difference.
Put another way, curiosity and openness are far from easy virtues. Within our own grouping both courage and compassion come relatively easy. They had and have evolutionary benefit, whatever you take that word to mean. But moving tribe to tribe without feeling lost: this is hard.
Over the past century or two, our tribal affiliations have been hammered continually. We are told and have been shown that many of our most cherished beliefs are arbitrary and “unscientific”. Efforts have been made to make science a tribe, but it is ill suited to this purpose. Tribalism in science leads to bad science, which itself undermines the core assumption, that we can “all come together” in science. This is bad science relying on worse philosophy.
But we need better answers to why the world is losing its mind. Why are smart, ostensibly “educated” people clinging in mobs to ideas,methods, and emotional gestalts which in history always lead to screams of terror and loss, to lifeless eyes in mass graves, to large masses of joyless, glazed facrs tramping indifferently to work they do only because the alternative is death or prison. Why?
Here is the core idea of Ersatz Verbundenheit: if I feel alone and lost, I will no longer feel alone and lost if I join a mob. And that mob, in turn, should have the power to force EVERYONE to join or die. And when that is done my existential anxiety and aloneness is palliated well enough that with low grade continual violence I can continue to not kill myself.
In Nationalistic Fascism the main vehicle of violence is war and conquest.
In Group based Fascism there is war, but to that is added tribal warfare, which is to say way between the artificially bound and arbitrary groupings which vary by time and place. The “bougeoisie”, certainly—which is thd middle class I will remind you many Leftists still disingenuously claim nowadays to care about—but whatever else may be needed from time to time to keep the water boiling into violence.
Ponder that “transphobe” was not a thing any of us had heard about when Obama was first elected. Government mandates that 14 year olds—or EIGHT YEAR OLDS— be allowed BY LAW to undergo irreversible surgeries more or less on a whim would have seemed preposterous. But here we are.
Creating enemies is the core action of a group which lacks a stable sense of place and purpose. The grouping itself is constituted amd furthered in induced tribal conflict. They can only be them in hating us.
There is no rest there and no peace. It is the “home” only of the manic, suicidal and delusional.
What the world needs is freedom and steadily increasing emotional intelligence, which allows difference to become good and useful and generative. In a perfect world all of us are simultaneously tribes of one and children of both God, humankind, and the Earth.
One last note: both the words Fasism and Religion refer to “binding”. The Latin “religio” literally means to bind together, making another translation of my German “Artificial or manufactured Religion.”
And the Fasces, of course, is a bound bundle of sticks with an axehead attached. The sticks symbolize the power of the mob, as directed by thr Dictator. The axe symbolizes the violence which is the nature of such as unnatural grouping.
I say let the dust fall where it may, and twigs and branches remain ungathered.
Let humankind learn to live in peace. So may we all pray, each in our own way.