Society requires a socially agreed upon level of authoritarianism to enforce the socially agreed upon ruleset. No system of organisation or control is absent from authority, but trying to conflate functional social authority with forced authoritarianism has been something I’m seeing a lot more from fascist thinkers.
Authority: When the majority tell the government how they wish to be controlled.
Authoritarianism: When the government tells the majority how they will be controlled.
Huh… I see you set a bit of a rhetorical trap there, where disagreeing or countering would make me seem like one of these fascist thinkers. Nice. Might not have been intentional though.
Anyways, I see them as different steps along the same spectrum. Authority is a component of authoritarianism, but the presence of authority is not necessarily indicative of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is authority taken too far.
On that topic, non-authoritarian authority is not always a good thing, nor does good authority necessarily stem from the will of the people. Sometimes the masses really don’t know what’s best. That said, democracy is probably still the best paradigm humans can manage on a long term.
Whether the will of the masses is “right” or “wrong” is irrelevant, society as a construct is one of cooperation for mutual benefit and improved quality of life through cedeing control and authority to those who represent the will of the majority, so if the masses managed to corral themselves into society then the understanding of the benefit of cooperation is strong in the social consciousness.
A result of this is the understanding that anything that works against the will of the masses to benefit from cooperation is unsustainable because it involves exploitation of the least protected sections of society.
This means that anyone trying to abuse and mismanage social systems for their own selfish benefit (emotional, financial, or otherwise) are objectively harming society. Ergo, anything that restricts the will of the masses by allowing selfish minorities to exploit their way to wealth and power and to further let them diminish the capacity of the majority to benefit from social cooperation is forced without consent, we call these actions “fascist”.
Fascism was the default social structure, he who controls the resources controls the society, but instead of that being an elected government of the populace it was one guy and his family that abused their position to maintain that position however possible from the first time an ape stole another ape’s rock to a king stealing another king’s country.
Society has slowly been slowly wresting control from the selfish individual to support the masses as social consciousness grows, democracy was one of the biggest steps in that direction of taking the power out of the hands of fascists and putting it into the hands of the people. But it’s a work in progress, and those that are selfish and want to hold back the progress of social benefit are thusly called conservatives, because they wish to conserve the ability to abuse society for chance to gain more wealth and power than other people as opposed to contributing to society to increase the wealth and power of all the people.
Many of these fascist systems still exist and will take a significant about of time for society to claim more control away from fascist actors, there will always be an ebb and flow of fascism and selfishness in society but that lessens as time goes on. For example, the Democratic electoral system of the US government has been unable to avoid the influence of fascism over the years as evident by legal voter disenfranchisement through first past the post, non-preferential voting, gerrymandering, the electoral college, attempts to limit and remove citizens rights to engage with the electoral system by de-funding postal services and limiting mail voting, etc. These are all fascist claw backs attempting to regain selfish control over societies power structures for their percieved personal benefit.
Capitalism, a system integrated into almost all modern world cultures and societies is also a fascist concession that is a middle ground between kings owning everything in their kingdom to personal ownership and control, of course exploitation is still present under capitalism, because capitalism is just a stepping stone to a socially beneficial system not an end point of social development, it is also one of the last bastions of fascist control over wealth consolidation.
I could go on about how all these developments relate to issues in the social order and the inability for individuals to develop cognisance of the nuances of societies current place in human development but it’s starting to feel like rambling.
If anything I hope that something I said resonates and provides context and understanding of the complex weave that is human social development.
Kinda skimmed because that’s a really long essay, but:
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Fascism is a fairly specific thing. It’s not just anything that’s not democracy. Overapplying the term is a tool that allows you to condemn reasonable stances as absolute evil. Note that reasonable, used here, does not mean ideal or without caveats. If you can condemn every stance other than your own as absolute evil, that is radicalization. Radicalization can have its use, but it’s a dangerous thing. It needs to be focused. What is “Punch a Nazi” when capitalists are fascists too?
