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I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
EDIT: Well that comment didn't last long. Here's the original:
If my employee is on TV and says rude things about a major client of mine, should the government ban me from firing them? From my perspective as a business owner in this hypothetical, it seems more the authoritarian government is the one that forces me to keep shitty and unliked employees around even if they're costing my business reputation.
Could anyone tell who he was working for from the video, and did he said anything at all relating to their business?
If you want to say "a company should be able to fire and hire whoever they want, for any reason" there's entire books of labour law that would need to be abolished to stop the government from being "authoritarian".
Well
We only have his side of the story for the claim so we don't even know if we was fired over the video to begin with
Ok so you're an employer and you see an employee of yours on the internet in front of millions saying things that you view as disgusting and horrible and that you don't want in your business. Are you only allowed to fire them if they mention your company during it?
I never said that, but yes from the perspective of the business owner they do lose some rights from anti discrimination laws. That is just a fact.
Which ones we find as acceptable is a different discussion and if you believe that should extend to anything a person says outside of work (or maybe even things they do inside of work) then that's a coherent viewpoint, but we can acknowledge that this definitely takes away more rights from the business owner.
That's how it currently works. If I find homosexuality, transgenderism or Islam disgusting or horrible, I still can't fire a worker for that. I don't know if I could even fire them for activism in favor of surrogacy, even though that's not a protected class.
Ok, so I'm saying we already live in an authoritarian society, and that it's odd to criticize someone as "authoritarian", when they claim authority should be wielded in a different way.
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It is already illegal to do so for at least some categories of things, ie if an employer finds homosexuality or interracial relationships or conservative islam disgusting they can sit and spin and are not allowed to fire you. I just think that saying "I can fire you for violating my values but you cannot fire me for violating yours" is not a sustainable situation.
Why not? There's plenty of expressions around this — like "rank hath its privileges," or "quod licet Jovi non licet bovi". A samurai could cut down a Japanese peasant who insulted him, but if the peasant was insulted by the samurai instead, said peasant had to just take it. Or consider, say, the Ottoman Empire in its heyday, and what would happen if a Christian or Jew publicly proclaimed something Islam considers blasphemous, versus if a Muslim publicly proclaimed something Christianity or Judaism consider blasphemous.
In fact, that latter pretty much describes why the situation actually is sustainable: because really it's "I can fire you for violating my values because my values are aligned with the Official Religion, but you cannot fire me for violating yours because your values are contrary to the Official Religion."
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There's an important distinction between a person speaking to masses on behalf of or as a representative of their employer, and someone who merely happens to be an employee speaking their own opinions as a private individual in a context unrelated to their job, and having activists dig up their messages and threaten the company over them.
It is an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for their private speech, but not an authoritarian one. It is also an imposition of government power to prevent an employer from firing an employee for being the wrong race, and yet most of us would agree that is appropriate. It is worth it for the government to intervene and restrict freedoms if those restrictions create more freedoms as a result. In this case protecting the ability of people to speak and not be mindslaves to the megacorps (and the activists who cherry pick people to bring to their attention).
And in a game theoretic way the corporations will actually be better off this way! If corporations were legally prohibited from firing employees for first amendment protected speech when that speech was made outside of the workplace, then no activists would have any incentive to boycott or threaten the company for refusing to fire such individuals. They wouldn't be able to get anything out of it, and if they try to accuse the company of tolerating bad speech, because the company could simply point to the law and use that as an excuse and so their reputation wouldn't suffer and they wouldn't be forced to fire their otherwise competent and well behaved employee. Win-win for everyone except the mob.
From my point of view it’s actually one thing I’d want the government to protect people from, simply because it’s been used — in some cases by the government itself— as a way to back door punish crime-think. It’s for all intents and purposes illegal to say things against homosexuality. Your boss is practically obligated to fire you for saying it, because if he doesn’t, it constitutes a “hostile workplace” that he can be sued for allowing to exist. And the law gives no out for a person to be left alone, because the mere presence of someone who has in any context engaged in crime-think online is creating that hostile work environment. And thus Internet scolds can root out anyone who posts crime think online and make them virtually unemployable, which in modern society makes their lives miserable. The government has learned to censor by using the private sector as its enforcement mechanism thus avoiding breaking the first amendment itself. Facebook or Twitter censors your online presence, not the government. Your boss fires you rather than tge government arresting you. It is still censorship, and most people unless they’re ideological, learn very quickly what sorts of opinions they must never say aloud.
Having a bit of protection where private employers cannot fire non public facing employees for personal opinions on private accounts posted on their own time would remove that chilling effect. It makes sense that I could be fired as a company representative for saying something “evil” online. My job is to represent that company. It also makes sense that if I’m posting from official accounts, the employer has a right to control what I post on those accounts or on internal chats/emails. Those represent official communications. Even posting during office hours might fall under use of company time. But if I’m posting to MY personal account on MY personal phone on MY personal time, it’s not his business. And I think it’s only reasonable that protecting the principle of free speech means that I should be able to say what I want to on my own time.
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Is free speech more or less important than freedom of association?
Not a great question considering free association rights are essentially a form of free speech rights. At least that's how we've traditionally viewed it in the US
That's how Anglo-Americans traditionally (read pre-CRA) viewed it. That's not how continental Europeeans ever viewed it.
I think the question has merit. Otherwise Mill wouldn't have had to invent the Harm Principle to solve it.
Consider a church that a large majority of your society attends (let's call it the catholic church, for "universal"). Let's say this catholic church has formal processes that would impose specific penalties on its members if they associate with people deemed unsavory by the institution. This is not a government institution, and yet it possesses large powers of censorship through this simple application of freedom of association.
How is this possible if there is no tension between keeping political expression unsuppressed and the ability for people to freely exclude anyone they desire from their lives?
Libertarians discard the primacy of political expression and focus on property rights. Liberals discard the primacy of freedom of association and focus on political expression. Hence vastly different reactions to some dudes deciding to setup ethnic enclaves innawoods.
But neither of these approaches realizes the original Liberal promise that both political and social freedoms can be fully realized with no contradiction. Because it was a lie.
Ok well in the case of us (me, and the jubilee guy) being American, the American view is pretty relevant here.
And considering how poorly Europe has been on free speech lately, I'm even less enthused about their philosophy.
If you get large enough it basically becomes a psuedo-government at that point and I would entertain the argument. Throughout much of history, this has been the case so yeah I'd agree we should be cautious.
But America is widely diversified. There is not a single corporate/religious/etc other private entity with that power. In many ways this can beneficial for them because there's a shit ton of powerful rich groups willing to support you. Shiloh Hendricks as an example made almost a million dollars just for being a viral cancel culture focus.
It certainly doesn't seem like there is an all encompassing major institution where dissent = failed life if even the closest thing to that has its victims made millionaires. Maybe it tries, but it's been proven over and over again to be lacking in power outside of a limited subset of society.
America is a highly centralized modern managerial nation.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
But you don't even need society wide nets to ruin a person, just industry wide. Remember when James Damore got fired and people tried to prevent him even getting any job back? Because I remember.
People always do this dance of pointing to some Emmanuel Goldstein that survived cancellation because they can't actually name the ones that were successfully ruined, since they disappeared from the internet since.
I personally know half a dozen such people. The modern world and its secular Cathedral does have excommunication. I know so.
That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US ... except for well, the one big thing we're seeing right now. Over porn/adult content. The payment processors ability to censor the largest stores on the internet and some of the state governments suppressing adult content sites is a pretty easy to see what real power looks like.
It looks like you literally not being able to see or buy the "bad things" to begin with. And even this still needs the backing of government and the deepest institutions of credit and capital to enforce their censorship with decently accessible workarounds still available. This is the worst America has to offer currently, multiple times more censoring than almost any other cultural clash and it's still struggling.
Nonsense. You don't sell guns or sex or heterodox politics or alternative payment systems so you wouldn't know.
It's been happening for a long ass time, it just creeped up to normies now.
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Operation Choke Point? Kiwi Farms?
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I mean he’s not wrong, totalitarian regimes are hard on their ruling classes.
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Weren't fascist movements a reaction to erstwhile aristocracy ? They're started by revolutionaries who borrow their power from military and/or church. Both institutions reject blood relations in favor of loyalty to the cause.
Disagreeable people with public platforms are the first go. This guy would've whacked on day 2.
Is there an example of a near-fascist state with significant ethnic diversity that's succeeded ?
P.S: OP deleted their comment, so I'm going off the quote.
Every Fascist movement/government was a little different, "Fascism" as such didn't necessarily have the ideological consistency that the Communism of the time did.
I return over and over to the myth of the Golem when thinking about the rise of Fascism in Germany and elsewhere. Traditional and Capitalist elites saw Hitler as a necessary counter to the threat of Communism, only to see Hitler grow too powerful and start threatening the aristocrats and capital who empowered him.
Equally, Hitler was empowered by continued Communist agitation and the refusal of Communist parties to ally with conservatives to stop Hitler, as part of Stalin's foreign policy choices, on the theory that the capitalist powers would exhaust themselves in war; they would live to see Hitler turn on the Soviets to disastrous effect.
Hitler had a lot of sometime allies on his way up, and a lot of them lived to regret it.
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Mussolini had a large number of aristocrats in his cabinet, and ennobled a bunch of retired WW1-era generals who he didn't have to, as well as his own successful generals and a small number of Fascist politicians. I would say Mussolini had a revealed preference the continued existence of the Italian nobility as a functioning warrior-elite - indeed given the history of the Italian nobility, had WW2 never happened Mussolini would have left Italy with a more functional aristocracy than he found it with. I can't find a list of top people in the Fascist party organisation, so I don't know how many were aristocrats.
The only aristocrat in Hitler's cabinet (after the aristocratic conservatives associated with von Papen were sidelined) was von Ribbentrop, and the aristocracy was notably underrepresented among the Gauleiters. The Weimar Republic had abolished the formal status of nobility, so Hitler didn't have the option of ennobling his generals, but he never came across as someone inclined to do it. Even under Weimar, the German nobility was a functioning warrior-elite, and Hitler was never entirely comfortable with it - arguably the foundation of the Waffen SS is an attempt to establish an alternative warrior-elite on Nazi rather than aristocratic lines.
So I don't think there is a consistent view on fascist-aristocrat relations.
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No, the major ones in the public imagination (Spain, Italy, Germany) were as much or more in reaction to powerful, organized, and street-level-thuggish communist parties in their countries than they were a backlash against old aristocracy. In fact, a major reason the fascists beat the communists was that the old aristocracy lined up behind the fascists, on the theory that anything was better than getting expropriated and lined up against a wall by bolsheviks.
Depends on what you mean by "succeeded", but Getulio Vargas in Brazil comes to mind as a potential example here. And Salazar in Portugal wasn't ultimately successful - his regime didn't outlive him - but lusotropicalism was the opposite of ethnically-exclusive; Salazar envisaged Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Timor, etc. as integral parts of Portugal itself.
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Officially yes, fascists were opposed to the aristocracy in the old sense of “the second estate”. The monarchists viewed the fascists as upstart revolutionaries rather than as conservatives.
But in practice every society has an elite, and this guy was presumably using “aristocracy” as a synonym for “elite”.
The text I quoted was the entirety of the original OP comment.
The distinction matters for promotion patterns.
An aristocracy propagates through blood ties. As a consequence, it develops a from-birth racial identity. Here, power is innate. Additionally, elites maintain power by not-fixing-whats-not-broken. So, rivals arent purged with the same fervor. Send them out as lords of border states, not gulags.
Fascist states revolve around a king-like central individual. But this individual draws power from commitment to some loudly expressed cause that's already taken root among foot soldiers. Blood relatives and visually identical individual arent entitled to power. A lowly commoner who has risen through the ranks will have a better claim to power than the child of the dictator. Additionally, totalitarism and paranoia mean that the new fuhrer will likely purge all rivals with a kind of harshness that aristocracies rarely employ.
In a fascist state, the 2 worst things you can be are 'the othered' and a rival to the eventual winner.
I think that "aristocracy" is covering a lot of ground. Nobility has been around about as long as long as agriculture has. From Ramesses II to Wilhelm II, you have nobles in very different settings, from low-born leaders of troops who managed to conquer something and kill anyone who disputed their nobility to products of dozens of generations of inbreeding.
You have aristocrats who relied on vassalage, Roman patricians, figureheads of some anonymous imperial bureaucracy and centralizers of power.
Still, that I agree that for the most part, the aristocracy was likely very bent on avoiding precedents of "you can simply kill some nobles and take their land". You needed at least a flimsy excuse, like "actually it was rightfully my land all along" or "yes, but the nobles I killed were following an evil religion, they don't count".
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Fascism can be conceived as the marriage between biological instinct and the State, and for this reason any fascist should note: the #1 most important thing is for your spokespersons to be biologically compelling, ie beautiful and strong. There’s a reason why Hitler perfected his voice and gestures and costumes in private, only allowing himself to be seen in select moments indicating strength — even at select times of day and in select lighting! You don’t want a non-masculine mid to ever be professing “fascism” in public. This is the real issue with the Jubilee video. It’s all Chad meme (always has been .jpg).
This is a ahistorical view. Fascism grew out of syndicalism, the specifically biological animus is a German adjunct which plainly grew out of the culturally German importance of blood. Mussolini was famously anti-racist before his alliance with Germany, and many examples of actual fascism (as opposed to run of the mill authoritarian nationalism) had little to do with race.
What you're trying to point at is a central concern for the spirited part of the soul that guides fascist (and more generaly ultranationalist) politics in reaction to its neglect by liberal democracy. What the Greeks and Fukuyama call Thymos. The desire for recognition, dignity, and self-worth. The drive to be acknowledged as having value and status.
This is at the center of revanchism, the obscession with aesthetics and much of Fascist politics. But the form it takes is a function of the society it appears in. Romanian fascism focused on religion, German fascism focused on race, etc.
By “biological” I don’t mean race alone: the biological instinct to secure and favor one’s territory without regard for any potential benefit of internationalism; a leader who is strong, militant and paternal, occupying the same role as a leader in a primitive human group or warband; paternal regard for citizens; distrust of foreigners and saving the worst hatred for foreigners who meddle in your territory; importance of allegiance to a single leader; importance of tradition; shaming individualism; increasing pride through deeds specifically for the group (as opposed to say, getting a job in finance). These spring up from a biological source; non-fascist societies actually need to train people to feel otherwise. An untrained boy will always like the strong, militant, paternal superhero; he makes exclusive “hide-outs” in the woods with his own friend group and would be upset if another group of boys encroached; he imitates his father’s ways; etc. You could see these features in many prehistoric societies.
All behavior springs from a biological source ultimately. So I don't see this as a productive distinction.
Epithumia and Logos, which are the more characteristic motivators of Liberalism are also quite natural. You will see humans express desire and self-interest without needing to be taught as such.
And indeed the sort of paternalist hero worship that you describe features prominently in the history of most political ideologies, Liberalism included. Italians will be quite familiar with Garibaldi for instance.
No, not every state roots itself in biological instinct to the same degree. “Ranked choice voting” and “representatives based on population” are examples of procedures unrooted in biological instinct. These procedures require the use of intellect to conclude that the procedure is ultimately in our best interest; when instinct rears its head and says “I wish my leader continued longer than the term allows”, it is quelched by a sense of logic insisting that it’s for the greater good. Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler obtained power through force (or the threat thereof) without much interest in procedure. That’s biological: you could see that happen in humans 100k years ago, or in primate groups.
Epithumia and Logos are too broad as concepts to know in what sense you mean that they are “biological”. Logos, as a construct of wisdom, is surely non-biological.
I don’t believe that humans actually come with “individualistic self-interest”; they come with a self-interest mediated by social cooperation and tribal allegiance. Purely individualistic self-interest is… how old? Not very old at all. It’s like 20th century new. In any other period, someone who pursued ruthless self-interest at the expense of the collective would be (rightfully) purged, his genes being defective.
Probably because of his heroic and glorious military career in pursuit of securing territory for a people, his subservience of selfish ambition to nationalist aspirations. Or because “he is not a man; he is a symbol, a form; he is the Italian soul”. His hero worship is precisely because he mirrors fascism. If he were simply a bureaucrat politician with some ideas, no one would worship him. And indeed, I don’t think anyone worships him for his view of democratic republicanism (he fought for the monarchists for the sake of unification). Fascism is about Garibaldimaxxing, to the fullest extent, so that men have a lot of passionate feelings about the nation, which can only occur through marrying it to biological instinct.
Why?
Iceland's parliament is about 11 centuries old. And Mesopotamia had primitive forms of democracy. It's quite literally as old as History. I see no reason to assume it's not as viscerally embedded in human nature as autocracy.
All three systems of government seem to fade into the eons in this way.
Fascism is ultranationalist, that's true, but it has neither a monopoly on nationalism, nor on ultranationalism, making this not a sufficiently defining characteristic to base a whole political analysis on, in my view.
I don’t think we know enough about ancient Mesopotamia to say whether it was a primitive democracy; given that the King was labeled “king of the universe” I think it’s unlikely. But in any case, “old as history” means “as old as civilization”, and humans are much older than that. Men didn’t form advanced civilization due to any biological impulse or feeling compelling them, but because their intellect persuaded them that it was for the greater good. It required significant social infrastructure to keep afloat: priests, myths, stories, tragedies, rituals, public executions, angry gods.
Reading is as old as written history, but reading is non-biological. It has been lost before, like in the Bronze Age Collapse / Greek Dark Ages. It’s not like throwing, or building a shelter, which all humans know how to do. An example in another animal might be a primate learning primitive sign language. That’s not biologically-rooted, though they can do it. You can train a monkey to ride a unicycle, but that’s not natural or rooted in their biology.
So there’s a very real, and useful, distinction between “humans do this because intellect/reason assures them of a delayed benefit”, and “humans do this because they feel a strong primal urge to do it”. A woman might be compelled by reason to marry an ugly guy if she has no other option; but a woman would not be passionate about it. I don’t think fascism just so happens to take advantage of animal biology to increase passion for the state; I think that this is its functional definition, especially colloquially.
Because it is an abstract construct that requires training for a human to either care about or learn. Humans don’t stumble across abstract philosophy in the natural environment.
I disagree with both statements. I do not see rational and irrational sentiments to be disconnected as you do. I recommend engaging deeply with your culture's mystical traditions if you wish to dispel this misconception.
The anthropology of prehistory is, as you know, heavily contested. But I'm disinclined to believe that tribal modes of organization could not have taken both democratic, oligarchic and monarchic forms given that we have examples of all such in primitive tribes in recorded history. Human nature and the incentives generated by social groups, which we know now to always have been a feature of human existence, make all three arrangements possible given certain material conditions.
What you seem to be describing as not "biological" is merely technology.
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And yet, Goebbels.
Goebbels was an amazing speaker though. Today things are different with television and social media privileging images but Goebbels did an excellent job in the age of the voice.
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Whole lot to unpack there, wow.
Trump not a fascist confirmed.
FDR a fascist confirmed.
Beauty pageants and celebrities in general too, I suppose.
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