How Societies Collapse , or, Trump, Fascism, and Existential Annihilation

In the last post, I discussed why Trump is starving America, and what it means. Not just that people go hungry, of course, but its destabilizing consequences for America macroeconomically. If a dictator’s starving his people, should the world really be investing in such a country?

Now we’re going to go deeper, because money is a mundane and boring subject. It satisfies neither my hunger nor yours for meaning and truth.

What does it mean that Trump is starving America? I think it’s crucial that you understand this.

This is what fascism and authoritarianism are.

It is a form of annihilation.

Of course, it says: I have the power of life and death over you. And that is the beginning of fascism and authoritarianism both. Not all people deserve to live, because not all people are people at all. In capitalism, to need any form of aid is to become a liability—only those who “stand on their own feet” deserve to…what? Perhaps not just live, and in that sense, capitalism is already just a hairs’ breadth away from fascism.

Under capitalism, dignity is kept under artificial scarcity. As capitalism implodes into fascism, dignity itself becomes that the Fuhrer has a monopoly over. He controls it, wholesale, and assigns it as he sees fit.

What is dignity? Dignity is the inherent recognition of the right of existence of another. As a being with autonomy, desires, needs, an end, not just a means, someone, just like me, struggling towards truth, meaning, beauty, and goodness.

But what is the opposite of dignity?

The opposite of dignity is annihilation. Of course, here, I’m not speaking in Hollywood terms: “nuclear annihilation,” and so forth. I mean it a humanistic sense and an existential one. To say that you do not have dignity is to say that you do not have the inherent right to exist, and to say all that is to annihilate you.

It sets the stage for later forms of physical annihilation, of course, this first terrible step, which is why this is a “slippery slope,” or a dynamic process. Of what? Of collapse and implosion.

When dictators starve people, that is a very real form of collapse. America appears nonplussed and unperturbed, at least in the world’s eyes, which is looking on in horror, baffled. If 10% of the population in any other nominally wealthy country, certainly, was suddenly condemned to starve by a dictator, cities and towns would be barricaded the very next day, I imagine. The Parisian protest over the retirement age being raised higher than 62. And so this disengagement from the genuine moral gravity of what people in America are refusing to see, too, is an elemental part of social collapse.

I’m not assigning blame. I’m just observing, and teaching you. Situations like this demand more from people, from a citizenry. What red line is redder than a dictator starving a nation? How high does the percentage of people have to rise? What gets more existential than “I can’t feed my children?”

But in fascism, there is no innocence. There is only guilt. To be weak, to be a liability, is to be a subhuman. And here, too, unseen, because American are looking away, America is crossing a line. The subhumans not so long ago, to MAGA, were the others, the ones they hated. Now, the subhumans are part of “real America,” part of the Volk, the common people, too. The Gestapos aren’t just kidnapping brown babies, after all—now the dictator is starving the Heartland, also.

This is what fascism, and how it happens. Through this stepwise process of implosion. You know that, but I want you to really see it. It’s almost invisible because it’s happening so suddenly, the line being crossed, the definition of subhumans as anyone who can’t afford to eat, no longer just minorities, women of certain kinds, the LGBTQ, horrid liberals, and so forth—this time, it includes the MAGA faithful, much to their own shock.

And what do superhumans have under fascism? The power of life and death over subhumans. This is the Mother Right granted to the dictator, after all. And from him, it trickles down into mere functionaries. He can grant it to whomever he sees fit—SS officers, perhaps, or an entire department tasked with eliminating the hated. See the way this absolute power works, is formed, operates, and what it is.

We are talking now about existential power. The power to casually take people’s lives away. Less than a year in, and Trump is already exercising this power over Americans. That it doesn’t always come at the point of a gun wielded by a masked “agent” is almost besides the point, which, again, is that in just a handful of months, Americans, even those who never expected it, the True Believers of MAGA themselves, find themselves having the power of life and death wielded against them.

That is a startling rate of collapse, my friends. It takes most societies years, at least, more often decades, to get here, and that’s under dictatorship. Only in the most severe and extreme forms of collapse do we see life and death levels of power being used indifferently within months.

Americans are averting their eyes from all this. That’s been a theme of this little essay, and I think it bears observation. Here we are doing something tragic, and strange. We are looking at people looking away from horror. Are we judging them in shame? Are we issuing a verdict of guilt upon them, too? Are we experiencing a double nausea? As much as Americans issue nostrums like “I don’t judge,” isn’t it the moral necessity in a case like this? What’s left of us if we don’t?

This power of life and death, trickling down from the dictator to his minions, assigned according to the level of “worth” in not-really-people, whether or not they are liabilities or assets to the larger social project of eternal greatness—that is an eerily precise not just definition of fascism, but a dynamic example of its moral logic, its institutional workings, and its philosophical underpinnings.

Now. You asked me how bad things would get, when all this began to happen, and I was forthright with you. I warned you that many people would lose everything. Probably, you thought I meant money, and I do, but I meant it, too, in a much, much deeper way than that.

I mean the right to exist. I mean the notion that existence is inherently worthy in itself, not conditional. On the whims of a dictator, or the grotesque assignations of fascism into super and subhuman. From the loss of that Mother Right, all else follows. Money is but a small part of the process of implosion, and just in ineluctable consequence of this loss.

So what is really happening here? Have I arrived at an answer for you yet, in this obscenity, in this horror? Let me try, at last.

Trump is annihilating America. Americans. At an existential level. This is what the power of course to starve people means. The annihilation of dignity, of decency, of truth, of history, of all that we have struggled for and learned in so many millennia of history. Here, we find ourselves back at the beginning: I am the most violent and brutish one in society, and I will destroy everything and everyone else. Reduce them to dust. That is how I will display my power, and how I will teach people to obey me.

In the last post, I reminded you that all this is even elementary if we’re just thinking about the mundane subject of money. Shall we ask the Great Depression if starvation is good for the economy?

Here, we’re trying to go deeper, but understand, these are not remote, abstract concerns. They matter in every way.

This annihilation is real. Americans are losing more than they yet understand. Once dignity—what little of it was to be had in America—is lost, it does not come back easily, or often. Once the power over life and death is established, by a dictator, it hardens, is used more and more often, and is abused, as if it isn’t an abuse to begin with.

So we are speaking of many forms of annihilation now. Americans are already morally annihilating themselves, looking away, pretending this is not really happening, smiling numbly and telling themselves it will all be OK. That is how fascism happens, too, through a kind of moral suicide.

There is a social annihilation, here, too, which is the erasure of the idea in society that norms should exist as things outside the dictator’s appetites and desires. Americans are not supposed to know, believe, or want anything that Trump doesn’t now. Hungry? Trump doesn’t care, and so neither should anybody else. If your kids starve, maybe it’s good for them, because it’s good for society to be rid of such of liabilities. It grieves me deeply to write such ugly words.

And of course there is the annihilation of agency and power—I will starve you, and there is nothing you can do about it, but perhaps, if you are good and obedient, then here, I will throw you a bitter crust.

All these are the erasure of dignity.

We do not often see the spectacle of a dictator starving a society. In the modern history of rich societies, we have neverseen it. Imagine that you saw such a thing happening in France, Germany, Spain, or Canada. Would you believe it? So we are seeing something genuinely historic, as Trump starves America.

And also monstrous. Reckon with it, my friends. Do not rest easy in the belief that you are somehow above this, because some level of money or status protects you. You are not. Do you really think fictional numbers on paper chits or paper bits protect you from this kind of violence? If he can starve millions, just like that, who are the easiest to attack and hurt and maim—among those, his very own True Believers—imagine what he will do next, and then after that, and after that, to you.

Don’t indulge the fantasy that this too shall pass. It’s beneath you. If you understand, I know that you are an intelligent and thoughtful person. Now you must act like it. As a very beginning, you must protect yourself, and those you love, from the kind of horror now unfolding, understanding that all this is a mere beginning, not an ending. Understand that when a dictator grants himself the power of annihilation, a society is now entering the abyss.

Do not trap yourself in complacency. They thought it wouldn’t happen to them. The MAGA faithful. And there’s a sense of schadenfreude about this. That is a mistake. Perhaps they don’t deserve our sympathy, or even pity. But that’s not the question. It’s what you deserve. And what is to be learned here. They thought it wouldn’t happen to them. That they were protected and safe and untouchable.

Many of you still do, too.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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