Ur-Fascism (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Ur-Fascism (1995)

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The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

Ironically, totalitarianism is itself a product of modernism: the idea that you can premeditate a "perfect" society and then bring it about at scale, by force. The theme of mastery over nature is extremely modernist, where nature in this case is humanity.

Sort of having an esthetic and being willing threaten people, throw them in prison, to exile, or kill them over it.

Yes. This is the essential flaw in utopianism. Utopias always feature a foundational philosophy, an aesthetic as you describe it, and it has yet to be demonstrated that there exists any non-trivial example which everyone could agree is the "best."

To reach utopia the ends always justify the means, which in the past has resulted in trying to fit a population to an ideology. It's next to impossible to reverse the two, engineering an ideology that fits us, but very likely a target that we never stop working towards no matter the consequences along the way.

We seem to believe that reaching utopia will satisfy some ultimate survival need or help us reach some higher unforeseen goal, otherwise why would we commit such damaging acts against our own species in pursuit of it?

> ends always justify the means

Read The Prince in high school. Took me 15 years to come up with a short appropriate response.

In civil society the means are your ends.

If the means you use to bring your utopia into the world are violent and ruthless then your utopia is also going to violent and ruthless. Not much of a utopia.

Yes, I agree, this is the point I wanted to make, that trying to fit a population to an ideology will cause the means to be violent and ruthless because in the eyes of the ruling class it is justified.

This brings us back to the parent comment where they mentioned this modern idea that mastery over human nature is possible. I think our understanding of human nature is still naive, especially in this relatively new environment with a global level of instant communication. We'll see more flawed aesthetics come into popularity based off a false sense of human nature.

True. He mentions throughout that fascism is littered with internal contradictions that it has no interest in reconciling rationally.

It most certainly is, how can a group they disparage simultaneously be weak and subhuman, while also having lots of power and "controlling the world"?

One obvious answer (not ascribing to the theory, just playing devil's advocate) is through deception and manipulation.

A group is weak, so it resorts to manipulation and deceiving , and thus gains power over stronger more "pure" groups don't stoop down to these tactics.

Oddly, this is a common trope in a lot of popular media, where heroes are often noble and strong, whereas their opponents are weak but cunning. (Various "Batman" movies have such plots, where Batman is almost brought low by the scheming of physically weak adversaries.)

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"A group is weak, so it resorts to manipulation and deceiving"

And yet the "superior" group isn't smart enough to evade or detect this effectively.

Well, superior could mean morally better, more hardworking, etc - so could be equally smart or even more, but might not be cynical enough to even think someone could do this kind of thing.

The superior group is not meant to be "superior" in every aspect -- only to the aspects that matter for the values of those defining it.

It's similar to how Redpillers would explain how women, who they believe to be less intelligent than men (among other deficiencies) are still able to dominate society: through lies and manipulation and controlling the media, etc.

It's remarkable how much the narrative stays the same whether the enemy is women, or Jews, or people of color.

>Ironically, totalitarianism is itself a product of modernism: the idea that you can premeditate a "perfect" society and then bring it about at scale, by force.

That is quite true. However, in the modern era we also have more pragmatic, moderate forms of liberalism that recognize that striving for perfection actually makes things worse than settling for imperfect but workable solutions.

Or we have been willing to admit to ourselves that our view of perfection was flawed and that these forms of liberalism are a better step in the direction towards our ultimate goal, whatever that may be.

No, leading liberal thinkers like Burke and Berlin have been perfectly clear that perfection is not possible. In fact, the whole US Constitution is a set of compromises based on the belief that human nature will always be imperfect. My impression is you don't know much about liberal political philosophy.

You're right, I haven't read much about liberal political philosophy, I was trying to reason this based on intuition and experience and I 100% agree that concessions about human nature need to be made.

I shouldn't have used the term perfection, as I didn't mean it in the short-sighted, self-serving and ideological form, rather than in the sense of our ultimate goal of how to best organize the human race despite our imperfections.

Is there a term for that objective, perhaps harmony? I'm going to do some reading of what "perfection" means from a political philosophical sense as the definition I came up with let me down in my response.

Exactly. See also the Futurists, a strong influence to Fascism.

Foucault's Pendulum also contain a great (fictional, but clearly autobiographical somehow) account of life in rural Italy during the Resistance.

Also an exemplar for a lot of more recent novels of... ahem... varying quality from people like Pérez-Reverte or Dan Brown.

This is a brilliant article. I would just like to add that it seems to me you can summarize what fascism is by saying it is the attempt to impose premodern, tribalistic social forms and ways of thinking on a modern, industrial society. This is not workable, and so I think it accounts for the many ideological contradictions that Eco points out.

it's odd that they characterise ur-fascism with irrationalism given the level of scientific innovation present in Nazi Germany (even though that innovation was entirely directed at more efficiently killing people). I'd more characterise it as anti-intellectual, as from reading this article the scorn seemed to be more directed at academics, bourgeois artists and armchair thinker types than science or rationality in general.

Irrational is accurate. The "syncretism" that is mentioned can only be achieved through ignoring contradictions.

Science can be employed by irrational people, and scientists themselves can be irrational.

There's been lots of people who note that engineers are disproportionately represented among terrorist groups.

You have Nobel prize winners like Kary Mullis who take copious amounts of psychedelics and deny that HIV causes AIDS.

There's nothing irrational per se in taking "copious amounts of psychedelics".

It's no more rational that not taking them.

Reason (ratio) itself, has no inherent values (as in "sober is better") -- it's all about deductive chains and what works.

Denying that HIV causes AIDS can also be perfectly rational as long as he justifies it with certain arguments that are not crazy themselves.

Merely straying off the established scientific view is not irrational -- else all kind of now established scientists should also be labelled as irrational, for that's what they did when they proposed and insisted on their theories before they ever got accepted (and some took decades or more to be accepted).

In which case tons of now established theories would never have come to pass.

I like the guy, but he does seem fairly irrational. He thinks astrology doesn't get a fair shake.

And in any event, a scientist while under the influence of neuroactive substances could be said to be an example of a person who is both a scientist and irrational.

> a scientist while under the influence of neuroactive substances could be said to be ... irrational.

Just for thoroughness, what's your rational, logical deduction that someone under the influence of neuroactive substances is more irrational than someone who isn't? The whole brain is filled with neuroactive substances regardless of whether you ingest more.

"There's been lots of people who note that engineers are disproportionately represented among terrorist groups."

It's also been noted that engineers are common among creationists. (The "Salem Hypothesis")

Pretty much every religious terrorist who murders others does so while believing they are representing a religion of peace.

While it seems our resident psychonauts objected to my label of irrational for Kary Mullis, at least nobody thought to object to that description for terrorists.

But under an expansive enough definition of "rational," surely terrorists and currently-tripping psychonauts both could be considered rational.

The amount of scientific innovation in Nazi Germany is incredibly overhyped. In reality outside of rockets they made very few major advances. And even in Rocketry there were major scientific breakthroughs, just improved engineering. The medical experiments inflicted on prisoners were useless scientifically, just pure sadism. The "experiments" to test hypothermia for instance often did not record the patience weight, the temperature and volume of the water, and other factors. Not to mention that the experiments were being conducted on people who were often on the verge of starvation and in terrible health. They provide no useful data.

Not to mention their rejection of "Jewish Physics", science in Nazi Germany was incredibly politicized and if your research didn't conform to the dogma you had to change it or risk your life.

Yep, Nazi Germany was coasting off the pre-eminent position in the sciences it had prior to the rise of Nazism.

If it had somehow survived WWII it would have had a rapid and persistent decline in leading edge research.

hm, I did not know that. I'd picked up a perception that the Nazis were innovative in quite a few scientific disciplines, at least partially due to their complete disdain for ethics, but it sounds like that belief is unfounded.

It's the whole mad science angle that we have in our culture I think. But that ignores that ethics are tied to things like oversight, methodology, and being objective which are all important for research.

It is also worth noting that a lot of those mad-science projects that we look back at and consider potentially visionary were often stabs in the dark by scientists who saw a ministry picking up their project as a way to avoid conscription into the army. They were seldom backed up by any real science and frequently had little chance of success, but they somewhat resemble something that was developed later so we assume the project leads knew what they were doing...

Also, perhaps they were adept at playing on the misconceptions or weird beliefs of those in powerful positions.

They also fell behind Russia in tank manufacturing technologies like submerged arc welding (which allowed making large, deep, quality welds) and casting large pieces of steel for armor.

The perfect example of faux-deep, but ultimately shallow work Eco was made famous for.

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