Fascism, The Talk of the Town

Fascism is now the talk of the town.

It’s probably what we’ve all been longing for without knowing we’d been longing for it, as it seems now that fascism is pretty much an old form of mesmerism bottled from the bottom up and top down, carbonated for popular consumption so that it can be swallowed as if a sort of home-brewed magic elixir that the people dream about drinking so they can overcome their real lives, the lives promised by their masters—the ranter’s and ravers, the speechifyers—that the people are on the verge of being guaranteed to receive the revolution they deserve…but feelings, not thoughts, are paramount and no dialectical progress is ever made.

Perhaps it is because we really are such good people, at least in our thinking, that we think the flyswatter is always much smaller than the fly, and that not a single one of us will ever be hurt, lest we forget that people as intelligent as Plato and Aristotle, for instance, preferred to be as far away from the mob as possible.

Theodor Adorno, student of fascism among his many other concerns: ‘thought needs to think against itself.’