Pill Pod 212 - The Desire for Fascism
Added 2025-06-14 03:18:17 +0000 UTCThis week we looked into OG critic of fascism Wilhelm Reich, who wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism right after the Nazis were elected in 1933. Reich was among the first "neomarxists", and believed that Marxists need to understand psychoanalysis to understand Fascism.
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I’ve been reading Cèline! His ‘journey to the end of night’… a must read. Laugh out loud dark disaster. But also could be interesting to think Cèline from the pov of a stifling petite bourgeois middling middle class french background he seems to have experienced as a suffocating need for break out… may show the options of ‘the middle’… join ‘em or explode into the unstable froth genius of invective truth that then veers into the pamphleteering at the slit edge of the hatred of the social/society.
Zachary Manenti
2025-06-22 16:24:10 +0000 UTCI was gonna make a comment about the Conformist! One of the greatest films ever and does well to wrestle with how a repressed self-hatred can be turned outwards as a defense mechanism to change, even if you "know better"
Max Monheit
2025-06-22 13:32:24 +0000 UTCBertolucci’s Il Conformiso (The Conformist) interprets this, not Third Reich, but Reich’s theory and puts it forward in the film. I buy a lot of WR… He was onto something, attested to by the authorities bothering to demolish him. He put thinkers onto ‘libido/energy,’ its divisions, prohibitions, excesses and. its function as social glue- enthusiasm of the group, like Freud too, don’t u think? V. Good to cover him. I think Reich has been lost in the bashing of the 60s counter culture, but def has useful insights for america now. It seems too the middle and lower middle class structurally holds together the middle, i.e., the morality (status quo). i.e., the society, in its ‘stable self identity’—-pushing back almost instinctually against disruption, chaos and change, even if it is against their own interests ultimately. Preservative no matter how much change is called for, thus the base for reactionary power.
Zachary Manenti
2025-06-22 02:02:10 +0000 UTC"And to be absolutely blunt, the workers don't actually have a party to vote for that's on their side," that's not a universal perspective; there are countries, especially in Europe, that have plenty of parties, including left-leaning ones and in the end it's the far-right ones that win more (to be fair, among young voters there is also increase in left support but much more far-right overall.) I am honestly not sure if we can even refer to "workers" as an identity these days, especially among the youngest. In the current gig / hustle environment with TikTok influencers "advising" everyone to "get rich quick," working 9-5 being treated as being a loser, people flock to libertarian ideas of getting the government "out of the way" to unlock some mythical potential that's supposed to allow anyone to become a millionaire. Plus there is of course a lot of immigrant-blaming for whatever economic issues arise.
ntoxeg
2025-06-17 11:55:18 +0000 UTCLiterally thought you were gonna say "What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?" less than a minute in.
G. Harrison
2025-06-16 04:17:31 +0000 UTC
