18 Nonparticipation and Building a Holocaust-Proof Society

Fascism represents an alarming failure-state in the conduct of the human experiment. We have already explored the operation of Fascism as an outgrowth of 3c pathology, and in the process situated it within the context of a specific historical cycle which is unlikely to recur. But the question of facing and resisting Fascism in one’s individual capacity, whether one is confronted with it in whole or in part, remains to be addressed.

Nonparticipation is the most potent tool for the dissolution of hysteria spirals. What nonparticipation means in this case should be obvious— the refusal to lie regarding one’s beliefs in order to appease other people— but the execution of such a strategy carries with it several more questions. Does a lie of omission fuel hysteria? Is nonviolence a necessary component of an anti-authoritarian worldview? Can nonparticipatory resistance assume an organized character, or does it need to arise spontaneously among a subject people?

In this chapter we will explore these questions in some detail, with the goal of constructing a set of principles by which individual opposition to Fascism can be enacted. We will be grounding our approach to the subject in the quote of Solzhenitsyn pictured above.

The image it evokes of spontaneous resistance to government agents is a vivid, and on the face of it, an implausible one. It is the spontaneity of the scene more than anything which lends it a fantastical air. Solzhenitsyn isn’t talking about organized resistance— guerillas, rebel factions, civil war— but an informal uprising of individuals operating reactively within their local environment.

This type of directed but unmediated violence is, if not unprecedented, at the very least extremely uncommon within our historical consciousness. The difference is really one of centralization; an decentralized program of violence as we are given to experience it is a riot— an upwelling of destruction that spills outward chaotically, and which is liable to either disintegrate or fall back upon itself if it isn’t constrained around some central pole of political or revolutionary organization.

The narrative of the riot, as we have collectively digested it in the centuries since the French Revolution, is that of formless anger directed proactively by the agents of some particular agenda. It is this capacity for direction that renders riots useless in opposition to Fascism. Revolution is a fundamentally bourgeois mode of behavior; the subconscious push of repressed Dionysian-Thanatos is united with the conscious, Apollonian-Eros pull of rationalist ideology to create a dialectic of centralization. Old divisions are destroyed in an outpouring of violence, and this violence is justified— rationalized— post-hoc by the instantiation of an ideology. The operation of this dialectic unites the citizenry into an undifferentiated mass which generates its own leadership. The product is a government which is reactive, prehensile, and self-aware— in short, Fascism.

In locating the susceptibility of the mob to Fascist “subversion” (though in reality, Fascism is the natural outcome of mob violence), most anti-authoritarians have located its weakness in its violence. Violence is, after all, the most salient feature of the mob from a perspective which originates within a passive, Thanatos-repressing bourgeois milieu. The logic that this violence creates a terror within the populace, who endow authoritarian strongmen with power in the hopes that they will end the violence, is on its face a rational one. But such a narrative doesn’t accord with the logic of the Framework. The abhorrence of violence apparent within a 3c populace is a reflection of their dominant mode, just as the mob’s lust for violence is a reflection of their repressed mode. 3cs operating as whole individuals possess an ambivalence towards violence, and this ambivalence is born out in the operation of Fascism, which compartmentalizes violence such that it is instantiated by 3c individuals who have fulfilled an internal bargain which allows them to access their repressed mode; individuals, in short, who are “just following orders”. Therefore, if one accepts that violence is not on the whole abhorred by a 3c populace, then the violence of the mob cannot be at the root of its utility to authoritarians; deep down, the 3c public don’t want relief from violence, they want an excuse to engage in it.

I would argue, then, that the susceptibility of mob violence to authoritarian subversion is located not in its violence, but in its proactivity.  Eros is a force of stasis, of reactivity; the repressed Thanatos which drives a riot is a force of proactivity and change. A group of people seeking an end to some injustice will organize themselves, and this organization will eventually take on the character of permanent revolution— round after round of subversives to be hauled off to the gulag. It is the illusion of finality, of the ultimate transcendence of evil which fuels Fascism, the totalizing impulse which seeks to impose concepts on reality rather than adjusting concepts to match reality.

Through this reasoning, we have arrived back at a rationale for nonparticipation as an antidote to Fascism, and along the way have acquired two principles by which this nonparticipation should be attenuated— firstly, that the question of violence and nonviolence is irrelevant; secondly, that nonparticipation should be maximally local, instantiating reality upon concepts rather than concepts upon reality.

The combination of these principles creates a technique of resistance which diverges greatly from those examples which have achieved cultural cognizance. MLK’s American Civil Rights movement and Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence both oriented themselves foremost around nonviolence: the former, fairly gently,  through marches, sit-ins and the like; the latter quite radically, with numerous instances of what was effectively suicide.

These movements laid a firm groundwork for a form of political activism which diverged from the revolutionary model which had ushered in Capitalism and Fascism across the globe; but each took place within Liberal democracies— Britain and the US— which were thereby ideologically primed to receive them. The strategy of appealing to the humanity and sympathy of the public relied on the existence of that humanity and sympathy; whether such a strategy would succeed on a public which had abrogated its humanity through a dialectic of Fascism is a doubtful prospect. The fate of the Jews within Germany—a fate much worse than that of the African Americans in the South or the Indians within the Raj— suggests that nonviolence is an accelerant in the collapse of Fascism, not a retardant to its rise.

So, as I said, we find ourselves walking a tightrope between two poles. Any form of proactive resistance will be subverted into revolution, a bourgeois mode of which Fascism is the inevitable product; any form of nonviolent resistance will be useless in the face of a truly Fascistic compartmentalization of life and death. The solution is therefore resistance which is violent and reactive. Like the civilians of Solezhitsyn’s fantasy, we must be prepared to deal death to the agents of the state where they encroach upon our territory, within our own homes, not out in the streets or in the halls of government. The mass-internalization of this approach to resisting authority would render Fascism permanently unfeasible; non-participatory dissenters could neither be co-opted into revolutionary schemes and their attendant hysteria spirals, nor could they be eliminated systematically. In its approach to violence, every community would be its own Afghanistan or Vietnam— diffuse, balkanized, intractable. Where the threat of violence did not emerge, these communities could reknit themselves with the proactive ties of civil and commercial life. Such a mode would be 3N, a synthesis of the extremes of 3o and 3c.

Thus, we have developed a rationale for personal resistance to Fascism— be prepared to engage in violence against agents of authority reactively and within your own environment; refuse to engage in violence directed at any external, non-immediate aim.

In all likelihood, no one reading this will ever need to carry out this strategy. The American bourgeoisie has been so thoroughly Balkanized into urban and rural factions that, even if the rural bourgeoisie submitted and were subsumed into the ranks of the urban bourgeoisie, the pockets of contiguous territory they dominated would not be sufficient to exert military control over the breadth of the continent. Even this eventuality remains unlikely; American countercultural solve has penetrated such depths that every corporation, political candidate, and government agency feels obligated to portray themselves as the ally of the underdog, the besieged minority, and the outsider, a tendency which increases year over year. These tendencies may be cynical, but they reflect a fundamental unwillingness of even the most uncracked 3c to espouse outwardly majoritarian partisanship; the rationalizations inherent to cynicism are signs that solve is already underway— the upper mind which has been successfully deceived by the lower has feels no need to justify itself.

However, if you ever find yourself faced with violent Fascistic oppression and wish to engage in the technique of resistance I’ve just described, remember to treat that decision with the gravity it deserves.

Understand that the value of your own life is finite. The great sin of any Erotic disposition is in an obliviousness to the reality of death. Death is a certainty, and as such the risk of some years of your life is not the wagering of an infinity of experience against an infinity of oblivion. Each life is ultimately an entry in the history of the human race and amounts to no more or less than that; there are depths of submission which demean the character of our species and leave us the worse off for their occurrence. If the Jews of Germany had opposed their extermination with axes, hammers, and pokers in the hallways of their apartment buildings, they would be dead all the same; but there would have been no Holocaust. Instead, because they had been inculcated 3c to the same extent as the Germans with whom they formed what was really a single people, they by-and-large followed their Eros-inclined dominant modes into horror and persecution. (In this way the Holocaust is really the tragedy of one people destroying itself, not of one nation oppressing another.)

By the same token, though, the finite value of life is not infinitesimal. I’m of the opinion that politically-motivated suicide is an expression of a perverted Thanatos drive which has been so repressed that any bargain which unleashes it must be exploited to the point of finality. To throw your life away in service to a symbol is to elevate that symbol above yourself; this is a betrayal of human dignity as great as any submission to human beings. People are worth dying for; ideas are not.

It is impossible to weigh these two notions against one another a priori, and this is natural. The decision to risk one’s life is always contingent above all else. Contingency is the recurrent watchword of a neutral disposition, the substitution of boundlessly-maximized principles for discrete tablets of goods. Analyzing all of the variable conditions which might play into such a decision would be exhausting and futile; making it in the moment, through the application of one’s principles to the actual material of your circumstances, should be straightforward. Proportionality is the self-justifying foundation of morality, and proportionality is only ever found in reality— not in the mind.

But, as I have said, at present all of this remains academic. The consideration of extremes is valuable because it illuminates the subtle principles which animate normality; but the normality of life in the developed world presents little risk of the reemergence of Fascism. This assertion is borne in the first place out of observation, but it isn’t difficult to locate a sturdier logic behind it. Fascism owes its origin to a distortion of the chi, an irrational breakdown of the balance of Yin and Yang within the minds of a group of people. By the same token, the wu wei of the human being is resistant to Fascism, and the unblocking of this chi by the operation of solve and unio will tend inevitably towards the restoration of this essential character.

Finally, if you were looking in this chapter for some advice on opposing Fascism today, that’s a much more straightforward question for me to answer. Fascism is driven by 3c inculcation, and 3c inculcation is dissolved by solve. Art, culture, and argumentation which prompt introspection remain the most potent weapons in the contest against authority; by any indication, they will prove sufficient in the end.