August 31, 2020

The why of anything is the most basic question. A political answer is often not basic enough. Thus it is with fascism. The politics goes in circles. So a more basic evaluation is needed. More basic than the politics is the morality. The right-and-wrong get to the basics.

To a large extent, fascism is an attempt to evade the morality and basics of politics. It's an escape method of doing things—an escape from all of the basic elements of morality, accountability and rationality.

The essence of fascism is making sin pay. Of course, a lot of proving is needed when making moral claims. The proof is in the most basic relationships between elements. At the most basic level, the relationships between elements are few and not very disputable.

The best analysis and proof in basic areas which include morality is in the mechanism or methodologies. (A methodology is more complex than some mechanisms.) There are methodologies which solve problems and are required for constructivity. But for corruption, methodologies are extremely crude or nonexistent. To a large extent, proper is simply to adhere to methodologies based on laws instead of whims.

But methodologies require consistent laws. It's the lawlessness of corruption that condemns fascism. Fascists cannot tolerate laws, so they operate by whim. Whim produces anarchy. A complex social order cannot survive anarchy any more than an automobile can survive running into a brick wall.

Fascism is largely a public decision. The standards of orderly existence break down before fascism is possible. The break down is an incremental slide. It always results from social problems which do not appear solvable and a quick fix is needed. Making sin pay is the quick fix that leads to fascism.

The demands for rationality increase as problems become unsolvable. Instead of trying to meet those demands, demagogues claim going around the process is the answer. Over time, the rationality is too vulnerable to the attacks upon it, so the demagogues prevail in promoting irrationality as the quick fix.

Rationality and morality are inseparable. Rationality is determining the make-up of, or relationships in, objective realities. Morality is that which sustains life. Life requires adherence to the demands of objective reality, which requires rationality.

Fascism is abandoning the rationality/morality process. It looks like the solution to persons who find rationality to be too demanding. They assume that the simplicity of irrationality must be a superior method of doing things. There is no logic to that assumption, but it prevails as fascism becomes the solution to overwhelming social problems.

Incompetent corrupters create social problems as a method of breaking down the rationality which exposes them as the incompetent corrupters that they are. If they get by with a lot of that, the response tends to be fascism.