When we speak of fascism, the first impulse is to identify villains, ideologies, or moral failings. From a relational perspective, this is misleading. Fascism is not primarily an ideology; it is a pathology of coordination under stress.
It emerges when a system’s intelligibility collapses: uncertainty becomes intolerable, revisability is treated as weakness, and the social field begins to enforce rigid, binary distinctions.
1. Stability Taken Too Far
Systems rely on stable coordination. Stability allows participants to act, anticipate, and communicate without constant recalculation. But fascism represents stability over-intensified: not the smooth coordination of complexity, but coordination compressed into a rigid, brittle form.
Indicators of this over-stabilisation include:
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moralised binaries (friend/enemy, loyal/betrayer)
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exclusion framed as necessity rather than choice
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suspicion of ambiguity or nuance
In other words, fascism is a system that enforces intelligibility by reducing the space of possibility.
2. Fear as Structural Fuel
Fascist coordination is driven less by ideology than by perceived existential threat. Fear is not simply emotional; it is structural: it guides which cuts in the system are legitimate and which are impossible to challenge.
Under this pressure:
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dissent is unintelligible rather than wrong
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deviation is experienced as betrayal rather than error
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stability feels not comforting, but vital
This is why fascist systems often appear morally compelling from the inside. The danger is experienced as imminent collapse, so enforcement feels necessary.
3. Normativity Without Revisability
Fascism produces a kind of normativity that is:
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rapid and unyielding
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intensely binary
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justified as survival
Deviation is not punished for moral failings alone; it is pre-emptively excluded by the structure of intelligibility itself. Participants internalise the rigidity, reinforcing the system without overt coercion.
This is what distinguishes fascism from ordinary oppression: it is self-stabilising.
4. Why Traditional Opposition Often Fails
When outsiders attempt critique — appeals to reason, moral argument, or evidence — the system often accommodates these challenges without destabilisation. Critique remains intelligible only on the system’s terms, which makes direct opposition almost irrelevant to its persistence.
Fascism is maintained not by coercion alone, but by pre-structured intelligibility. It is a pathology that thrives on being felt rather than argued with.
5. The Subversive Insight
Understanding fascism relationally reframes the task:
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The problem is not “evil ideas” or “bad people” alone
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The problem is a system whose constraints have hardened to the point of excluding variation
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Intervention must operate on fields of intelligibility, not at the level of morality or ideology
In other words, fascism can be undone not by yelling at it, but by reopening the space of possibility that it has foreclosed.
Conclusion
Fascism is a pathology of coordination under fear and rigid constraint. It stabilises not by virtue or morality, but by preemptively shaping what can be perceived, said, and acted upon.
In the next post, we will examine how fear and oversimplified binaries collapse revisability, and why this structural collapse makes fascist coordination so resilient: Post 2 — Fear, Simplicity, and the Collapse of Revisability.
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