Brutalism, suprematism and nazi-libertarianism

notes on the Madrid summit of the ultra-reactionary white wave

Dynamics of the Nazi-liberal wave

The summit of Western rightwing leaders that took place on May 29 in Madrid was the culminating moment of a process that escapes the categories of modern politics.

However, we continue to interpret it with the categories we have at our disposal: democracy, liberalism, socialism, fascism and so on

But I believe that these political categories no longer capture the essence of a process, which is not new on the enunciative, programmatic level, but is instead radically new on the anthropological and psycho-cognitive level.

The statements of the world’s rightist leaders do not explain the disruptive force of a movement that no one seems able to stop —with but a few exceptions, such as in Colombia, Brazil and socialist Spain: bastions of human resistance.

The traditional dynamics of parliamentary democracy and social struggle appear to have been overcome, as if a cyclone of unprecedented strength swept away the defenses that society had built after the Second World War.

The Madrid summit brought together groups that can be traced back to Western white supremacism, but also the Indian Narendra Modi, an example of non-white suprematism, and the Russian Putin, an example of non-Western suprematism.

In the second half of 2024 it is possible that the supremacist right will win the American Presidency and change the majority of the European Parliament, allying themselves with the center. But even if the right does not prevail in Europe and the Democrats win the American election, this would not change much, because on fundamental issues—rearmament, war and climate change—there is no longer a distinction between an extreme right-wing and a center government.

Indeed, the situation that is emerging—the victory of LePenism in France’s June elections and Trump's potential victory in November—would have the effect of breaking Western unity in the war against Russia.

But the subject of my reflection here is not the outcome of the 2024 elections.

What interests me is not merely political dynamics, but the anthropological dynamics that have deeply transformed the societies of the West — and a large part of the planet — after having swept away the organized working class and deactivated, one after the other, the international institutions of the liberal-democratic era: starting with the UN.

Can what is happening be reduced to a return of historical fascism? I don’t think so: fascism and nationalism continue to constitute the main reference point of the language and mentality of the political class that rides the reactionary wave. These are people of very low intellectual caliber, unable to find the concepts and words to describe the anthropological transformation behind their triumph.Their political potency is much greater than their consciousness.

What is emerging is a phenomenon of gigantic scope. It cannot be explained in political terms because it has its roots in the techno-anthropological mutation of humanity over the last four decades. It constitutes the outcome of a hyper-liberalism that made competition (i.e. social war) the universal principle of inter-human relations.

the human race has failed

Anthropos 2.0

Current explanations of the ultra-reactionary wave capture only marginal aspects of the phenomenon: liberals argue that democracy is shaken by authoritarian sovereignism. Marxists, or many of them, interpret what is happening as a return of historical fascism.

But neither one explains the most important thing: the anthropological mutation that lies at the heart of a mass adhesion to ultra-reactionary movements.

What we need to understand is not the meaning of the words pronounced by Trump, Milei, or Norendra Modi, but the reasons why a growing majority of the planet's population enthusiastically embrace the destructive fury of these leaders.

Unlike historical Nazi-fascism supporting the intervention of the State in the economy, the suprematist wave blends the clichés of racism and cultural conservatism with a hysterical emphasis on economic liberalism. The emphasis is on brutality and the freedom to be brutal.

Should we think that the crowds follow Trump despite his blatant lies, despite his low-grade machismo? And that the Israeli crowds support the colonialist government despite the extermination of Palestinian children? And that the majority of Argentines vote for Milei despite the chainsaw with which he is preparing to destroy the welfare state and starve millions of workers?

Or perhaps the reasoning should be reversed?

I put forward the hypothesis that we are faced with a real inversion of ethical judgment: Americans vote for Trump precisely because he is a rapist and a liar. Israelis support Netanyahu precisely because he practices genocide, compensating for a profound and unspeakable need to compensate for the descendants of the victims of a past genocide. And young Argentines follow Milei because they believe that finally the best will be able to excel, and the rest will starve as they deserve to.

This cynical inversion of judgement, this enthusiasm for racist violence, implies a perversion of perception and psychic processing, even before a moral one: gore capitalism, as Sayak Valencia defined the Mexican reality in her book.

Social brutalism

By making competition the universal principle of inter-human relationships, neoliberalism has ridiculed empathy for the suffering of others, eroded the foundations of solidarity, and thus destroyed social civilization.

When Milei decries social justice as an aberration, he merely legitimizes the right of the strongest and galvanizes the illusion of masses of young individuals (mostly males) convinced that they are endowed with the necessary strength to be victorious against everyone else. This belief will not be easily dismantled, because tomorrow when these individuals are miserable impoverished loners, they will only blame their defeat on immigrants, or on communists, or on Satan, depending on their preferred psychosis.

While social justice is condemned as an aberrant intrusion of state socialism into the freedom of individuals, competitive ferocity is naturalized: in the struggle for life, those who are not up to ferocity deserve to die.

Empathy is not compatible with the economy of survival, indeed it is self-harming.  As Thomas Wade says in Liu Cixin's novel (Dark Forest): “If we lose our humanity we lose something, if we lose our bestiality we lose everything.”

Brutalism becomes the foundation of social life.

Connective unconscious and the end of the critical mind

McLuhan wrote in 1964 that when inter-human communication passes from the slow dimension of alphabetic technology to the fast dimension of electronics, critical thought turns impractical and mythological thought is restored. The current mutation is proving to be more overwhelming than McLuhan's own predictions.

According to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the main competitor of info-companies is sleep.

Adding up the hours of multitasking activity of a person of our time, the day is 31 hours, of which only six and a half hours are dedicated to sleep.

In 24/7 Capitalism and the end of sleep Jonathan Crary writes that the average time dedicated to sleep has decreased in a century from eight and a half hours to six and a half hours. What are the effects of this change in the mental autonomy of each individual?

For thirteen hours the mind is exposed to stimuli from the electronic infosphere.

A book reader could expose his mind to the reception of alphabetic signs for many hours, but the intensity and speed of the electronic impulses is incomparably higher. What are the consequences of this techno-communicative transformation?

The mind, subjected to the uninterrupted bombardment of electronic impulses regardless of their content, functions in a way that is radically different way from the alphabetic mind.

The post-alphabetical mind is less and less able to decipher true and false information, and less and less able to construct an individual path for processing information and lived experience. This ability depends on available processing time.

In the case of a boy who lives thirteen hours a day in the electronic infosphere, time for critical processing is reduced to zero.

The distinction between deciphering the truth and falsity of statements is not only made difficult, but is irrelevant, as when you are in a gaming environment. In such an environment it makes no sense to approve or disapprove of the violence of the green men invading the red planet. Doing so would only lead to losing the game.

The connective configuration of the contemporary mind is increasingly indifferent to the distinction between true and false, between good and bad. The choice between one stimulus and another does not depend on critical judgment but on the degree of dopamine stimulation. To give a personal example: on the night of November 9, 2016, when awaiting the results of the American elections in which Hillary Clinton faced Donald Trump, I remember waking up at four in the morning to turn on my computer to see how the contest had ended. Not that I had any sympathy for Hillary, but I found the idea that this brute could become president to be morally repugnant. Yet I realized that something in me wanted the strongest, most unexpected, most scandalous, in short, most dopamine-stimulating event to happen. And my nervous system was satisfied: the horror prevailed, and the spectator in me was satisfied, because every spectator always wants the screen to send him the strongest stimulus.

Cellular technology and the great migration

Marxism has generally underestimated the demographic question after Marx criticized Malthusian theses in the mid-nineteenth century. Marx was right against Malthus, who predicted that the increase in population would cause upheavals without considering the technical evolution of productivity. But Marxists were not equally right in downplaying the consequences of the extraordinary acceleration that medicine and social progress have made possible. The jump from two and a half billion people in 1950 to eight billion seventy years later entailed an unprecedented intensification of the exploitation of the earth's resources and led to the devastation of the planetary environment. Liberal capitalism has its faults, but I believe that no production system could satisfy the needs caused by the demographic explosion without provoking catastrophic effects on the planetary ecology, and also on the psychic perception of others: in conditions of overpopulation the collective unconscious, in the contemporary mode of connective unconscious, is no longer able to perceive the other as a friend, because every other individual is a threat to survival.

Ecological devastation is making large areas of the planet uninhabitable and cultivation impossible. It is understandable that the populations of the global south (an expression which means: the areas which have suffered the effects of colonization and suffer particularly from the effects of climate change) want to move towards the global north (which means the area which has enjoyed the advantages of colonial exploitation and which has suffered less, for the moment, the consequences of climate change).

It’s understandable, although immoral, that the inhabitants of the north of the world reject the idea that more and more people are moving from the south to the north. This explains why the great migration pushes, and will push, the populations of the north towards openly racist positions. This explains why genocide is back and will increasingly become a technique for controlling population movements. This is why Europeans do what they can to ensure that thousands of people drown in the sea or die in the deserts of North Africa.

In the novel Gun Island, Amitav Gosh talks about the magnifying effect of cellular communication on mass migration.

The great migration contributes to the ultra-reactionary wave, while the contrast between the imperialist north and the colonized south takes on increasingly clear contours. Just look at the map of the countries that condemn Israeli colonialism and the countries that support it, and you’ll understand the geography of the epochal clash that is taking shape.

But we must not believe that brutality belongs only to the white Western world: Putin's Russia is not Western, and Modi's India is not white, but both share the essential characteristics of brutalism and indifference to genocide.

Anti-colonialism was a progressive movement within the framework of workers' internationalism, but this seems to have disappeared from the horizon of history.

Demographic trend and provisional conclusions

We must consider the fact that demographic expansion, which is rolling back in the global north, is destined to continue globally until the world population will reach ten billion, according to the demographer’s predictions.

Some demographers predict that at that point, in the middle of the century, the Earth's population will begin to decline at a rate similar to the rate at which it has grown in the past century.

According to Dean Spear, we can draw a bell that rises dramatically from two to ten billion on the left, reaching a peak around 2040, then just as precipitously falls down.

At least three factors contribute to this collapse in the birth rate which I do not intend to analyze here: the collapse of male fertility, female reticence to generate the victims of the climatic and military holocaust, and the decreasing frequency of sexual contacts as a result of the hyper-semiotisation of desire.

But it is entirely foreseeable that the political and moral brutality that is asserting itself everywhere, combined with the growing power of weapons of mass destruction and the amoral rationality of artificial intelligence applied to armaments, will cause the final collapse of human civilization before the beginning of demographic decrease.

Can we expect a reversal of the trends that I have been analyzing here? In order to answer we must consider that the rise of libertarian brutalism is fueled by an energy that seems to arise from the profound dynamics of the technological and cognitive evolution of the human race.

Such energy cannot be stopped by political will, only by an opposing energy of similar potency.

This is why I fear that it is only when this energy has produced all the effects of which it is capable will it stop, just as the Third Reich stopped the destruction only when it had destroyed everything it could destroy, including Germany.

But the destructive force available to the global Third Reich of our time is enough to erase every trace of human life from the planet.