I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about the effects of isolation, echochambers, the compounding effects of low quality education, simple heuristic solutions for group problems, irony poisoning, conditioned in-group responses, thought terminating cliches… a whole milieu of factors great and small that sorta “till the soil” of the mind leaving it easy for anything to take root. While there are especially virulent things looking to take root, where good ideas are perhaps a bit less aggressive and invasive by nature.

With the virus analogy, I guess how I’ve been feeling is that even as early as my primary schooling, we were not effectively vaccinated against the fascism virus and in some respects it seems like we were/are primed for it.

The thought which I haven’t yet really figured out how to articulate or conceptualise is this notion that fascism and liberalism are so inextricably linked that liberalism might more or less always lead to fascism. Like perhaps it relies on the same sort of tilled soil that fascism requires to take root, to continue stretching that metaphor to the end.

Not that this is some fresh revelation for a socialist community. I’ve just been feeling the “reality” of this lately, rather than it being an intellectually understood fact. It’s hard to describe. Like even the best meaning efforts from within the liberal project bend towards a fascistic failure state.