All The Lonely People, That’s Where Fascism Comes From

How the loneliness of capitalism trends towards fascism

‘Fascism’ comes from ‘fasces’, a bundle of sticks. It is the creation of community in an atomized world, where we are nothing more than lonely bits of labor-power to burn.

Hannah Arendt said the fertile ground for fascism was loneliness. A bunch of atomized people, as separate and lonely as grains of sand, turned into a sandstorm by a demagogue who gives them meaning, belonging, a purpose, all the things bourgeoise values lack. Eleanor Rigby was, in short, a closet fascist.

Today people are lonely as shit. I grew up in America (and Canada) and the main reason I left was loneliness. As a teenager I lived in my family’s basement, I had a mini-apartment down there, I could smoke weed into the air filter, I had a car, I had a job, I had everything I was supposed to have and I was sad.

I’d come back from holidays in Sri Lanka—poor but rich in family—and I still remember looking down those basement stairs. I felt so lonely I could cry. That feeling of just grey persisted for weeks, at which point it just became part of the paste of life. I felt like snow after people had driven over it for days. A bunch of snowflakes once, now just undifferentiated sludge.

I went to a therapist because I was depressed, I went to a dermatologist because my skin was literally turning white, I worked shitty jobs to make money, to buy clothes that were never cool enough, and weed…