I want to find out if Wilhelm Reich's theory about where fascism comes from is true. This isn't a scientific survey so regardless of the results I still won't really know, but I suppose it's still better than nothing. I'm also not an academic so I can't get access to research grants, and I'm not sure anyone would pay for a study like this to begin with (correct me if I'm wrong).

Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, basically says that fascists are created by two factors: severe economic exploitation / anxiety on the part of the petite bourgeoisie, combined with severe child abuse. Reich believes that the abuse takes place while people are too young to remember it (and/or that the memories may be suppressed), but I imagine that it could have easily continued afterward. (Others who understand Reich better than me, again: correct me if I'm wrong.)

  1. Do you believe that you experienced severe abuse or neglect from your parents or guardians?

  2. Do you come from a petite bourgeois family? (Do your parents own their home, but still have to work in order to survive?)

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Damn man. I’m sorry to hear that but I’m glad you made it out. I remember the only Chinese kid from an all-white high school I was in and it was rough for him. He was awkward and kind of an outsider. Someone I knew once made fun of his name to his face and I joined in. It didn’t seem to get to him but it must have. This was over fifteen years ago and except for one class we had together I haven’t seen him since. I liked him though and would apologize for that if I saw him now. There’s so much casual racism directed toward Asians in America it’s just insane.

    So far we just have a sample size of one, and I think you might be right that the fash pipeline isn’t as simple as I made it sound. But the thing is—you made it out. Maybe your case wasn’t as severe, even though you were suicidal. I don’t know because I’m far from an expert and I know virtually nothing about you. A lot of other people are still trapped there. They could probably look at that same contrapoints video and it wouldn’t phase them at all. If your parents sucked, do you think you still would have escaped? What about your friend? Do you know why he became a fascist as well?

    Maybe a big factor is loss of status? You were rejected by your school and you wanted answers. 4chan provided them. Sadly, they got to you before any leftists could, at least until later. But yeah. I don’t know. I think I’m a little older than you, and in the late 90s and early 00s when I was getting on the internet, it was all liberal, at least for me. The most leftwing sites I could find never mentioned socialism; they just really hated Bush. Had I been stuck there longer it’s possible the pickup artist forums I looked at (pathetic I know) would have led me toward something bad.