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.)
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Do you believe that you experienced severe abuse or neglect from your parents or guardians?
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Do you come from a petite bourgeois family? (Do your parents own their home, but still have to work in order to survive?)
I think you're going to need to qualify what 'severe' abuse is because you're going to be hard-pressed to find victims of abuse that will self-classify it as severe. Even people who are victims of extreme levels of abuse will typically downplay it.
Also extreme abuse in my view can be seen as very light abuse that is consistent over decades as well as extreme singular or uncommon 'extreme' events.
Good point. Reich actually defines it as sexual abuse. But for Reich, sexual abuse can mean anything from being raped to not being allowed to have consensual sex with whoever you want.
The "official" definition google gives me is actually pretty vague:
"Child abuse is when a parent or caregiver, whether through action or failing to act, causes injury, death, emotional harm or risk of serious harm to a child. There are many forms of child maltreatment, including neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, exploitation and emotional abuse."
Don’t have answers to your questions, but I did a psych research paper on hostile attribution bias. I remember a study that found that having abusive parents had a connection with developing authoritarian (likely reactionary but I don’t remember) political views, which was mediated by hostile attribution bias. I can try to link that study if you want.
Please do. I tried googling this awhile back, but liberal sources generally relied on the authoritarian personality, without ever saying where it came from. My unconfirmed suspicion is that it originates in the precariousness of the petite bourgeois.
Hey the paper is Authoritarianism, Anger and Hostile Attribution Bias (Milburn, Niwa, Patterson 2014). https://www.jstor.org/stable/43785848?seq=1 Sorry for my late response here.
Not a problem, thank you. I took a look at the abstract: basically, the paper says that regardless of political orientation, being abused has a good chance of giving you an authoritarian personality? If only there was research connecting upbringing with socioeconomic status!
I believe that it's regardless of parental political orientation, which actually makes it very interesting to me. I think the gist of the paper is that parental abuse distorts our perception of the intentions behind others' behavior, which has implications for our political views. Mainly that abuse leads people to attribute hostility to others behavior, which creates a desire for authoritarianism. This is combined with displaced emotion from being abused.
Also I'm not sure how serious you are with the last sentence, but I do know of some research that has shown some generalized differences between how working class and more wealthy families raise their children.
I’m sorry, I was definitely serious and would love to see the research if it’s not too much trouble.
Sorry about that, the way that you worded that sentence made it seem slightly sarcastic. It turns out that the information that I was recalling was not from a specific study, but was derived from a textbook written by a sociologist. The name of this textbook is Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life 2nd Edition by Annette Lareau. I have not read the actual book myself, but I do know that it discusses some generalized differences that occur between "high SES" and "low SES" children. One concept that I learned in a university class is that high SES children are actively monitored by parents to directly foster growth, while low SES children have more autonomy and develop skills and talents more naturally. As this relies on the liberal concept of socioeconomic status I suspect that this sociologist may have a liberal background, but there is probably some interesting information if you're interested in differences in how the wealthy and working class raise their children.
Reich says he bases his ideas on the work he did with working class patients in Europe.
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I wouldn't call it abuse but there was a lot of tension. To be clear they were awful people, you def wouldn't wanna be around them.
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They didn't have to work to survive either.
I was a stupid kid and snapped the fuck out of it basically the moment I had any extensive interaction with the world outside my bubble. I don't think kids know shit about fuck when it comes to class at that stage, so it definitely wasn't class anxiety.
They were difficult to stand, never a day passed where they weren't wallowing in self-pity due to their imagined misery. When they weren't yelling at each other, they were venting about whoever else pissed them off. Occasionally one of them would pull me aside and go on a diatribe about how marrying the other one was a mistake, and make other snarky remarks. My mother got seriously pissed when she thought the presents she got for her birthday weren't enough. Apparently thousand dollar shoes was just not good enough. I think I also heard her on the phone once with her parents screaming and swearing her ass off like there's no tomorrow. They were basically like the grinch, but for all days of the year.
It sounds like they’re haute bourgeois, not petite bourgeois, to me. They also don’t seem to really suffer from economic anxiety so much as neglect. What do you think? That hole your mom is trying to fill with expensive shoes can only be filled by making peace with her parents—maybe? Does this sound right or out of bounds?
Could be, she did buy lots of stuff all the time. I don't know what happened with her parents, it was always kept between them. From what I gather it was some thing that happened some time in the 80s (maybe?) Or it might have been just a bad relationship in general. You could be right but I can't be certain, the way things are going it seems like she'll take whatever the problem is to her grave.
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- My parents were great, but I was completely rejected by and isolated from my peers for being "different" in many ways (only non whiteoid in my whole grade, small, shy)
- Idk what you consider petite bourgeois, but we had a average house for small town PA (never payed it of fully) and my dad was an HVAC tech.
Damn. So do you blame your bout of fascism on the way your peers treated you? What do you think caused it? How long did it last? And how severe was it? What brought you out of it?
But yeah, having a mortgage on a house in small town sounds petite bourgeois to me.
Being rejected and isolated from literally everybody at your school has no doubt been the most influential factor in my development in general, let alone with my fascism bout. Internet fascism gave idiot preteen me something to belong to, and my "outsider looking in" perspective on life allowed be to see through the bullshit of liberalism, wich I hold to this day. My parents are literally the best parents I have ever seen in real life and I would not trade them for the world, so unless fascism is when you have good parents, I don't think it's that. I was always deep into "internet culture" and was on 4chan since I was 12 years old, and as 4chan turned from idiot libertarian website into idiot fascist website in 2015, I went with it. I don't need to go on about my whole life story so I'll keep it brief, ended high school as a Internet fascist, my only friend that stuck with me afterwords was also a fascist (also an outcast) I then went to community college trade school for a bit, dropped out to get a blue collar job unrelated to the field I was studying, tried to kill myself, quit, went to a public uni for education, felt the need to end it coming on, dropped out before I did the deed, now I'm a NEET in my extremely supportive parent's basement. I was de-radiclized by fucking ContraPoint's Incels video, yes, cringe, I know, but the fact that someone on the left just fucking acknowledged the fucking agony I experienced just snapped me put of it. I then saw a richard wolfe video on marxism and from there I went down the leftist rabbit hole and have read a fair bit of theory. I also dropped my only friend (a fascist) along the way, after trying and failing to "convert" him. The difference between me and him? Even when I was a fascist, I was convinced that it was whats "best" for humanity (I know how stupid that sounds, but I had never been exposed to leftism so to me it seemed like the only options were neoliberal hell or fascism) while he literally just values brown people less (despite his only friend being Chinese). Basicly, I think fascism and its causes are a lot more complex than bad parents, own house.
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.
