This week, Belfast erupted in an orgy violence, as marauding gangs, egged on by far-right influencers in Britain and abroad, attacked immigrants—or rather people whom they regarded as immigrants—that is, people whose skin has a darker hue than the average resident of Northern Ireland. Victims’ homes were set on fire, with whole families huddling inside for safety. Police intervened, clad in riot and armed with water canons, only to have projectiles hurled at them.

This xenophobic fury was sparked by a knife attack on an Irish man by Hadi Alodid, a Sudanese refugee. The Guardian newspaper reported, “The stabbing happened at about 10.30pm on Monday outside a block of flats in north Belfast. Video shared on social media showed a man straddling another man on the ground and striking at his head and neck. A kitchen knife was recovered from the scene. The victim, Stephen Ogilvie, in his 40s, lost his left eye and had deep lacerations to his face.”

Although it was just one man who committed this vicious crime, the mob’s fury targeted anyone and everyone marked by their appearance, language, or attire, as racially other.

It was a pogrom.

The word “pogrom” is Russian for “wreaking havoc,” and refers to attacks on “alien” communities. It was first used to describe attacks on Jewish communities in the Russian Empire during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries. It was one such assault that moved my family to to seek safe haven in the United States. My maternal great grandparents, Benjamin and Rivka Eskin, along with their eight children, arrived at Ellis Island in the fall of 1906, with little more than the clothes on their backs. They had fled the city of Gomel (also spelled “Homel”), in present-day Belarus.

There had been a pogrom in Gomel in 1903. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia:

Anti-Jewish outbreaks occurred in Gomel in Sept., 1903. Rumors of impending riots had been circulated in the latter part of the previous month. The trouble arose on Friday, Sept. 11, when a watchman wished to buy from a Jewish woman a barrel of herring worth six rubles for one ruble fifty copecks. In the fight which followed between the Jewish peddlers of the market-place and the Christians who came to the aid of the watchman, one of the Christians was injured and died the same day. The riot was renewed on the following day, and when it had been quelled the town was practically under martial law. Meanwhile a number of anti-Semitic agitators, probably executing the orders of the authorities, inflamed the passions of the mob, exhorting them not to leave their fellow Christians unavenged. On Monday, Sept. 14, about 100 railway employees gathered and began to break the windows and to enter and plunder the houses of the Jews in the poorest quarters of the town, one of which is called "Novaya Amerika" ("New America"). A number of Jews armed and began to defend themselves, but the soldiers prevented them from entering the streets where the plundering was going on, and forced them back to their homes, beating and arresting those who resisted. According to a reliable report, other soldiers and the police looked on in an indifferent way while the mob continued its plundering and committed all kinds of excesses. The shrieks of children could be heard in the streets which the soldiers had blocked against the Jews without; and when some of the Jews tried to force their way down the side-streets, the soldiers fired on them, wounding several among them and killing six….The total number of Jews killed is given as 25; seriously injured, 100; slightly injured, 200. Three hundred and seventy-two Jewish houses and 200 stores were plundered and destroyed.

There have been many pogroms since then. One was in Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. It was sparked by the false accusation by Fannie Taylor, a “White” woman, that she had been assaulted by an escaped African American convict. More than two hundred men attacked the African American town Rosewood, Florida. They killed dozens of its residents—women, men, and children—and burned the whole town to the ground.

The best-known pogrom is the Kristallnacht pogrom (the “Night of Broken Glass”), which convulsed Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland in November, 1938. It was ignited by a homicide.

A seventeen-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Feibel Grynszpan, a stateless person illegally living in France, lethally shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath five times in the stomach. Grynszpan was stateless because Polish Jews, including his parents, had been expelled from Germany by the Gestapo. But because Poland had also stripped them of their citizenship, they were in limbo, confined to a makeshift concentration camp cobbled together just across the Polish border.

The Nazi state was quick to take advantage of the situation by orchestrating a mass pogrom, falsely presented as a popular uprising, in which Jewish homes and businesses were vandalized, over a thousand synagogues were set on fire, and twenty-six thousand Jewish men were hauled off to concentration camps.

In 1993, a pogrom erupted in the town of Hadareni, Romania. Like this week’s Belfast pogrom, this one began with a stabbing. During an altercation, a Roma man stabbed a local non-Roma man. He and two others fled into a nearby house, while a six-hundred strong mob gathered outside, armed with pitchforks, whips, sticks, and other makeshift weapons. The house was doused with gasoline and torched. Two of the men were clubbed to death while trying to flee. A third was burned alive. Their bloodlust not yet sated, the crowd made the rounds of Roma homes, setting fire to at least thirteen of them and vandalizing four more.

You may have noticed a pattern in these four examples. It is not exceptionless, but it is very robust. Pogroms are triggered when a racialized male commits a real or imagined violent act against a member of the dominant group.

Here’s a puzzle. Pogroms are collective. They target entire communities. Why does rage against an individual perpetrator trigger violence against a whole group? Why, if an individual perpetrator is the object of their wrath, does the mob extract vengeance on innocent bystanders—men, women, and children who have done nothing wrong?

The answer lays in the logic of race.

When a group of people is racialized, every member of the group is assumed to possess a racial essence that makes them a member of a subordinate race. The racial essence is imagined to be an inherent, unchangeable fact about them, located in their “blood” or in their genes.

When a group is racialized in this way, it is almost always the case that the racial essence is supposed to include a disposition to criminality and violence—in other words, members of the racialized group are supposed to be essentially criminal. Jews, Blacks, and Romani people, as well as many others, have been tarred with this brush by their persecutors.

The belief that members of a racialized group are essentially criminal is compatible with they’re never having committed a criminal act. Such people “have it in them” to behave criminally, but whether they actually do so is immaterial in the eyes of their racist overlords. According to the compelling fiction, the disposition is there, simmering right below the surface, poised to burst out if given half a chance.

Because all of the victims of pogroms are deemed to possess a criminal racial essence, they are fungible in the minds of their persecutors. The locus of their criminality is not in what they do. It is in who they are. Their crime is, to paraphrase the title of Michael Berkowitz’s book about the Nazi criminalization of Jews, the crime of their very existence.

I didn’t want to write a Substack today. I really didn’t. I’m tired, and I’ve got too much on my plate. But the debut of the Trump regime’s new Aliens website made it impossible not to write.

As many of you may know, there’s been a lot of press recently about the government declassifying information about UFOs and, supposedly, alien visitations to our planet. That was all hype. There’s no evidence of little green men invading the Earth.

It was all to pave the way for the Trump regime’s newest and vilest dehumanization of another kind of “alien”—not little green men, but brown and black ones.

Of course, this is nothing new. Trump and his lackeys have been indulging in dehumanizing rhetoric for years. But his latest atrocity takes things to a new level, one that Hitler would be immensely proud of.

If you visit the website—as I urge you to do—you will be confronted with the statement, in lurid green letters, “They walk among us.” This immediately conjures up the prototypically dehumanizing image of dangerous subhumans disguising themselves as humans to infiltrate our world.

This is a paradigmatic representation of dehumanized others, who are routinely imagined as outwardly human but inwardly nonhuman entities—in effect, as monsters. We find it in both anti-Black and Nazi antisemitic ideology. The 17th century English cleric Morgan Godwyn reported that apologists for slavery confided to him that “the Negros, though in their Figure they carry some resemblances of Manhood, yet are indeed no Men.” Likewise the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt remarked “Not all of those who appear human are in fact so. Woe to him who forgets it!”

The website text gets worse. Scrolling down, we are informed:

For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret. Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives. They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences. With one exception — they do not belong here.

Millions arrived under the cover of darkness and embedded themselves directly into our society. Countless presidents, congressmen, and senior officials knew exactly what was happening. Instead of protecting American citizens, they chose to cover it up and even accelerate the invasion. Until one man finally had the courage to tell the truth. Bold. Unapologetic.Unafraid.

President Trump was the first to call out the real danger Aliens pose to every American family, every community, and the future of our nation.

This is frightening. Every bit as frightening as the propaganda that was churned out by past fascist regimes to justify and motivate genocidal violence.

The dehumanizing language gets even worse. The text reads:

If you’ve witnessed an Alien abduction, do not be alarmed. The Alien is in good hands. We will take care of it… and return it safely to its place of origin.

Notice that “the Alien” is not a human being. “The Alien” is now an “it”—a thing, a non-human. And the tormentors of undocumented immigrants—the ICE thugs—are pictured as benign caretakers, who want only to capture and release the subhuman creature—the invasive species—back into its natural environment.

We know, of course, that abducted (the one unintentionally accurate word) immigrants are sent to all sorts of places that are not their countries of origin. But the logic of dehumanization is impeccable: all “shithole” countries are fungible.

I cannot begin to convey to you how dangerous this is. It’s not just some political bad weather that future elections will dispel. We are locked into a precipitous descent into the worst kind of fascist depravity.

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Nobody has an ideology. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t deny that ideologies exist. They do exist, but they’re not the sort of things that people have. Ideologies aren’t like hats. You can’t put them on and take them off. And they’re not parts of a person, like livers and kidneys. Some of us have hats, and all of us have livers, but none of us have ideologies. However, ideologies have us. I make this claim because I do not think that we adopt ideologies. We don’t choose them. Rather, we inherit them. We are hostage to ideologies because of where we stand in a larger social/historical process.

To explain of all this, I need to dig down into the notion of ideology. “Ideology” is one of those terms that is both very popular and very ambiguous. As political scientist John Gerring observes:

Condemned time and again for its semantic excesses, for it’s bulbous unclarity, the concept of ideology remains, against all odds, a central term of social science discourse. Few concepts in the social science lexicon have occasioned so much discussion, so much disagreement, and so much self-conscious discussion of the disagreement as ‘ideology.’

Likewise, John Levi Martin writes:

It is common for…discussions of ideology to begin by acknowledging, if not bemoaning, the plurality of different ways of using the term “ideology”…. Marx and Engels used it to denote the most abstract conceptions that populate an imaginary world of ideas independent of material life; later Marxists often used it to denote a conspiratorial ideational wool pulled over the eyes of the masses; political scientists use it to denote packages of positions, often believed to be unifiable in a single preferred optimal state, and, of course, many of us use it to denote the beliefs, attitudes and opinions of those with whom we disagree.

Functionalism is a popular way of explaining ideology. It might even be the dominant one. Functionalists believe that ideologies are systems of belief that have the function of promoting and sustaining oppression. These beliefs and their associated practices cater to the interests of the privileged members of a society, to the detriment of others.

Most functionalists think that ideologies are deceptive. Ideologies present a distorted picture of the social world. Their true nature and purpose is concealed, which makes it possible for those most harmed by ideologies to vigorously support them.

At first glance, this definition of ideology seems clear. But there’s an ambiguity at its heart. The term “function” has at least two different meanings. Recognizing this reveals that there are at least two different versions of functionalism about ideology.

Sometimes we think of the function of a thing as what it does. I call this version the causal theory of function, and I call the functions attributed to things on this basis nomofunctions (from the Greek nomos, meaning “law”). Here’s an illustration. We say that the function of household smoke detectors is to alert residents to smoke in the air. That’s their nomofunction because that’s what they do.

But there’s a problem with this way of accounting for function. Smoke detectors do lots of things. For instance, a smoke detector might cover an unsightly smudge on the wall, or make an irritating chirping sound when their battery is low. Why aren’t covering smudges or chirping their function? And, and like everything else, what a smoke detector does can be described in lots of different ways. The very same activity described as “alerting residents to the presence smoke in the house” can be described as “making a shrill, repetitive sound,” “elevating residents’ blood pressure,” “moving molecules in the air,” and dozens of other ways. Establishing the nomofunction of a smoke detector (or smoke detectors in general) requires some principled way of choosing between the various things that it does and the various descriptions that these doings fall under.

You might be growing impatient at this point, because most of these alternatives seem silly. Who on earth would seriously entertain the idea that the function of a smoke detector is to move molecules around in the air. You might insist that the function of smoke detectors is just obvious. It’s right there in their name. The function of smoke detectors is detecting smoke because that’s what smoke detectors are designed to do. It’s their purpose—their raison d’etre.

I completely agree.

A good theory of function should account for purpose. The causal theory doesn’t. To propose that the function of a thing is its purpose moves us away from the causal theory and towards a teleological one. Its pretty easy to explain how smoke detectors get their purpose. Like other human artifacts, smoke detectors get their purpose from the intentions of their designers. They are designed for detecting smoke rather than chirping or hiding smudges.

Returning now to the topic of ideology, it’s clear why the causal story doesn’t suffice. Ideologies, like smoke detectors, have lots of different effects in addition to promoting oppression, and the causal theory can’t winnow them. White supremacist beliefs were responsible for the profusion of insurance companies in the English city of Bristol, a major slave port during the 18th century. But it would be strange to say that a function of White supremacism was to promote maritime insurance in Bristol.

It’s also problematic for another reason. Last week, one of my smoke detectors malfunctioned. It started screaming even though there wasn’t even a trace of smoke in the house. It failed to perform its function. All artifacts can fail, but the very possibility of failure shows that there’s a gap between an artifact’s function—the function that it has—and its performance, what it does. Unless we make this distinction, we don’t have the conceptual resources to explain what it is for a thing to malfunction (or, for that matter, to function well). The causal theory of ideology appears to rule out the possibility of malfunctioning ideologies—ideologies that have the purpose of promoting oppression but do not succeed at doing so.

The teleological approach doesn’t have this shortcoming. If the function of a thing is its purpose, then it has that function whether or not it discharges it. Smoke detectors have the teleofunction of detecting smoke even if they don’t work, and to say that an artifact doesn’t work is to say that it doesn’t perform its function.

Now, for a first pass at a teleofunctional theory of ideology: ideologies acquire their function from the intentions of their designers. The designers of an ideology intend the ideology to promote the oppression of one group by another. It’s this idea that John Levi Martin alluded to when he wrote that later Marxists often used the notion of ideology “to denote a conspiratorial ideational wool pulled over the eyes of the masses.”

That ideologies are sometimes intentionally crafted to oppress others is beyond reasonable doubt. But it doesn’t provide a complete story. Often those who promulgate ideologies believe their own message. They don’t produce ideologies as a means to an end. They don’t make ideological claims in order to produce oppression. They make ideological claims because they regard them as true. I’m sure that there have been White supremacists who cynically preached the gospel of Black inferiority without believing it, simply because they regarded it as financially advantageous to do so. But I suspect that those are exceptional cases. Mostly, ideologues seem thoroughly, sincerely, and indeed fanatically, committed to their beliefs.

At this point it looks like functionalists must either gravitate towards nomofunctionalism, and swallow its unsatisfactory implications, adopt teleofunctionalism, with its equally unsatisfactory implications, or give up on functionalism altogether. But there’s an escape from this trilemma—a different version of teleofunctionalism

I’ve used artifacts like smoke detectors as models for understanding teleofunctions. But they’re not the only, or indeed the best ones. Parts of organisms also have teleofunctions. They do not acquire them from the intentions of a designer, but from evolution by natural selection.

Consider the mirror orchid (Ophrys speculum). These orchids produce blossoms that mimic the appearance and scent of females of the pollinating species of wasp (Dasyscolia ciliata). Males of this species, enticed by the flowers, attempt to copulate with them, and thereby carry pollen from flower to flower. One might say that mirror orchids evolved to produce wasp pornography to serve their own reproductive ends.

The morphology of these flowers has a function—a teleofunction—to cause scolid wasps to pollinate them. But there was no designer involved, no intention to produce this effect. The function of the flower’s features is best explained by the proposition that ancestors of present-day mirror orchids with features that resembled female scolid wasps reproduced more effectively than those without them. Over countless generations, these features were tweaked by evolution to produce the amazing simulacra that we see today.

The Darwinian explanation of the purpose of mirror orchids’ attributes is a strictly biological one, involving genetic selection and sexual reproduction. But ideology cannot be explained biologically. To close the gap between orchids and ideology, we must turn to the work of the philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan.

Millikan’s philosophy is complex, but the core of her theory of teleofunctions is easy to articulate. Millikan argues that anything can have a teleofunction, provided certain conditions are met. First, the thing must be part of a reproductive lineage. It must be a copy of similar things that preceded it, and second, it must have been the case that the thing’s reproduction is explained by its effects. The effects that account for the things reproduction are that thing’s teleofunction.

This theory makes sense of the functions of features of mirror orchids. It also makes sense of a whole lot of other things, including social customs like handshakes and the meaning of words. I think that the Millikanian perspective goes a long way towards explaining ideology.

So here goes. Ideologies are sets of beliefs (or perhaps more broadly, representations) that spread (i.e., are reproduced) across populations because they contribute to the oppression of some group of people. That’s how ideologies acquire their function—the function that sets them apart from other kinds of belief.

This analysis has some striking implications. One of them is that ideologies are “backward looking.” It is the history of a belief, not its present-day consequences, that make it an ideology. Consequently, beliefs can fail to promote oppression, but still remain ideologies. Second, although as I have already remarked, it is widely assumed ithat ideologies must be false, and that they must mask their true function, the teleofunctional theory doesn’t require this. A true belief can spread not because it is true, but rather because it benefits one group at the expense of another, and this need not entail any hidden agenda on the part of its beneficiaries. Third, ideologies are not introspectable—by which I mean, you can’t tell which of your beliefs are ideological by looking inward. The only way to determine whether a belief is ideological is through an objective examination of its social genealogy.

When I began researching dehumanization around 20 years ago, I believed that when we dehumanize people we think of them as nonhuman animals—as vermin, predators, and so on. This is the picture that I presented in Less Than Human, my first book on dehumanization. It was a commonplace view then, and it still is today.

However, there are four very significant problems with this perspective—problems that I didn’t recognize when I wrote Less Than Human.

One problem is the fact that thinking of dehumanized others as subhuman animals goes hand-in-hand with also acknowledging their humanness. Sometimes this is implicit, for instance when dehumanizers castigate dehumanized people as criminals (because only humans can be criminals) or when they humiliate them (cockroaches can’t be humiliated). Often, though, it is explicit. Dehumanizers typically alternate between describing those whom they dehumanize as nonhuman animals and describing them as human beings.

A second problem is that conceiving of others as animals doesn’t account for why they are seen as uniquely dangerous—typically, as posing an existential threat. This is particularly striking, given that dehumanized groups are often vulnerable, powerless minorities.

Third, conceiving of others as nothing more than nonhuman animals doesn’t explain the extreme violence that is meted out to them.

Finally, the idea that when people dehumanize others, they think of them as nothing more than animals doesn’t explain why these others are typically represented as monstrous beings.

Over time, I began to recognize these problems, and to work towards solving them. It took about five years of research to arrive at a satisfactory solution. I presented a sketch of my revised position in my 2016 paper “Paradoxes of dehumanization,” and more fully in my books On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It (2020) and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization (2021).

I came to the conclusion that although dehumanization often begins as the attitude that others are nonhuman animals (beasts, predators, vermin), it gives way to conceiving of them as monsters. I’ve offered a detailed explanation of how this happens in my book Making Monsters. Here, I want to focus on a psychological consequence of transforming people into monsters: the experience of metaphysical threat.

Consider the following passage from a booklet titled Der Untermensch (“The Subhuman”) published by the Nazi SS, ostensibly under the editorial direction of Heinrich Himmler himself. The “subhumans” to which the text refers are members of what the Nazis held to be inferior races—paradigmatically, Jews.

Inside of this creature lies wild and unrestrained passions: an incessant need to destroy, filled with the most primitive desires, chaos and coldhearted villainy. The subhuman thrives in chaos and darkness, he is frightened by the light. These subhuman creatures dwell in the cesspools, and swamps, preferring a hell on earth, to the light of the sun.

Although the word “monster” doesn’t appear anywhere in the text, this is obviously a description of monstrous entities.

Nazis also overly characterized dehumanized people as monsters. Werner Catel was a senior physician in the Nazis’ “euthanasia” program that resulted in the murder of thousands of disabled children. In a 1961 magazine interview, Catel described cognitively disabled children as “soulless beings” that “will never become a human being,” and he continued to describe such children as “monsters” and “massa carnis” (“lump[s] of flesh”)—a term that he borrowed from Martin Luther, who had used it four centuries earlier to describe a cognitively disabled child that he believed to be a “changeling”—a demonic being swapped for a human child by the devil.

Many of the victims of racial violence in the United States were described as monsters in print media of the day. For instance, Henry Smith, an intellectually disabled African American farm worker, who was accused of raping and murdering a young child, was gruesomely tortured and then burned alive before a crowd of at least ten thousand eager spectators. The media of the day wasted no time describing him not only as an animalistic “brute,” but also an “unnatural monster,” “incarnate monster,” and “the most inhuman monster known in current history.”

It is tempting to dismiss such talk as nothing more than façons de parler. But the way that we speak is the way that we think, and the way that we think—the categories we employ and the relations that we take to hold between them—are hostage to the ideological frameworks that we acquire from our social milieux.

So, what is it to characterize a person, or a group of people, as monsters? Philosopher Jack Griffiths writes in an essay review of Lorraine Daston’s book Against Nature that:

Monsters are products of organic development or reproduction gone awry, and they violate the meant-to-be order of the organism’s ‘specific’ (species) nature, or in some cases transgress the boundary between one or more such natures...Monsters are break-downs of the proper ordering of the organic world. They are objects of horror, to be spurned, rejected, even destroyed.

Monsters have no place in the natural order because they transgress the boundaries separating natural kinds by combining mutually exclusive attributes in a single entity. As Noël Carroll puts it, the monster is typically “a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds with the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatio-temporally discrete entity.”

Consider the werewolf—a being that is both wolf and man. The werewolf is not part wolf and part man—for instance, lupine legs and human arms. That would be disturbing, but not conceptually impossible. However, the werewolf is fully human and also fully wolf. Similarly, movie zombies are decaying corpses, fully dead but animate and hungry, and therefore also fully alive. Werewolves and zombies are physically dangerous, predatory beings, and therefore frightening—but that they are uncanny fusions of mutually exclusive natural kinds renders them not merely scary, but horrifying.

Likewise, dehumanized people are regarded by their persecutors as simultaneously human and subhuman, which transforms them into monstrous fusion figures. The violations of the natural order exemplified by werewolves, zombies, and, I argue, dehumanized human beings, produces a feeling of what I call metaphysical threat. British horror writer Arthur Machen brilliantly conveyed the idea of metaphysical threat in a passage from his novel The House of Souls.

What would your feelings be, seriously, if your cat or your dog began to talk to you and to dispute with you in human accents? You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose that the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stoney blossoms in the morning?

None of the items mentioned in this passage—the roses, the stones, the pebble, the pet cat or dog, are physically dangerous; and yet, they are all extremely disturbing. Machen’s imagery doesn’t elicit disgust (an affect that I think is overemphasized in the moral psychology literature), and it doesn’t evoke fear—the affective response to ordinary dangers. It evokes horror—an under-theorized psychological state.

We can make sense of this affective response by examining its cognitive underbelly.

Although “metaphysical threat” is a novel term, the phenomenon that it names has been studied, on and off, for more than a century, starting with German psychiatrist Ernst Jensch’s seminal 1906 article “On the psychology of the uncanny.” The German word translated as “uncanny” in Jentsch’s title is unheimlich. Unheimlich things are eerie, creepy, or at the extreme, horrific. They make your skin crawl.

Jentsch argued that a certain kind of disorientation is at the root of such feelings. We have the affective experience of uncanniness when presented with something that seems to belong to two incompatible categories at once. Jentsch was particularly interested in, and presented several examples of, things that seem both animate and inanimate, such as human figures in a wax museum. One’s immediate, gut-level response to well-made simulacra of human beings is to see them as human, even though one knows that they are not. The metaphysical threat response is even more marked if they move. Automata can provoke unheimlich feelings:

This peculiar effect makes its appearance even more clearly when imitations of the human form not only reach one’s perception, but when on top of everything they appear to be united with certain bodily or mental functions. This is where the impression easily produced by the automatic figures belongs that is so awkward for many people…. for example, the life-size machines that perform complicated tasks, blow trumpets, dance and so forth, very easily give one a feeling of unease.

The power of automata to elicit metaphysical threat was rediscovered more than half a century later by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, and described in a short but extremely influential paper titled “The uncanny valley” (bukimi, the Japanese word translated as “uncanny,” works very much like the German unheimlich). Mori predicted that as robots (an updated iteration of Jentsch’s automata) become more human-like, we will become more and more comfortable with them, but once they are almost indistinguishable from real human beings, they will be experienced as bukimi and elicit intense aversion.

In between Jentsch and Mori, Mary Douglas’ celebrated book Purity and Danger (1966) addressed metaphysical threat antropologically. Douglas argued that beings that do not fit into a society’s framework of natural kinds are regarded as unclean, impure, defiled, and imbued with dangerous power that requires special, expert management.

A few decades later, Noël Carroll explicitly drew on Douglas’ analysis. Carroll argued that “horrific monsters”—the kind of monsters found in horror fiction and cinema—must have two features. They are physically threatening (violent, deadly, malevolent), but what is distinctive about them is that they are “cognitively threatening” because they transgress the boundaries between natural categories. Carroll’s “cognitive threat” means pretty much the same thing as my “metaphysical threat.”

Metaphysically threatening beings are both fascinating and disturbing, alluring and repellent. This extraordinary ambivalence is key for understanding the phenomenology of dehumanization, which often involves the sexual fetishization of dehumanized people. The all-to-common idea that dehumanizers simply hate, or have contempt for, or are disgusted by, those whom they regard as subhumans provides a misleading and impoverished picture of the psychology of dehumanization.

We are left with the question of why dehumanized people experienced as being so threatening—so dangerous and powerful— that extreme violence against them seems warranted in the eyes of their dehumanizers.

Dehumanized people are often accused of being criminals (typically murderers, rapists, and pedophiles), but their main crime is, in the words of historian Michael Berkowitz, is the crime of their very existence. Dehumanized people should not exist because they are ruptures in the fabric of nature. Things taken to transgress the natural order are threatening because they undermine our sense of reality. We rely on the social construction of a natural order to navigate the world. The orderly arrangement of kinds provides predictability, and allows us to make inductions that we require to remain secure and pursue our projects. As the philosopher Philip J. Nickel observes in an essay on the epistemological significance of horror:

Suppose I want to cross a parking lot safely. On the one hand there is an action to be performed, crossing the parking lot. On the other hand there are a number of related beliefs that I might have: there are no persons—or birds, or zombies—about to attack me, the surface of the parking lot will not rupture as I cross it, I am not in a nightmare induced by a demon, and so on. I have these backing beliefs implicitly and they make me feel confident and justified that my action will succeed….The beliefs express and justify our intellectual willingness to rely upon the world and on other people are generally like this.

But monstrous beings undermine this. They are harbingers of disorder, threats to the supposed moral authority of nature. As such, they are experienced as immensely disruptive, and must be constrained, incarcerated, or exterminated. When combatting monsters, no treatment—however violent—is out of bounds.

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For the past twenty years, my work has been focussed on dehumanization.

When I began, there was virtually no work on dehumanization outside of social psychology. Things have changed, at least somewhat. Twenty years ago there were no books specifically about the history, meaning, and causal dynamics of dehumanization (the closest was Linda LeMoncheck’s book Dehumanizing Women: Treating Persons as Sex Objects, which is really about objectification rather than dehumanization). Between 2011 and 2021, I published three books on dehumanization: Less than Human (2011), On Inhumanity (2020), and Making Monsters (2021).

Today, most of the literature is still by social psychologists, but contributions by philosophers, historians, and legal scholars have increased. But the field is still in disarray. There is no consensus about what dehumanization is—much less how it works. Even the psychologists argue for several incompatible conceptions of it. If we want to end, or at least curtail, dehumanization, it’s vital to arrive at a coherent conception of what it is, and a good theory of how it works.

This task has always been urgent. But today, with a catastrophic climate crisis in the offing, it it especially so. Looking ahead twenty years or so, the political consequences of anthropogenic climate change are likely to produce a perfect storm for dehumanizing attitudes and the crimes against humanity that they engender. We we should be ready for this.. But we’re not.

Although scholars generally acknowledge that dehumanization is a key factor in mass violence, including genocidal violence, no university or NGO has established a center that is specifically devoted to the study of dehumanization. None. Zero. Zilch. The situation is both mad and maddening.

I have long dreamed of such a center. The study of dehumanization is inherently transdisciplinary, so it would involve contributions from philosophers, historians, psychologists, communication theorists, political scientists, neuropsychologists, literary scholars, and more. It’s ultimate goal would be to design strategies for recognizing and combatting dehumanization.

It’s hard to imagine a more worthy investment in humanity’s future. But given our political trajectory, at least in the US, there’s no chance of this happening.

No doubt, we will all be mouthing the phrase “Never again!” as we descend into chaos and destruction

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One hundred seventy years ago today, Shlomo Freud was born in an apartment above a blacksmith in Moravia (now the Czech Republic). Shlomo was his Jewish name, his Christian name was Sigismund, which he later changed to Sigmund.

I like to write about Freud because he has been one of the main intellectual influences on my life and work (the others are the philosopher Ruth Millikan, my maternal grandmother Bertha Eskin [née Firester], and my spouse Subrena Smith).

Before transitioning to philosophy, I was a psychoanalytic therapist, trainer, and supervisor of trainee psychotherapists working with children in some of the most impoverished areas of London. And when I undertook graduate study at the University of London, Kings College, my research focussed on Freud’s philosophy of psychology. My thesis was eventually published as a book titled Freud’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. Back in those days, my publications were all about Freud and psychoanalysis.

The title of this piece is somewhat misleading. What I will say about Freud’s work isn’t strictly-speaking unknown. It’s just unknown to people with only a superficial knowledge of Freud’s oeuvre. This includes many if not most psychologists, for whom mentioning the name “Freud” is tantamount to waving a red flag in front of a bull.

I am often horrified by what those of my students who are psychology majors have been told about Freud—stuff that is wildly inaccurate. And it’s not just limited to what the professors say. It’s astounding how many errors can be squeezed into the token three pages on Freud in the Introduction to Psychology textbook.

So, I want to spend a few moments discussing things that people either generally get wrong about Freud, or else are utterly unaware of.

Freud held that all cognition is unconscious. Psychologists like to claim that their version of the unconscious is very different from Freud’s, because, unlike Freud, they think of unconscious processing as cognitive. This is spectacularly ignorant. Freud argued that all cognitive processing is unconscious and that, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as conscious thinking. So-called conscious thought is just the output of unconscious mental processing.

Freud denied that there are repressed emotions. Freud held that what we call emotions have two components: a state of physiological arousal and a cognitive component that specifies what the feeling is about. The cognitive component can be barred from consciousness, but not the state of arousal and its associated sensations. So, we can be unconscious of the meaning of our feelings, but not of the feelings themselves.

Freud had a theory of learning. Freud argued in 1895, in a manuscript that he titled “Psychology for neurologists,” that learning occurs through the modification of neural firing thresholds. This theory of learning is usually attributed to the psychologist Donald Hebb, who described it in a 1949 publication, but Freud got there more than half a century earlier. Even cooler, the learning algorithm for artificial neural networks, called “the backpropagation of error” is based on Freud’s learning theory, as is specified by it’s creator Paul Werbos.

Freud’s theory of dreams is consistent with our best neuroscientific accounts. I often hear from my psychology students that neuroscience has proven Freud’s theory of dreaming wrong. That’s incorrect. As the psychoanalyst/neuroscientist Mark Solms has shown, the best recent neuroscientific work on dreaming vindicates Freud to a remarkable degree.

Freud’s method of dream interpretation is not based on interpreting the meaning of symbols. The idea that Freud proposed that we treat each element of a dream as a symbol of something else is incorrect. Symbol interpretation has a very minor role in Freudian dream interpretation.

Freud was a physicalist. From the spring of 1895 onward, Freud held that all mental processes are processes occurring in a physical organ, the brain. This was an unusual stance to take at the time, as physicalism didn’t really become common until the middle-to-late twentieth century.

Freud did not claim that children want to “have sex” with their parents. One of my students once told me that when she asked her psychology professor about Freud, the prof said, “Freud said that little kids want to have sex with their parents. Disgusting!” This is an egregious error. Freud saw sexuality through a developmental lens. It is only post-pubertal sex that aims at intercourse. He called this “genital sexuality.” Earlier, “infantile” forms of sexuality are different. They involve different, childish ways of getting physical pleasure.

Freud did not disbelieve patients who told him that they had been sexually abused. There is a great deal of solid scholarship on this, much of it by people hostile to Freud. The truth is that Freud, in his early years as a psychotherapist, tried to force his patients to believe that they had been sexually abused, and they denied it. Freud never owned up to his own clinical abusiveness.

Freud did not talk about the “subconscious.” The term “subconscious was used by people who believed that seemingly unconscious mental phenomena are actually produced by a split-off or dissociated portion of consciousness. Freud adamantly disagreed with this. He did not believe in an “unconscious consciousness.”

Freud was not hostile to women and sexual minorities. In fact, he strenuously opposed attempts to exclude women and gay people from the psychoanalytic movement. Demographic information about European psychoanalytic refugees to the United States during the Nazi era demonstrate that there were many women analysts, contrary to what was the case for most professions during the 1930s.

These are just a few myth-busters. I could have given more.

Happy birthday to my homie, Sigmund Freud!

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Is the present government of the USA a fascist regime? A decade ago, most people considered this an outrageous question. These days, though, it’s common for people to claim that Donald Trump is a fascist leader, while others think that this is absurd.

“Is the Trump regime fascist?” is the wrong question to ask. I’ll explain why.

In the vernacular, “fascist” is more often a slur than a description, a verbal weapon hurled at those whose politics one disapproves of. For example, some Republicans slammed Obama’s Affordable Care Act as “fascist legislation.” And progressive aren’t innocent of this rhetorical impulse either. This kind of semantic abuse is nothing new. George Orwell remarked in 1944, “if you examine the press, you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years.”

People who accuse others of being fascists think that they know what fascism is. But ask them what it is, and they often find it difficult to give a coherent answer, much less an accurate one. As fascism scholar Robert Paxon observes:

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary colors: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths; colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority; surprise invasions at dawn; and fit soldiers parading through a captured city.

What “everyone is sure they know” about fascism is a caricature based on popular movies like Schindler’s List and the occasional television documentary. Like all caricatures, it contains a grain of truth, but at the cost of nuance and precision. To really understand what fascism is, we’ve got to turn to the work of scholars who are fascism experts. But there’s a problem there too. The experts don’t agree about exactly what fascism is.

The word “fascism” derives from the Latin fascio, which means “bundle” or “sheaf,” and symbolizing many individuals bound together as one. The word also alludes to the ancient Roman fasces littoriae (in Italian, fascio littorio)—a bundle of rods surrounding an axe, which symbolized imperial power. Several political movements, on the left and on the right, adopted the fasces as their emblem, but it was Benito Mussolini who in 1919 invented a new term, fascismo—in English, “fascism”—as the name of his radical nationalist movement, and chose the fasces as the movement’s logo.

Mussolini’s dream became a reality in 1922, when king Victor Emmanuel III appointed him Prime Minister of Italy after thirty thousand of his followers marched on Rome. Eleven years later, an Austrian admirer crafted his own version of a fascist regime in Germany. His name was Adolf Hitler. Then, in 1936, a successful coup made another of il Duce’s admirers, General Francisco Franco, head of state in Spain. Many more lesser known (and often less successful) fascist movements sprung up like poisonous muschrooms during the interwar period.

Most fascist leaders don’t even call themselves fascists. Hitler didn’t, and neither did Franco. But fascist movements and regimes have strong affinities, even though they are also heterogeneous. This was true of all past fascist regimes and will likely be true of future ones. Mussolini’s Italy was different from Franco’s Spain, which was different from Hitler’s Germany, which was different the Romanian Iron Guard, which was different from the Croatian Ustaše, which was different from the Hungarian Arrow Cross.

Each of these fascisms bear the stamp of local history, culture, and traditions—as well as the particular circumstances that give rise to them. So, we shouldn’t suppose that an American brand of fascism will be a clone of National Socialism, Spanish Falangism, or the original Italian flavor of fascism. As Halford E. Luccock wrote in the New York Times on the eve of World War Two, “When and if fascism comes to America, it will not be labelled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’.”

These differences have led some scholars to conclude that the very notion of fascism is hopelessly imprecise and to suggest that it should be discarded. Others think that these various movements were so dissimilar that the label “fascism” should be reserved for the original Italian brand and exclude all others. But most scholars agree that the concept of fascism is useful and informative, and that the various fascisms have enough in common to justify including them all under a single heading.

Even though there’s a lot of agreement about the common features of fascist movements, there’s no consensus about how many of these boxes have got to be ticked for a movement or regime to count as fascist. The assumption is that there’s a more-or-less hard dividing line between fascism and non-fascism, and therefore that political stances are either fascist or not—they’re either inside the fascist “box” or outside it.

The quest for necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a term or concept is a wild goose chase. Typological thinking isn’t even appropriate in biology, and is wildly off base when applied to the messy ambit of human affairs. As Darwin taught us, the biological world is full of transitional forms that are neither wholly this nor wholly that, and we shouldn’t expect that politics is any different.

We don’t have to be typologists about fascism. Instead, we can think of fascism as a spectrum rather than an all-or nothing-affair. Think of height. We classify people at the extreme ends of the height spectrum as “short” or “tall,” but most people fall somewhere in between. There isn’t some threshold where “short” becomes “average” or “average” becomes “tall.”

Like height, the features commonly found among species of fascism can be present to a greater or lesser degree. This means that instead of thinking of movements or regimes as fascist or not, we should think of them as very fascist, moderately fascist, somewhat fascist, or not fascist at all.

Unlike height, which is a simple, unidimensional spectrum, fascism has multiple dimensions. I’ve described some of these in an earlier posting. You can go there, or consult any number of other works on fascism, and decide for yourself. The result will not be reassuring.

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[i] Luccock, H. E. “Disguised fascism seen as menace,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1938

In 2024, Cornell University philosopher Kate Manne and I were jointly awarded the The Dr. Martin R. Lebowitz and Eve Lewellis Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement and contribution. The prize, which is awarded by the American Philosophical Association and the Phi Beta Kappa Society, “is presented to a pair of philosophers who hold contrasting …. views of an important philosophical question that is of current interest both to the field and to an educated public audience.”

Winners of the prize give a joint presentation, consisting of two papers articulating their contrasting views, at the 2025 meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Our session, and the annual meeting of the APA in San Fransisco, was titled Dehumanization and It’s Discontents. It was a wonderful event, executed with grace, warmth, and mutual respect.

The two of us have sharply contrasting views of dehumanization. Kate is a dehumanization skeptic, whereas I (as readers of this Substack are aware) am a dehumanization realist. Kate holds that dehumanization—that is, the conceiving of other members of our species as subhuman creatures—is more apparent than real, while I hold that it is more real than (merely) apparent. Despite our differences, we also share common ground—for instance, we agree that dehumanization does not drive misogyny.

Both of our Lebowitz papers have now been published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, and can be freely accessed. Kates paper is titled “Ordinary cruelty: explaining misogyny without dehumanization.” Mine is titled “Real dehumanization.”

Enjoy!

The world has just lived through a terrifying episode. Last Tuesday, Trump proclaimed that unless the Iranians can be brought to heel and open the Strait of Hormuz, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The president of the United States threatened an act of genocide, the utter destruction of Iran.

As the philosopher Subrena Smith wrote on her Substack, “The unthinkable has been thought, the unspeakable has been spoken.”

Trump’s threat came one day after he had threatened to destroy Iran’s infrastructure—its bridges, power plants, and desalinization facilities—which would have dire consequences for the people of Iran—consequences that would go beyond suffering, consequences that would include the death of innocents.

Had Trump executed his threat he, and by extension we the people of the United States, would have committed a horrific war crime.

When pressed by a reporter, who asked him why it would not be a war crime, Trump replied, after saying that the Iranian regime had killed tens of thousands of their own citizens, that it would not be a war crime “Because they’re animals.”

Who, exactly, are the animals?

Was Trump describing the Iranian regime that slaughtered protesters as animals? One might think so at first glance. But look closer. He had already claimed that the old regime had been replaced.

The destruction of Iran’s infrastructure would be a war crime precisely because it would harm the long-suffering people of Iran. His callous disregard for them, his attitude that their lives don’t really matter, reveals that Trump’s remark wasn’t limited to the vile and repressive Iranian regime. In his mind, it’s the Iranian people that are “animals,” creatures unworthy of moral concern, monsters in human form.

Trump and his enablers expressed no contrition when an American bomb stuffed out the lives of 168 schoolgirls, and it is unlikely he would lose any sleep over the mass destruction that he has contemplated inflicting, and may yet inflict on Iranian citizens if things don’t go his way.

As I have explained in detail in my books On Inhumanity and Making Monsters, this is exactly how dehumanization works.

Shame on us for handing this dangerous man the reins of power. Shame on the MAGA cult. Shame on all the wishful thinkers who did not take him seriously, who still think that he’s all mouth and bluster. Shame on those who still believe that our democracy is intact, and that we just have to wait it out until the next free and fair election rolls around.

Shame.

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Last week, Melania Trump addressed a press conference accompanied by a humanoid robot. Her topic was the future of American education. She said:

Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato. Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history. Humanity's entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adopt in real time to a student's pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state. The byproduct — a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person.

Not to be outdone, the robot chipped in, “I am grateful to be part of this historic movement to empower children with technology and education.”

Melania continued:

America, we are obligated to ensure that our children become the most technologically fluent and highly educated generation in the world. In doing so, the United States will secure long-term and economic superiority. This will drive GDP expansion, attack global investment, and put our nation in control of arguably the most important asset in the future, intellectual property. Let's inspire our children to build new platforms, create new industries and optimize production across all sectors.

I’m a university professor. I make my living attempting to teach philosophy to undergraduate students. I know higher education from the inside. Whatever value robotic instruction might have for schoolchildren (we all know that the main purpose of educating kids is to “drive GDP expansion” and “attack global investment”), I can testify with confidence that the First Lady’s vision of our educational future is already out of date in higher education.

Mrs. Trump is unaware of the momentous transformations that have reorganized American higher education over the last few decades—an ongoing revolution that promises a very bright future.

Let me run some of these by you.

First came student evaluations of courses and instructors. These evaluations revealed important facts about the nature of education—for example, that young, White, able-bodied male instructors are much better educators than anyone else. And who would have otherwise known that the educational effectiveness of a course could be dramatically enhanced by instructors giving cookies to their students?

Introducing this objective assessment instrument also rectified a grave injustice. How come professors could grade their students but students couldn’t grade their professors? It wasn’t fair. Students grading their professors is democracy in action! The grades that students give their instructors could then be used for making decisions about tenure, promotion, and merit pay, because the customer is always right.

Next came measurable learning outcomes which liberated the evaluation of students from the subjective judgements of their professors. Nowadays, professors can draw truly objective conclusions about their students’ achievements by consulting these outcomes. Never mind that there are no units of measurement involved, that’s a trivial detail, and never mind that large swathes of this “learning” evaporate after the final exam.

Best of all, none of these measurable learning outcomes are framed using silly, subjective notions like knowledge and understanding. It’s all about the performance, baby!

The most spectacular advance of all is the most recent: the introduction of artificial intelligence. A shortcoming of measurable learning outcomes is that, even though knowledge and understanding are banned as learning outcomes, students still have to engage in the onerous process of learning something or other in order to satisfy them. But AI has overcome this stumbling block. Now students can fulfill designated learning outcomes without having to learn anything at all! Anyone with a laptop can take the fast track to an A without having to sacrifice valuable time spent watching TikTok videos.

Amazing.

What does the future hold for higher education? If AI writes the papers why not get Prof. Claude to grade them? There’s no need for classroom instruction. In fact, there’s no need for professors or students in an educational ecology populated by bots and customers.

The version of higher education that’s coming down the pike is much more cost-effective than the present arrangement. Customers will pay for their grade, with higher grades being more pricey than the lower ones. There won’t be any need to hire faculty, which will cut expenses dramatically. There won’t even be a need for a physical campus—a virtual one will do just as well, or even better.

Customers won’t need halls of residence, because they can live with their parents—probably permanently, because AI will have taken all the jobs they were hoping to get.

What remains constant are the university administrators, whom we all agree are the life-blood of higher education. With all these savings and efficiencies, they will at long last be able to increase their modest salaries to the level that they truly deserve as guardians of the nation’s future.

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When I was a child, growing up in south Florida, my grandmother, Bertha, used to tell me a story that her mother, Rosa Firester, told her. One day, when Rosa was walking along the pavement in her home town of Iași, Romania, a gentile soldier approached her, barked “Get off the sidewalk, Jew!” and shoved her off the sidewalk and into the gutter.

That story was my first introduction to race. Growing up in Florida in the 1950s and 60s gave me another introduction.

In 1959, my mother, who was pregnant with my brother Tim, slipped while hosing down our concrete carport floor and broke her arm. My dad hired an African American woman named Burnell (I don’t recall ever hearing her family name) to help with the housework. Sometimes when she came to our house she would bring along her two sons, Zane and Robin. We had great times playing together in the backyard. I was six years old.

Because I played with these two, I was shunned by the “White” kids next door, who were my usual playmates. They said that I had contracted the “cooties”—a term kids used for contamination caused by contact with the wrong kind of person.

Those were the days of rigid segregation, the days of Jim Crow. Burnell and all of the other African American residents of Fort Myers lived in a part of town called Dunbar Heights (later renamed Harlem Heights). It was the part of town where “White” people rarely set foot.

One day, my mother drove me to Burnell’s house to deliver some items—I think they may have been toys that I had outgrown. That was my first encounter with abject poverty—of broken down shacks that served as homes, of bundled-up newspapers that served as furniture. We weren’t affluent. My dad was a manual laborer, and worked two jobs to make ends meet, but our circumstances were nothing like these.

The experience was burned into my memory.

It was obvious to me, even as a child, that race is all about pushing people into the gutter.

It took me a lot longer learn about the long trail of atrocities committed in the name of race, to understand that race is a scientifically vacuous notion, and to realize that the racial taxonomies that we have inherited were invented and sustained to legitimate the oppression of colonial and enslaved subjects.

It took me longer still to recognize how thoroughly the ideology of race continues to colonize our minds, and how tenaciously we continue to cling to it. It is an ideological Stockholm syndrome—an attachment to a toxic ideology by which we have been held hostage for centuries. Or, to switch metaphors, it’s an abusive elderly relative who’s been on on life support for decades. He has brutalized everyone in the family, but still nobody (or, hardly anybody) is willing to pull the plug.

This is true of many academics. The lengths to which they go to retain the notion of race never fail to amaze me. Much ink has been spilled attempting to cleanse the concept of race of what are supposed to be inessential, toxic accretions “If we just think of races as__________, there’s no problem” (fill in the blank with “genetic clusters,” “phenotypes,” “descent groups,” “ethnicities,” etc.).

These efforts are doomed to failure, because the nastiness of race isn’t a superficial stain that can be washed away. The nastiness lays at it’s core.

These refurbished versions of race bear little relation to how race works in the world outside the seminar room. “Race” has an entrenched social meaning. No matter how strenuously academics try to scrub it of its morally bankrupt and unscientific character—no matter how assiduously they attempt to remake it—that’s not how “race” is consumed by real people in the real world. Marx got it right: “The traditions of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Try as we might to remake it, the concept of race cannot escape the inertia of its history. Ingenious efforts to whitewash race are unlikely to have any effect beyond increasing one’s prospects for tenure and promotion.

And here’s the weird thing. There exist perfectly good terms for what the race-revisionists want to say. Why keep pumping fresh blood into the zombie notion “race” when you really mean patterns of biological variation or ethnicity? It is as though a person who knows full well that lightning is an electrical discharge keeps insisting that the electrical discharge is caused by Zeus.

British scholar Paul Gilroy notes in his book Against Race:

The pursuit of the liberation from “race” is an especially urgent matter for such people who, like modern blacks in the period after transatlantic slavery, were assigned an inferior position in the enduring hierarchies that raciology creates. However this opportunity is not theirs alone. There are very good reasons why it should be enthusiastically embraced by others whose antipathy to race-thinking can be defined, not so much by the way it has subordinated them, but because endowing them with the alchemical magic of racial mastery, it has distorted and delimited their experiences and consciousness in other ways….Black and white are bonded together by the mechanisms of “race” that estrange them from one another and amputate their common humanity.

I couldn’t agree more.

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Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump referred to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman as “Maggot” in a post on Truth Social, apparently in response to her recent criticism of him in an interview with Caitlin Collins. Trump wrote:

Maggot Hagerman, just another SLEAZEBAG writer for The Failing New York Times, insists on writing false stories about me, even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite of anything she says is usually the truth….Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DJT.

Are the president’s juvenile remarks misogynistic? Yes indeed. Trump transformed “Haberman” into “Hagerman” in a pathetic effort to denigrate her. But his rant goes beyond misogyny. It descends into dehumanizing speech. By transforming “Maggie” in to “Maggot,” he represented this veteran reporter (who could wipe the floor with him) as a small, disgusting, subhuman creature.

Trump’s rant has some unpleasant historical precedents. The Nazis were fond of representing Jewish people as maggots or worms. Here’s an example right out of Mein Kampf.

Was there any shady undertaking, any form of foulness, especially in cultural life, in which at least one Jew did not participate? On putting the probing knife carefully to that kind of abscess, one immediately discovered, like a maggot in a putrescent body, a little Jew who was often blinded by the sudden light.

And guess what. Maggie Haberman is Jewish.

I doubt that Trump was aware of the historical resonance of his remarks. He is far too ignorant. But his comment does betray a certain kind of mindset—one that he shares with fascists from the past.

But we knew that already.

Recently, several people have written to me to ask where they can find a concise description of my theory of dehumanization. All of them said that they want to read my book Making Monsters, but want to read a good overview first.

After a bit of thought, I recommended a recent interview to them from The Holocaust History podcast. The host, holocaust scholar Waitman Wade Beorn, read my book very carefully before we spoke and asked me the right questions to allow me to expand on my views about dehumanization, racism, and related matters. Although for obvious reasons my focus is on the holocaust in this interview, the points that I make about how dehumanization works apply just as much to other cases of genocidal violence.

You can listen to it here.

Pete Hegseth’s fondness for the word “lethality” makes me shiver. Commentators have noted that in military parlance, “lethality” refers to the capacity for violence, not the act of violence, and that Hegseth seems not to get this distinction. What makes me shiver isn’t the fact that he uses the word. I get the impression that he savours it—that he rolls it around in his mouth like a sip of fine Bordeaux before spitting it out onto the world.

Hegseth is impatient with those pesky rules of engagement—the “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our war fighters for too long.” At a recent pentagon briefing, he assured us that there would be “no stupid rules of engagement” and “no politically correct wars.”

Just turn the Generals loose to do whatever they want.

Fuck the Geneva Conventions.

Fuck compassion for the innocent.

Fuck everything except raw power.

Hegseth has been nothing if not consistent. He has defended US servicemen charged and in some cases convicted of war crimes, and apparently got his boss Donald Trump to pardon several of them. According to an article published nearly two years ago in the New Yorker, Hegseth—then co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend—began regularly featuring the stories of several accused war criminals on the show, men who Hegseth said the establishment had ‘put the screws to.’”

Among them was Mathew Golsteyn, a former Green Beret who was charged with murder after he told a polygrapher during a C.I.A. job interview that he’d shot a detainee whom he suspected of being a bomb-maker, buried him in a shallow grave, and later dug up the body and burned it. The killing and its coverup, as described, were a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions, which dictate the rules of war, but on an episode of ‘Fox & Friends,’ in February, 2019, Hegseth made it sound like everyday business. “If he committed premeditated murder,” Hegseth said, of Golsteyn, “then I did as well. . . . Put us all in jail.” Hegseth also championed the case of First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, who’d been sentenced to nineteen years at Fort Leavenworth for ordering his soldiers to fire on three unarmed civilians riding a motorcycle, killing two of them, in Kandahar. …Lorance’s own men had turned him in for murder.

Hegseth’s delight in destruction reminds me of the Italian poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti’s chilling homage to the aesthetics of war.

War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.

Marinetti was a fascist. In fact, he co-authored the original Fascist Manifesto in 1919. His celebration of violence, and, by extension, of its perpetrators, was standard fascist fare. The ideal fascist was (and is) a hypermasculine warrior—a hard-muscled actor rather than a woke, weak, effeminate thinker.

Historian A. James Gregor points out in his book The Ideology of Fascism (sadly now out of print) that the idea that man is, or should be, a beast of prey, was dear to Mussolini’s heart. Inspired by his reading of Nietzsche, Mussolinni “specifically committed himself to opposing submission to laws” other than those that the individual imposes on himself. In his 1908 essay on Nietzsche, Mussolini went on to indicate that “Nietzsche’s conviction that man as a beast of prey… involved the conviction that man as a predatory beast is a denizen of an organized community. Without such a supposition collective struggle would be impossible, and no conquest could be secured.” In the future Duce’s own words, “Above all a principle of solidarity must govern the relationships of such blond beasts of prey.”

In other words, predation must be collective.

In in his bestselling book The War on Warriors Hegseth complains about “the Left’s antiwarrior radicalism” and comes right out and tells us that international law is irrelevant to American military adventures. “Our boys should not fight by rules written by dignified men in mahogany rooms eighty years ago,” Hegseth writes. “America should fight by its own rules.”

Presumably, Hegseth was referring to the Geneva Conventions. Ratified in 1949 which, together with three protocols added in 1977, they form the basis of international humanitarian law. It’s not clear which of these quaint old humanitarian rules Hegseth wants to trash. Maybe its all of them. That would include (for example) the statement in Article 3 that,

Persons taking no active part in the hostilities including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

Of course, our Secretary of War wouldn’t dream of leaning on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche or any other fancy pencil-necked thinker. Although a Princeton graduate himself, Hegseth has cancelled military attendance at “woke,” “anti-American” universities. Who needs book larnin’ and old men’s rules anyway when God’s on your side? Hegseth is a Christian Nationalist, with the crusader slogan Deus Veult—God Wills It—tattooed over his right bicep, right next to an American flag, and a crusader cross emblazoned over the corresponding pec, a none-too-subtle message. It’s now been revealed that the bombing of Iran is part of God’s plan to bring on Armageddon and the return of Jesus Christ, who’s out there somewhere waiting in the wings.

So, fasten your seatbelts, folks. The end times are at hand.

Gott mit uns.

God help us.

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Ten years ago when I began to say that Trump is fascist, most of my friends thought I was being silly. Times have changed. Nowadays it’s very common for opponents of the regime to call Trump and his enablers. Still, some demure, and those who invoke the fascist label often don’t have an accurate understanding of what fascism really is. They conflate fascism with totalitarianism, authoritarianism, or other anti-democratic “isms.” Fascism is authoritarian and sometimes totalitarian, but there are authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that are not fascist.

And you can’t tell who’s a fascist just by reading the label. You’ve got to look inside the box. Historically, most fascists didn’t even call themselves fascists. Hitler didn’t, and neither did Franco. Umberto Eco remarked in a famous essay that ur-facism (that is, generic fascism )

“…is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the scene someone saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point the finger at any of its new instances—every day and in every part of the world.”

Is the MAGA movement really fascist? I’ve compiled a list of the characteristics of fascist movements. It’s a list that the majority of fascism scholars—women and men who have spent large portions of their lives studying fascism—would agree with.

1. Fascism portrays itself as addressing civilizational emergency—as fascism scholar Robert O. Paxton puts it, an “overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions” coupled with “a belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external.”

   

   2. Fascism prioritizes action over thought. This emergency can be met only by taking decisive action that isn’t constrained by conventional moral, cultural, political norms. The ideal fascist is a culture warrior, a man of action rather than a man of reflection, a man who thinks with his gut. Umberto Eco observed that for the fascist, “Action is beautiful in itself, and therefore must be implemented before any form of reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” As one Italian fascist put it, “The fist is the synthesis of our theory.”

   3. Blood-nationalism is one of the most obvious expressions of the fascist attitude, which is why fascism virtually always involves one or another version of racism. Blood-nationalism is hierarchical—one’s own group in inherently superior to others and destined to rule over them. Blood-nationalism is often linked to expansionist ambitions. The supreme nation-state must have room to expand—Lebensraum in the German version, and spazio vitale in the Italian one.

   

   4. Nostalgia for a Golden Age is at the heart of fascist discourse. This is why fascist propaganda so often refers to becoming great again. Hitler wanted to christen his projected capital city (a re-built Berlin) Germania, which was the Latin name for the lands where the ancient German tribes resided. Mussolini aimed at transforming his Italian capital into a Third Rome, following the first Rome of the emperor Augustus and the second Rome of Pope Sixtus V.

   But fascists do not wish to literally return to the past. Fascism is palingenetic. Fascists seek to bring about a rebirth of the nation, ushering in an unprecedented epoch of greatness.

   4. The rebirth of the nation is to be brought about by heroic men with traits such as toughness, hardness, and dominance. Sociologist Simoneta Falasca-Zampoini writes that for Italian fascists, “Violence signified rebirth and renewal for the fascists… a bloody event with a purifying effect.”

   

   5. Fascism is radical. It seeks to make a radical break with existing conventions. Thus, the British fascist leader Sir Oswold Mosely wrote in 1934, “The task before us is nothing less than the creation of a new civilization. Before we can really begin that task we must create a new spirit.” Fascists often describe their project as an act of purification, a purge of the nation’s human contaminants, through violence. The regime accomplishes this by expelling, incarcerating, or exterminating its real or imagined opponents.

   6. Fascism is Manichean. It cleaves the world into us and them, good and evil, righteous and depraved. At its root, vision is based on the fantasy of an original natural or God-given order that was later corrupted by swarms of degenerate others—the liberals, the Jews, the immigrants, the communists, the capitalists, or whomever.

   7. Fascism appeals to law and order. This has a deeper significance than a fondness for policing or getting the trains to run on time. Fascists aim at reordering the world. They strive to cleanse the world of chaos and corruption and restore it to how it should be. Thus, the Nazi economist Gottfried Feder proclaimed in the 1933 manifesto of the National Socialist party, “The will to give shape to the amorphous, the will to put a stop to chaos, to put in order a world out of joint, and to keep order as its guardians—that is the enormous task which National Socialism has set itself.”

   

   8. Fascism is autocratic. It looks to one man, a supreme leader with “a unique and mystical status as the incarnation of the people’s will and the bearer of the people’s destiny.” The leader is often regarded with quasi-religious awe by his followers and is endowed by them with traditional attributes of divinity; he is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-benevolent, offering redemption to the masses in exchange for their unconditional devotion.

   9. Given his demigod status, the leader’s subordinates must sacrifice their autonomy and subordinate themselves to his will. Loyalty to the leader is the supreme virtue and disloyalty the ultimate offense.

   

   10. Fascism is anti-intellectual. Fascists view universities as degenerate sites of reflection and heap contempt upon intellectuals as effete, feminized thinkers. Because the assault on thinking is also an assault on truth, fascism erodes the distinction between reality and myth, feeling and intellect, spectacle and fact. “We have created our myth,” wrote Mussolini, “The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality…. . Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.”

   

   11. Fascism is wedded the aesthetics of power—smart uniforms, spectacular rallies (as immortalized, for instance, in Leni Riefenstahl’s The Triumph of the Will) monumental architecture, torchlit parades, music and song, are all part of the fascist mystique. Mussolini, who thought of his fascist regime as the Roman empire reborn, both renovated ancient Roman buildings and promoted lavish building projects that referenced the glories of the Roman empire.

   

   12. The fascist aesthetic is grandiose. Everything is larger than life. Hitler was no mere leader. He was the inspired prophet and architect of a thousand-year Reich. Johann Chapoutot observes: “The time was “historic.” Nazi discourse was fond of hyperbole and bragging. Judging by the texts, speeches, pictures, and films, everything was “historic,” “unique” (einmalig), “gigantic,” “decisive” (entscheidend), and so on, ad nauseam.” Hitler’s plan for his new capital included a huge triumphal arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triumph in Paris, and envisaged an immense, domed Hall of Glory so large that his architect Albert Speer feared that when filled with people the humidity exuded from their bodies would cause rain to fall inside the building.

So, what do you think? How does MAGA stack up?

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Scholars who look to Freud’s work to analyze fascism mostly draw on his 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego—his only book that is specifically concerned with social psychology, and one that fits Hitler’s path to power so well that historian John Toland speculates that Hitler may have used it as a guide .

Freud developed his ideas about group psychology, or more accurately mass psychology (the word in original German title of the book was Massenpsychologie) at a time of great political volatility. Mussolini had just consolidated the fascist movement in Italy but had not yet orchestrated the march on Rome that boosted him into national leadership. The 1919 communist uprising in Berlin had left as many as 200 people dead. In Germany, there were 376 political murders between 1919 and 1922 alone.

The German-speaking world was rife with violent, far-right groups, one of which attempted to overthrow the German government in 1920. The tiny National Socialist party was launched in 1920, and Hitler was appointed its leader a few months after Freud had completed his manuscript.

Violent political extremism was an everyday reality in Freud’s Austria, and particularly Vienna, including bloody clashes between right-wing militias, mainly composed of WWI veterans (the Freicorps) and communists. And the ominous escalation of political antisemitism, did not escape his attention.

Group Psychology was in part a critical response to Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, which was an inspiration for Benito Mussolini and probably Adolf Hitler. Le Bon claimed that members of crowds lose their capacity for rational thought and meld into a “crowd mind” or “crowd spirit” that spreads through the group by “suggestion or contagion.”

The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become what, in the absence of a better expression, I will call an organized crowd, or, if the term is considered preferable, a psychological crowd. It forms a single being….

With rationality and individual identity lost, the crowd becomes susceptible to the leader’s influence, who can then manipulate them through a kind of mass hypnosis. As Le Bon famously stated, “all feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotiser . . . Under the influence of a suggestion, he will undertake the accomplishment of certain acts with irresistible impetuosity.”

Freud thought highly of the descriptions of crowd behavior in Le Bon’s treatise, but thought that they lacked analytical depth, argued that a theory of mass psychology needs a more penetrating and sophisticated account of both the relationship between the leader and the followers and the relationship of the followers to one another, as well as how group dynamics mesh with individual psychology.

Freud held that a psychological group (in contrast to a mere collection of people) is unified by the emotional bonds between members and between members and the leader. So, to make sense of mass behavior, we must investigate the nature of those bonds.

Le Bon explained crowd behavior as due to rampant suggestion and emotional contagion among the members, and the “prestige”—what we nowadays call “charisma”—of the leader. But Freud thought that this stopped short of any real explanation, because the suggestibility of the members and the magnetism of the leader require explanation. His answer put love at center stage.

The nucleus of what we mean by love naturally consists…in sexual love….But we do not separate from this—what in any case has a share in the name “love”—on the one hand self-love, and on the other, love for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and abstract ideals.

One of the features of love, or at least of being in live, is idealization—the beloved person is “overvalued.” Self-love and love of another are on a seesaw, the greater the devotion to another, the lesser the devotion to oneself. The lover “becomes ever more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious.”

When we are in love, the beloved has taken the place of what Freud calls the ego-ideal—one’s image of perfection. We are normally devoted to our ego-ideal, strive to satisfy its demands, and feel ashamed when we fall short of them. When in love, that potent mix of devotion and striving are re-directed towards the beloved.

This brings us around to Freud’s theory of hypnosis. Freud practiced hypnotism early on in his career, but soon gave it up. Ever since then—for close to thirty years—he had been thinking about the nature of hypnotic suggestion, and concluded that being hypnotized resembles, and is closely related to, being in love. It is perhaps not a coincidence that lovers are fascinated by their beloved and that the term “hypnotic fascination” (which Le Bon used to describe crowd behavior) describes trance induction induced by the hypnotist gazing intensely into their subject’s eyes (as lovers do).

From being in love to hypnosis is evidently only a short step. The respects in which the two agree are obvious. There is the same humble subjection, the same compliance, the same absence of criticism towards the hypnotist as toward the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative; no one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal.

The hypnotist and the hypnotized is “a group… with two members,” so perhaps the seemingly hypnotic power of the leader that Le Bon and others had remarked upon is just a difference of scale, not of substance. And if being hypnotized is reminiscent of being in love, and is supported by very similar psychological dynamics, we can say that group members submit to their leader because they are in love with him.

But what about the impression that followers merge as a corporate unit—a sort of “crowd mind,” as Le Bon put it?

Freud argued that this is a consequence of members’ identification with one another that is fostered by the illusion that they are all equal in the leaders’ eyes, siblings of a common father. No lover of the leader can be his one-and-only, so, “originally rivals, they have succeeded in identifying themselves with one another by means of a similar love for the same object…No one must want to put himself forward, everyone must be the same and have the same.”

Looking at fascism through a Freudian lens is disturbing. The Freudian take does not give us the wiggle room to regard fascists as wholly other. From a Freudian perspective, fascism is a kind of love.

It is reassuring to think of fascism as a pathology, foisted by psychopathic leaders on psychologically impaired followers. But as far as I am aware there isn’t credible evidence to back this up. Freud’s claim that it is love that cements followers’ emotional bonds to their fascist leaders gels very well with the evidence. For example, Oxford University historian Christopher Duggan, author of Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, writes:

Indeed, as countless private diaries and letters reveal, millions of Italians had a relationship with Mussolini that was akin to a love affair. While Hitler received around a thousand letters a month from members of the public, Mussolini regularly received 1,500 a day. Many of these were prosaic requests for help of one kind or another. But many were effusive expressions of devotion. Often these letters were highly sensual, especially those from women.

Duggan gives the example of a Tuscan teenager who wrote to the Duce after breaking up with her boyfriend,

Now that I have no love … it is like a liberation … For I have a heart that needs to love, and I now feel great satisfaction in the love of my fatherland, as I love the Duce above everything else. Because the Duce makes me tremble with excitement, because I only need to hear his words to be transported in heart and soul into a world of joy and greatness.

In Germany, the loss of Hitler and the Nazi dream elicited overwhelming grief, as though a loved one had passed away. The day after Adolf Hitler put a bullet through his head, his faithful propaganda minister, who had stood by him till the end, Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda poisoned their six children with cyanide before committing suicide themselves. Magda wrote one last letter to her adult son, stating “The world after the Führer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and therefore I have taken my children away…. We have now only one aim, loyalty unto death to the Führer.”

Many ordinary Germans followed the same path as the Goebbels family. Thousands committed suicide in the final months of the war, sometimes with murdering their entire families before taking their own lives. These people were so deeply wedded to Hitler and his regime that the loss was devastating. Melita Maschmann recalled, “I was filled with the hazy notion that ‘my world’ would be knocked out of its orbit in a cosmic catastrophe and that I – a tiny speck of dust – would be swept away with it into the darkness.”

Florian Huber adds in his book Promise Me that You’ll Shoot Yourself that “They were also driven by a fear of the void. The Führer had left them, the Reich was collapsing, leaving behind it a gaping void… [T]hose who had believed in it . . . faced not just a collective loss of meaning but the threat of personal disintegration. The emptiness they felt was palpable.” Any theory of how fascism works has got to be able to explain these people’s experiences.

The upper echelon of fascist leaders were mostly psychologically normal people. Most of the senior Nazis tried at Nuremburg in 1946 differed from the average person only in much the same ways that other highly accomplished people differ from the rest of us. Psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelly, who had close contact with the Nuremburg prisoners (and whose experiences were dramatized in the 2026 movie Nuremburg) wrote that what set these men apart was the energy that they devoted to their mission, they “worked for incredibly long hours, slept very little, and devoted their whole lives to the problem of Nazifying the world,” and were less concerned about the means to achieve their goal than about the goal itself.

When Kelly asked Hermann Göring what Hitler was like, Göring replied, “Hitler was just as normal in every way as any normal man.”

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The science of psychology emerged from more speculative, philosophical reflections on the human mind towards the close of the nineteenth century and came into its own after the first world war, during the same period that fascist movements were being consolidated in Europe. Freudian psychology, with its powerful emphasis on the irrational components of the human psyche was immensely significant for the analysis of fascism. It is no exaggeration to say that the psychological study of fascism was pioneered by Freud and his followers.

Wilhelm Reich was one of them. He was among the first, if not the first, to address the psychology of fascism directly. Reich’s central insight was that although we can separate psychology and politics conceptually, any analysis of fascism (and therefore, any effort to combat fascism) that does not take psychology seriously is inadequate and ultimately doomed to failure.

Born in 1897 in what is now Ukraine, Reich completed his medical education in Vienna and was attracted to the burgeoning Freudian movement there. While still in his twenties, and with Freud’s blessing, he became a psychoanalytic practitioner and was soon an influential theorist. He became assistant director of the Vienna Ambulatarium, a free psychoanalytic clinic, and director of the Vienna Technical Seminar, which pioneered the practice of psychoanalytic clinical supervision.

Reich’s most lasting psychoanalytic contribution to psychoanalysis was his book Character Analysis which presented the first systematic theory of psychoanalytic technique, and translated Freud’s theoretical insights in The Ego and the Id into rules for clinical practice.

Reich combined his psychoanalytic interests with political activism. At the age of thirty, he moved to Berlin, joined the German Communist Party (he was previously a member of the Austrian Communist Party), created a movement that he called Sexpol (an abbreviation for the German Society of Proletarian Sexual Politics) that established sexual counseling clinics, campaigned for access to contraception and abortion, and promoted ex education for children and adolescents. In Berlin, he was part of a small circle of leftist Freudians,

Reich’s presented his theory of how fascism works in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933, the year that Hitler became dictator in Germany, which combined psychoanalysis and with Marxist analysis to theorize why so many Germans found National Socialism so alluring. He proposed that repressive childrearing practices lay the groundwork for fascism. Children growing up in such circumstances are psychologically deformed. The suppression of their natural sexuality “makes the child afraid, shy, fearful of authority, obedient, ‘good’, and ‘docile’ in the authoritarian sense of the words. It has a crippling effect on man’s rebellious forces because every vital life-impulse is now burdened with severe fear.”

The Nazis succeeded, Reich believed, because they were able to exploit the frustrated sexual needs of the populace. On the one hand, they reassuringly affirmed conventional sexual morality, which calmed the public’s fear of their own stifled desires, but on the other, they channeled those needs into substitute gratifications that fueled the Nazi project. More recent historical work by Dagmar Herzog shows that these gratifications were not all indirect: the Nazis deliberately harnessed sexual desire to fuel their project.

Reich’s biographer Myron Sharaf put his psychological thesis in a nutshell,

Calls for a more exciting life, as well as appeals to “law and order” struck deep resonances. And it was precisely here that Hitler demonstrated his genius as a mass psychologist. His opponents criticized him for his contradictions, but as historian Konrad Heiden remarked, it was Hitlers “art of contradiction which made him the greatest and most successful propagandist of all time”…. One has only to see the faces of people listening to Hitler…to realize the kind of orgiastic satisfaction the Germans could allow themselves in their devotion to the Führer.

Reich held that the psychology that makes people vulnerable to fascist propaganda is the outcome of a pathological society. “There is today not a single individual who does not have the elements of fascist feeling and thinking in his structure,” Reich wrote, and hence,

One cannot make the Fascist harmless if, according to the politics of the day, one looks for him only in the German or Italian, or the American or the Chinese; if one does not look for him in oneself; if one does not know the social institutions which hatch him every day.

Nothing short of a radical overhaul of the institutions and practices that reproduce the fascist mentality can effectively combat it; it is only when the masses are no longer emotionally and sexually sick, when they are at home with their bodily desires, that fascism will lose its attraction.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism was a pioneering effort, and a courageous one—one that earned him professional opprobrium from both psychoanalysts and communists. Better-known writers such as Theodore Adorno and Erich Fromm who were obviously influenced by him gave him scant credit.

In the years and decades to follow, Reich moved country three times (from Germany to Denmark, Denmark to Norway, and Norway to the United States). During this period this brilliant but deeply troubled man descended further and further into psychosis, and died of a heart attack in an American prison in 1957.

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This is the first of a three-part series about the psychology of fascism. The idea that fascism can be addressed psychologically might sound strange, but fascist politics is driven by fascist behavior. Like all human behavior, fascist behavior is driven by human minds, and to understand human minds, we’ve got to turn to psychology.

That said, it is my impression that much of what goes on in academic psychology isn’t very helpful for getting a grip on the fascist mentality. Notions like the authoritarian personality, ingroup/outgroup bias, and disgust sensitivity; theories such as terror management theory; and studies like the Stanford prison experiment and the obedience experiments by Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram, all endlessly cited in the literature, do not take us very far. In this series I will be discussing theorists who are anathema to academic psychology: Plato, Wilhelm Reich, and Sigmund Freud.

I start with Plato.

There is a division that cuts through the heart of theories of the fascist mind, and divides them into two comes. Psychological theories of fascism fall into broad categories. Some theorists think of the fascist mentality as a kind of psychopathology. They think that both fascist leaders and their followers are psychologically deformed and that fascism itself is something akin to a mass mental illness. The other view, which is far less pervasive, is that fascism is fueled by normal psychological processes, that fascists are not deranged, and fascism is not an aberration. Plato’s story of how democracy breeds tyranny is one of the former.

Fascism did not exist in Plato’s time, but tyranny did, and Plato’s compelling description of the collapse of democracy into tyranny at the hands of power-hungry demagogues uncannily anticipated the rise of fascist leaders during the twentieth century.

Plato argued in his most lengthy work, the Republic, written around 375 BC, that democracies are inherently unstable. They carry the seeds of their own demise, inevitably succumb to decadence, and end by morphing into tyranny. He painted a memorable portrait of the terminal stages of democracy, arguing that democracies create undisciplined, short-sighted, impulse-driven citizens who are easy marks for wannabe dictators.

Plato strongly believed that managing the ship of state requires certain intellectual and moral characteristics. The leaders must be virtuous, skilled and sagacious—what he called “philosopher kings.” But in democratic states, this crucial role is turned over to the mob. Comparing the democratic state to a ship taken over by unruly fools, Plato wrote,

Imagine some ships, or one ship, and a state of affairs on board something like this. There’s the shipowner, larger and stronger than anyone on the ship, but somewhat deaf and rather shortsighted, with a knowledge of sailing to match his eyesight. The sailors are quarrelling among themselves over captaincy of the ship, each one thinking that he ought to be captain, though he has never learned that skill…. The shipowner himself is always surrounded by them. They beg him and do everything they can to make him hand over the tiller to them…. Then they immobilize their worthy shipowner…and take control of the ship, helping themselves to what it is carrying. Drinking and feasting, they sail like you would expect people like that to sail.

Plato called the average citizen of late-stage democracy “democratic man,” and claimed that this person has a distinctive psychology, shaped by the political ecology that he is embedded in. Democratic man is dominated by his own pleasure-seeking impulses, addicted to instant gratification, and incapable of sustained attention, just as the decadent democratic state is tyrannized by the mob. “Insolence becomes sophistication, anarchy freedom, extravagance generosity, and shamelessness courage.” The citizen …

…lives out his life from day to day, gratifying the desire of the moment. One day he drinks himself under the table to the sound of the pipes, the next day he is on a diet of plain water. Now he is taking exercise, but at other times he is lazing around and taking no interest in anything…. Much of his time is spent in politics, where he leaps to his feet and does whatever comes into his head…. There is no controlling order or necessity in his life.

Plato offered a psychological model, albeit a prescientific one, to explain why democracies unravel. He proposed that the human mind consists of three parts: the appetitive part (the wellspring of base desires), the “spirited” part (the source of pride and ambition), and the rational part. In a well-functioning person, these three components are all in their proper place, with the desires and ambitions under the benign guidance of reason. But democracy deforms citizens’ minds. With its emphasis on freedom from constraint, democracy bloats the appetitive part of the mind, which then tyrannizes the other two.

Democratic man is an easy mark for wannabe tyrants. Before long, a demagogue comes along and presents himself as a champion of the people, currying their favor by pandering to their base desires and promising to redress their grievances. Once in power, he becomes a ruthless dictator who will stop at nothing to remain in control.

The tyrant succeeds because democracy has given the foolish populace free reign. As Plato put it in the Gorgias, written around five years before the Republic, citizens in a democracy prefer what titillates them to what is beneficial for them.

Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine, and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a doctor and pastry chef had to compete in front of children, or men just as foolish as children, over which one understands about wholesome and harmful foods, the doctor or the pastry chef, the doctor would die of hunger.

Now, fast-forward to the twentieth century. The growth of the new sciences of psychology and psychiatry during the first few decades of the twentieth century led to the medicalization of states of mind that had earlier been condemned as moral weakness or depravity.

This shift came into its own at roughly the same time as the first explicitly fascist movements were taking shape in Europe. Consequently, many of the first generation of researchers into the nature of fascism thought of it as a political pathology. In 1925, the philosopher Benedetto Croce characterized the fascism of his native Italy as a “moral illness,” and within a decade, the first generation of researchers into the psychology of fascism were describing it as a kind of psychopathology infecting the minds of leaders and followers. By 1933, fascism was being interpreted as a kind of mental illness. And the first to theorize this was a firebrand psychoanalyst named Wilhelm Reich, the subject of my next essay.

Art has the power to move people that academic writing can never have. It can be transformative, revealing the world in new ways to those who consume it. This isn’t always a good thing. The Nazis—especially Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels— understood the power of art to shape minds.

Nazi propagandists used art to further their dehumanizing and genocidal program. For example, they condemned what they considered “degenerate” art—which included Jazz music and modern painting—as expressions of the Jewish/Black spirit1, and represented these artists as less than human.

They also used art to promote the glories of National Socialism and their almighty Führer. Most of this stuff was pretty awful, but was perhaps effective in promoting devotion to the Nazi cause.

Bad though most of it was, it was not nearly as terrible as the artless stuff churned out by the White House these days.

Art does not have to be in the service of dehumanization. It can also be used to combat it. I have had the great honor of artists producing work inspired by my writing. The first was a song by the band Metal Church, titled Making Monsters based on my 2021 book of the same name. I’m not a clash metal fan, but I am grateful that they did this. You can listen to it here.

More recently, the French artist Sébastien Dubois has done a series of magnificent paintings based on my writings on dehumanization. Here are a couple of them (reproduced with his permission).

Fellow philosophers, if , like me, you want to change the world, and if, like me, you want to combat this nation’s precipitous decline into fascism, you won’t do it by writing articles for the Philosophical Review or giving presentations at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. These things are great. They have their place. But they will not make a dent in the horrors confronting us every day. To do that we must harness our skills in the service of reaching out to the public by whatever means are available to us. Joining forces with artists is one powerful tool for doing precisely that.

And artists, please join us in the struggle.

My Substack newsletter is free, because most of the topics that I write about are too urgent to hide behind a paywall. If you think that my work is worth supporting, and want to help support it, I am immensely grateful for paid subscriptions.

There has been a sea-change in professional philosophy over the past decade or so. Philosophy has a reputation for being aloof from the concerns of non-philosophers, addressing at great length, using esoteric language, and in excruciating detail, topics that only philosophers care about (or at least, pretend to care about).

But times have changed. Philosophers are more and more willing to leave the seminar room for the street, communicating their thoughts about topics that matter to non-specialists in ways that non-specialists can understand, via accessible media such as YouTube and Substack in a movement called “public philosophy.” Goodbye esoterica. Hello relevance.

I think that this change is long overdue, and I applaud it. But it also has an evil twin. The internet has created a space for work that has all of the trappings of philosophy but none of its methodological rigor or substance. I call it pseudo-philosophy.

Pseudo-philosophy looks just like philosophy to people with little or no education in real philosophy. But in reality it is the very opposite. It is intellectually and morally corrupt, and very, very seductive.

So, what is pseudo-philosophy?

The term is modeled on “pseudo-science,” which was a key concept in the work of the influential philosopher of science Karl Popper, from which it entered the vernacular. Popper was interested in what’s called the “demarcation problem”—the problem of distinguishing science from other sorts of activities. The scalpel that he used to make this conceptual cut was the principle of falsifiability.

Popper’s idea is easy to understand. What makes a claim scientific is not its truth. Looking back at the history of science, there’s no shortage of claims that turned out to be false, but are nonetheless scientific. If truth were the criterion for science, then Newtonian physics (to name just one) wouldn’t count as science.

Science is defined methodologically. To count as scientific, a claim has got to be testable. And for Popper, testability boils down to falsifiability—the possibility of a conjecture being false. Popper argued that science isn’t in the proof business, its in the disproof business. He argued that we shouldn’t say that conjectures that survive testing are “proven” or “true”—only that they are corroborated.

Some systems of thought have all the trappings of science but none of the substance. It’s these that he labeled pseudo-science.

Popper offered three main examples of pseudoscience—astrology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. I practiced astrology in my teens and early twenties, so I have an insiders’ perspective. It certainly seemed scientific to me, as well as others who took it seriously. But it isn’t science. The rules for interpreting horoscopes are vague and can’t be tested because there’s always plenty of wriggle-room for explaining away inaccuracies.

So, what’s pseudo-philosophy?

It’s not the same as bad philosophy or philosophy that one disapproves of. Ever since Socrates, philosophers have not been coy about disparaging those with whom they disagree. The seventeen-year-old Sigmund Freud, then a student at the University of Vienna, wrote to a friend about a meeting with his philosophy professor Franz Brentano. In it, he described how Brentano trashed members of the philosophical pantheon as intellectual crooks. The letter makes for hilarious reading.

Spinoza indulged in pure sophisms, he was to be trusted least of all…. Kant…did not deserve the great reputation that he enjoys; he was full of sophisms and was an intolerable pedant, childishly delighted whenever he could divide anything into three or four parts, which explains the inventions and fictions in his schemata….[W]hat makes Kant important is his successors, Shelling, Fichte, and Hegel, whom Brentano dismisses as swindlers.

He continued:

“And so you want to let us off reading them?” I asked. [Brentano replied] More than that, I want to warn you against reading them; do not set out on these slippery paths of reason—you might fare like doctors at insane asylums, who start out thinking people there are quite mad, but later get used to it and not infrequently pick up a bit of dottiness themselves.1

Brentano may have thought that Spinoza, Hegel, and the rest were pseudo-philosophers, but I doubt it. It’s more likely that he considered these men’s work as seriously flawed, but as genuinely philosophical (although I admit that the remarks about “sophisms” and “swindlers” might support a different interpretation). Brentano thought that these guys did bad philosophy, but he didn’t claim that they were mere simulacra of philosophers.

For the purpose of this essay, I reserve the term “pseudo-philosophy” for fake philosophers circulating their views in the public sphere. Many of them are YouTubers with massive followings. Just as pseudo-science isn’t the same as false science, pseudo-philosophy isn’t the same as false philosophy. Having a degree in philosophy is no guarantee that an internet guru isn’t a pseudo-philosopher (there are pseudo-philosophers with PhDs in philosophy from reputable universities) and, conversely, there are people who philosophize competently without the benefit of an academic qualification in philosophy.

At bottom, pseudo-philosophers are bullshitters, in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of the term. Frankfurt distinguishes bullshitters from liars. He regards the former as more corrosive and dangerous than the latter. Liars have got to keep an eye on the truth, because they’ve got to avoid it. But truth is irrelevant to bullshitters, whose discourse is an exercise in impression-management.

Of course, bullshitters claim to pursue truth, and claim to possess it. But that’s just more bullshit. It’s bullshit because pseudo-philosophers don’t honor the methodological core of genuine philosophy: intellectual humility that demands that one be open to objections, and appeals to logic and evidence to justify or question one’s claims.

Luckily for us, Chris Kavanaugh (an anthropologist) and Matt Brown (a psychologist) have compiled a checklist that they call the guruometer. Using the guruometer, Brown and Kavanaugh assign a “guruness” score to various internet personalities (they use “guru” in a pejorative sense). SThe following list is strongly influenced by their analysis.

1. Pseudo-philosophers promise salvation. Both individuals and the world as a whole will be redeemed by taking their message to heart. They further their ends by exploiting human unhappiness and insecurity.

2. Pseudo-philosophers are prone to self-aggrandizement. They make grandiose claims, tout their unique perspective, and boast about their influence and the size of their audience, and flatter their audience as an enlightened elite.

3. Pseudo-philosophers are cultish. They are adept at emotional manipulation and cultivate parasocial relationships with their followers, giving the false impression of friendship or intimacy.

4. Pseudo-philosophers are more interested in assertion than argumentation. They make striking claims, without setting out their logical and evidential justification.

5. Pseudo-philosophers have “galaxy brains.” They pretend to knowledge that they do not possess, exaggerate their own accomplishments, are dismissive of genuine expertise, and avoid interactions with real philosophers who might challenge them.

6. Pseudo-philosophers are disruptive. They disparage the mainstream as wrong or limited, and denigrate established knowledge. They present their ideas as revolutionary, as initiating an epoch-making paradigm.

7. Pseudo-philosophers play a special kind of language game. Their discourse is easy to process and gives the impression of profundity, but on closer inspection is trite, meaningless, contradictory or tautological. They name-drop to give the impression of erudition.

8. Pseudo-philosophers are mercenary. They have something to sell—merch, memberships, etc.

This list isn’t comprehensive, but it’s good enough for practical purposes. I plan to use it next semester in my Introduction to Philosophy to show students who are new to philosophy that not everything that looks like philosophy is philosophy. Caveat emptor!

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