Opinion Sur
Today, the one-dimensional human being as a prototype of the 21st century is a healthier, taller, more global, more informed and more long-lived specimen than its predecessors, but is led by the noses with an organizing and conductive screen, which often leads to the universe of fascism.
October 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of the march on Rome, led by Benito Mussolini. There and then fascism was born, which became a regime in Europe and flourished in totalitarian systems until its defeat in World War II.
On this centenary, we are witnessing precisely the rebirth of fascism, not only in Europe but throughout the world. The current reissue of the movement has some significant differences from its predecessor. However, both show a common root. In this sense, we can say that despite its defeat by arms, fascism never really died.
Winston Churchill said that the difference between politics and war is that in war you die only once. In politics, resurrection is frequent. Where does fascism nest in its latency periods, until at the right moment it hatches? To find an answer I invite the reader to watch the following Jair Bolsonaro’s filmed interview during his presidential campaign in Brazil: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SacGDtPbv6Y presented by UOL Noticias.
Many will say that fascism (as a right-wing reaction with a popular base) nests in the emotions of a people disappointed by the political system – particularly the democratic one – under which it finds itself and which often suffers. In this article, I propose another hypothesis: the nest of fascism is not in the human heart but in its brain. While it is true that, as Pascal said, le coeur a des raisons que la raison ne connait pas (the heart has reasons that reason does not know), here I affirm something else, namely: a certain type of reasoning leads to and facilitates hatred in the heart, through polarization.
It is what we can call the binary matrix, a form of reasoning that works with simple oppositions of the type black/white, masculine/feminine, native/immigrant, us/them, good/bad, and so on. Its most abstract form is the logic of computer science, the 0/1 “bits” of any algorithmic calculus.
In his structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure distinguishes between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations[1]. The former are functional contrasts. The semiotic method founded by Saussure includes the identification of polar or binary semantic oppositions, for example “friend/foe,” “public/private,” “unity/diversity,” etc. Thus, we could characterize the opposites that are used in each culture, sub-culture, or religion and their frequency.
In political thought, the most notable case is found in a very important book published in 1927 (republished in 1932) by Carl Schmitt under the title of The Concept of the Political (Der Begriff des Politischen) in which he argues that all political relations can be reduced to the opposition “friend/foe.”
To delimit the political, or to understand what its domain is, Schmitt tries to find a series of distinctions that can serve as criteria for considering a political problem. For example, the moral domain is the distinction between good and evil, just as for the aesthetic domain is the beautiful and the ugly. In that sense, the criterion of the political is the distinction between friend and enemy. They are all binary distinctions, that is, paradigmatic. Schmitt was a very fertile thinker and celebrated as the theoretician of German National Socialism. This conception of politics reduces it to a relationship of force, and rejects a definition of it as a field of negotiation and compromise, which is the essence of democracy. Schmitt asserted that “the political enemy need not be morally bad, nor aesthetically ugly; it does not need to become an economic competitor, and it may even have its advantages to do business with it. It is simply the other, the stranger, and to determine its essence it is enough that it is existentially distinct and strange in a particularly intensive sense [2].”
Schmitt’s definition is clearly distinguished from the thought of another famous theorist, Norberto Bobbio (General Theory of Politics)[3] for whom the great contribution of Western thought is the idea of democracy as a form of government directed by reason in dialogue and freedom among equals, beyond struggle and domination. It is a conception of the political associated with peace and human rights.
For a fascist, every reflection is a symptom of weakness. Action takes precedence over all reasoning. Poet Antonio Machado captured this attitude well in the Spain of his time (the fascist): “Of ten heads, nine attack and one thinks.” Coinciding with Machado, and also about that Spain (Franco’s at that time), Jorge Luis Borges composed this famous phrase: “They speak with the aplomb of those who do not know doubt.” [4]
This priority of action over reflection has led many to equate fascism with irrationalism in politics. In his otherwise excellent essay on primordial fascism (Ur-fascism), Umberto Eco wrote: Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action is beautiful in itself, and therefore must be acted upon before and without reflection. Thinking is a form of castration. That is why culture is suspect to the extent that it is identified with critical attitudes. From the statement attributed to Goebbels (“when I hear the word culture, I reach for the gun”) to the frequent use of expressions such as “intellectual pigs”, “scumbag student, works as a pawn”, “intelligence dies”, “university, den of communists”, suspicion of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism.[5]
However, there is a method behind the apparent madness, and it is called binary reasoning, that which Max Horkheimer called “subjective reason” [6] and that today spreads everywhere in the small screens of the iPhone and its multiple applications (Apps). It enables rapid and thoughtless calculation in a world doomed to immediate and subjectively “effective” action, increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence. It is for this reason that social networks are the favorite area of populist mobilizations, in many countries mostly right-wing fascist.
The social media of our time make frequent use of simple opposites. In semiotic terms, they reject syntagma (linear and sometimes complex phrases) in favor of simple paradigms. For example, fascists interpret feminism as an inverted woman/man opposition and reject it in favor of the traditional domination of men over women. The same goes for the binary black/white or native/foreign opposition. These binary oppositions are the basis of classification in any culture. The linguist Roman Jakobson called such a characteristic (presence/absence of an element) marking. [7] Fascist discourse makes frequent use of the marking of a distinctive feature to a previously unmarked signifier. For example, before the outbreak of Nazism in Germany, the cultural assimilation of Jews meant that Judaism was unmarked. The Nazis waged an intense campaign to mark Judaism (Jewish/non-Jewish opposition) to mobilize the masses against that ethnic group and promote their persecution and eventually extermination. In other words, fascists make use of binary oppositions to cultivate hatred in polarization. It is a particular form of their identity politics.
The marked or unmarked status applies to both signifier and meaning. Such an operation, well known in the case of anti-Semitism, today spreads through social networks in many other binary oppositions. It is about “hanging the little sign” of discrimination and rejecting the unmarked (the basis of all reflection and complex thinking) as “chameleon,” “weak,” “decadent” or “subversive.” The mental operation consists in the reduction of all ambiguity, complexity, or dialectics to a strong marking of opposing terms.
In the case of Carl Schmitt as we have seen, politics is reduced to the categorical friend/enemy option. The notion of sovereignty is reduced to the coup d’état and dictatorship as the supreme exercise of marking. Doing politics means taking power and eliminating the enemy. Any democratic game of negotiation, dialogue, and compromise is despised for the sake of a categorical paradigmatic decision-making. The “make a clean break” is promulgated as a way of doing politics.[8]
In my hypothesis, this form of anti-democratic reasoning has its basis in the increasingly widespread use of binary oppositions, and these are rooted in the behavior mediated by algorithms. These are almost indispensable of our daily use of “little screens” with multiple and accelerated decisions. For this reason, the political prognosis is not at all promising. True reflection seems to be marginalized in increasingly reduced environments. Today the “mass man” of which Ortega y Gasset spoke is a hyper-informed being but incapable of thinking deeply and serenely.[9]
Lest the reader despair, I will tell him/her that reflection and democracy will not die. Fascist reaction encounters a lot of resistance and makes many mistakes. There is even a glimmer of hope in the future development of artificial intelligence, which until now is based only on binary calculation.
We are facing the threshold of quantum computing, which in its own way will once again enhance complex, dialectical, and multidimensional thinking. [10] For now, let’s rest the little screens, leave the binary matrix, and cultivate doubt. We will not let extraterrestrial futures consider us remote-controlled apes.
[1] F. de Saussure, General linguistics course (Cours de linguistique générale) published in 1916,
[2] https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Carl-Schmitt/dp/8420683833
[3] https://www.academia.edu/27444623/NORBERTO_BOBBIO_Teor%C3%ADa_General_de_la_Pol%C3%ADtica
[4] Today even children succumb to armed aggression, which is the most terrible binarism. See https://rebelion.org/aprenden-primero-a-disparar-y-despues-a-leer/
[5] See https://www.bloghemia.com/2021/09/las-14-caracteristicas-del-fascismo-por.html
[6] http://www.archivochile.com/Ideas_Autores/horkheimerm/esc_frank_horkhe0003.pdf
[7] Consult http://www.humanindex.unam.mx/humanindex/consultas/detalle_capitulos.php?id=11276&rfc=SUFLTjQ3MDcyNQ==
[8] The phrase “make a clean break” appeared in the Middle Ages. At that time, if a patient had a very deep wound, the immediate solution that the doctor found so that the patient did not lose his life was amputation.
[9] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303280102_EL_HOMBRE_MASA_EL_HOMBRE_UNIDIMENSIONAL_Y_LA_IGNORANCIA_EN_RED
[10] https://www.ibm.com/mx-es/topics/quantum-computing.
In computing a usual bit is the equivalent of two states according to the current passage: on (1) or off (0). The term bit is used for traditional digital computing. One quantum bit is the representation of the bit as a function of the properties of quantum mechanics (Quantum bit). A quantum particle suffers from a property called superposition, where before we measure it, it can have all states at once. In the case of a Qúbit, it can possess states 1 and 0 at the same time and their intermediate numbers. In a literary metaphor, Borges’s Aleph would be the quantum bit par excellence.
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