Spiritual disease as a bio-weapon
Why it’s useful to understand the rise of fascism as political-spiritual warfare.
Absurd, cruel and idiotic fascist ideas and murderous acts flood the news. In my own bubble I see very understandable cries of anger and frustration everywhere. People go to protests, try to strategize and organize in new ways. On the other hand, life continues, with people promoting their achievements and activities, also understandable.
I see many people sharing their concerns in terms of the loss of democracy, rule of law, absence of truth and justice. And this framing matters a great deal. It describes a lot of what is happening practically. But I feel like there’s another dimension of all of this — a sense of profound spiritual degradation.
I’ve been struggling to articulate something about this that I feel might somehow be of value or helpful. Many people I’m sure already feel this very consciously. But my sense is that there are also many people for whom this is a more unconscious process. There is the notion of ‘moral injury’. When people are faced with crimes and cruelty that they cannot accept morally, but that they cannot do anything about, this wounds them. I feel like it is useful to talk about this moral wounding in spiritual terms, no matter how religious or non-religious you are. The language of spirituality can still have metaphorical power to help describe how fundamental this wounding is.
Bear with me for a moment and let’s imagine for the sake of this metaphorical usefulness that we have souls in some way, and maybe a connection to the sacredness of life. There is a way in which the incessant stupid cruelty of fascism wants to eat away at our very souls and at the feeling of that connection. People who feel active pain about what is happening to the world feel their very sense of humanity being choked. But those who respond by turning away from the suffering or enabling the destruction of societal structures for their own perceived short term benefits are also undergoing spiritual degradation. The people who care grow exhausted at a deep spiritual level, and those who don’t care become more spiritually deadened.
And this is a victory for fascism, which I believe can be usefully understood as a spiritual force waging spiritual warfare. Hardcore fascist ideologues certainly see themselves explicitly in spiritual terms, even if you don’t. That is why right wing religion and fascism fit together so well.
Fascism is an alluring spirituality of closed-hearted domination and death struggle, and it is able to attract people with that closed-hearted, sharp, powerful type of energy. People have been describing the current wave of fascism as a ‘hedonistic fascism’ that feels like it is entitled to everything and that takes great sadistic pleasure in humiliating its perceived enemies.
If fascism wages a spiritual war, its approach to ‘flood the zone’ with idiocy, unreality and endless cruelty is like unleashing spiritual disease as a bio-weapon. The opponents of fascism have to be made spiritually weak. If these opponents are not aware that their spiritual power is essentially being sapped, degraded and ruined, because they hold more cognitivist ideas about experience and reality, all the better.
So far, so very fucking depressing.
But what I’m hoping to point out is that you are being fucked with in a very deep way as part of a spiritual-political war, and the metaphor of spiritual disease is the best fit for this.
Where I feel hope is that being aware of how deeply we are being messed with can create a response in our individual and collective systems. It can light a fire in us that says ENOUGH or FUCK NO. Or the response can be a flood of love and deep care for everything and everything that is so deeply, deeply beautiful and vulnerable in this world. Perhaps it lights the flame of truly wanting a better future. Maybe it’s humor at the profound smallness of fascism. Maybe it’s all of this.
Or maybe it’s just a wordless fire.
And maybe this fire is already lit in you. But if you feel half asleep to what I’m talking about, but curious about being more activated, it can be worth taking a moment to really feel how the reality of fascism is creeping into your soul, your energy and your being. And then feeling, or listening, to something in you that responds to that corruption and degradation. What does it say?
Aboard the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of more than 50 aid ships for Gaza with participants from 44 countries, Greta Thunberg says ‘I’m not afraid of Israel. I’m afraid of a world where there is seemingly no humanity left. And we are here to show that there is still some humanity left.’ Italy and Spain have sent marine vessels to protect the flotilla’s safe passage.
I’d like to thank my friends Rosa Lewis and Kyle Thompson for their thoughts on this piece.
Dr. Joost Vervoort is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University. His work focuses on connecting games and creative practices, mystery, politics and action to create better futures. He leads the NWO Vidi project Anticiplay and is a leading researcher on the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on the transformation of the European game industry. He co-leads the pluralistic meditation group the Dharmagarage, sings about the global crisis in Terzij de Horde and paints weirdly dark album covers for other bands.
