Errors in axiomatic construction

 Charlie has this tweet, which kicks off a thread that talks about technology in a context of atrocity but which settles into an axiomatic "Nazis are the problem".

That's a mistake.

Nazis are certainly one problem (and an immediate problem), but if you poke at it, fascism generally is a manifestation of a much more general problem, and that turns out to be a manifestation of the false axiom.

Fascism -- the several fascisms, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, whatever you call the "this is all ours" structures in Australia and Canada, etc. -- is a set of rationalizations to the effect that what you want, you should have, irrespective of what it is or how it got that way so long as those things are independent of another member of the in-group. ("In group" isn't stable; populism is a protest at being excluded from the in-group.)

That in turn rests on the idea that wealth reduces your insecurity.

It doesn't, it's the problem.  There's a very long historical pattern of using wealth to create armies and then using the armies to guarantee markets -- to force people to buy from you, which has higher rates of return than any possible mechanism of taxation because taxes have to come out of surplus if you are going to avoid breaking the economy -- followed by formalization into empire followed by collapse.  Empires always collapse.  It's inherent in the form of organization.  The collapse is generally protracted and severe.

(What wealth does do is increase your status, and being band-forming primates, we all have this wetware bug which equates status and security.  You'd think an awareness of kings in antiquity needing food tasters would start to put a dent in this, but it doesn't.  You'd think an awareness that the empire is not helping you if you're not a member of the elite would stick better, too, but it doesn't, either.)

Wealth -- the idea that you should be able to have, and keep, as much as you can obtain by any means -- also acts to increase the general insecurity by simple feedback; it's going to act to reduce your agency because structurally, it's trying to guarantee returns and equally structurally, those returns are not abstractions; they reduce to your effort and thus time and thus lifespan.  "Productivity" is a term of art for someone else being able to get more return per unit of time of your lifespan.

Any effective reduction in insecurity must rest on things which actually reduce insecurity generally.  (Which seems ridiculous as a thing which needs saying, but here we are.)  That in turn means you'd want a general measure of agency to be seen to not decrease (and to be evenly distributed over the population); it would also mean effective collective solutions.  Both of those imply that really sharp limits on relative prosperity are required, and that wealth in the "keep whatever I obtain" sense cannot be permitted.