Fascism: Hysteria in the Age of Oedipalisation

“When someone is 'Oedipalized', it's basically to say that they've bought into the bullshit: "Yes, Mr. Freud, I agree that the reason I think that we're inside the belly of a machine that is bleeding to death is that my mother sometimes looked longingly into her wineglass when I was a child." This amounts to a rejection of the immanent, continuous, profligate nature of Spirit. A surrender of agency and self over to whatever system installs the mores of a given society. These days it looks more like SSRI addiction.”[1]

The Reddit post above (from 3 years ago) offers a perspective that breaks from academic conventions and instead addresses current societal dynamics directly. From Deleuze and Guattari's viewpoint, becoming 'Oedipalized' means having one's desires constrained by dominant cultural narratives, resulting in repression and limited critical engagement.

It is an essentially fascist style capture of consciousness. For example, look at what is happening in the world today in domestic politics and global politics; Charlie Kirk, Ukraine, digital ID, Net Zero, etc. Social media is dead, fake alternative truthers are everywhere, MSM is government propaganda; everything is staged to agitate and provoke and oedipalize you.

During a recent review of my book collection, I revisited Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari—a book directly relevant to our current context. The foreword, by Michel Foucault, addresses power relations and fascism, despite controversies about his personal history. Foucault's work offers insight into the mechanisms of control that shape contemporary society.

Foucault wrote a glowing account of Deleuze and Guattari’s book.

He wrote:

“The art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual to everyday life:

Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

• Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

• Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

• Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

• Do not become enamored of power.”

I will offer a few thoughts on the above, and it is not exhaustive, on how his ideas (and the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari) relate to our current situation.

His first point about freeing political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia is highly applicable to current affairs.

We live a in unitary political system whereby all the political parties, left and right, what we could call the uni-party all sing (in reality) from the same hymn sheet; United Nations Agenda 2030, Net Zero, Digital ID, electric vehicles, Covid-19 hysteria, etc. The skirmishes played out in parliaments and social media is a scripted soap opera, a Punch and Judy show, seducing you like the Pied Piper to take one side or another; think of the fake pandemic, Ukraine, Israel/Palatine, immigration etc. And ironically, from what would ordinarily be a Marxist (working class) issue, all the Agenda 2030/Net zero/medical fascism, incredibly bizarre immigration policies affect every day ordinary working people, including minorities and even refugees; the impoverishment of everyone’s lives under a globalist, Communio-Fascistic colonisation. Nobody escapes. Nobody ever does under fascism, as Foucault would attest to; even committed Stalinists ended up in the Gulag. So, the fake Punch and Judy show is driven by a unitary agenda (e.g., Agenda 2030, World Economic Forum, etc), which uses paranoia and gaslighting to provoke ordinary people.

Look at the fake COVID pandemic. They made so many people paranoid about dying from a supposed virus. Meanwhile, they (all the politicians, scientists, etc) lived normally, never wore masks, and exempted themselves from an emergency authorised injection which had no rigour regarding safety checks. Even the drug companies were exempted from any liability of harm; how was this not a wakeup call? For many it was not, such was the brainwashing. But they asked you to line up to take it, wear a filthy cloth mask, lock yourself in your home and shut your business. Meanwhile, all the big supermarkets were open and even politicians had parties. And in recent days, people are now paranoid about putting up a flag, and the Tommy Robinson show would have you believe this is some counter movement “sticking it to the man.” Tommy Robinson, a man supposedly convicted and imprisoned for various offences, can shut down London. Meanwhile, people get banned from attending protests for years for putting up stickers (Sam Melia) and people get banned from social media (Alex Belfield). Meanwhile, ordinary people, “left” and “right,” black and white, Muslim and Christian, refugee and will be corralled into a digital ID system to control the movement of people on all levels; online and in the material world. A “Papers please” society. A digital gulag. Job done.

Also, look at the onslaught of supposed social justice, the extremely racist critical race theory (CRT), which tars “white” people (whatever they are meant to be?) with the original genetic sin of their skin colour privilege and inherent racist psychopathology. However, the CRT propaganda (not science, btw) equally labels black and ethnic minorities with the flaws of not being able to wield agency in the realm of human social relations (being able to talk/network with white people as they lack this human ability). I am not sure how this propaganda does not oedipalize everyone and create a pathetic juxtaposition that does not reflect the reality for most people. The fascists want you to believe otherwise.

Then we come to the Charlie Kirk issue. Whether a false flag, a real event, or the “taking out” of an asset that has served its time or exceeded its best-before date, one can see how this “event” will work in favour of promoting paranoia about safety and the need for censorship in various forms. The fear-outrage machine creates a stage that is actually very far removed from the ordinary experience of everyday people. But we will be subject to the output of this machine.

Thus, as Foucault suggests, we have to develop political action, critical thinking and the desire to reject of the soap opera; by juxtaposing the “left”-“right” fantasist show for what it is; inserting a disjunction into the narrative to highlight the fakery of the juxtaposition (“left” versus “right”), which is the practice of deliberately connecting two supposedly opposite or contrasting elements with to reveal that the contrast is artificial, misleading, or socially constructed, rather than natural or inherent. One must reject subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization that is created by the Uni-party and the fake alt-stream narrative. Ultimately, as COVID showed, everyone was subjected to medical fascism, except those pushing it. Of course, covid, the fake pandemic, should have been the wake-up call to reject their pigeonholing. Those who pushed it now want us to forget COVID even happened. Have you noticed that? Many have not. They are now concerned about waving flags. All by design.

Further, Foucault argues that we must withdraw our allegiance from the old categories of the negative that dominate the mainstream/fake alt-stream narrative; reject the state-sanctioned narrative of mental healthism that sees you as lacking, determined by biology or childhood circumstance (e.g., The Adverse Childhood Experiences mental health cult). One also must reject the pretend authority of the so-called medical specialists; the outsourcing of medical practice to AI and reified reductive algorithms, laden with a big pharma bias, is not for the health of people. Again, the “my doctor/nurse is an immigrant fake narrative obfuscates the real issue; whether one is an immigrant or “native-born” doctor or nurse, critical thinking has been outsourced to AI, to an algorithm, a condition of alienation for the practitioner/worker; so, the practitioner suffers, and the patient suffers. Did you think they wanted to create a system where it helps people, worker and patient? There must be a respect for difference over uniformity, and this is what the uni-party and state/mainstream/fake-stream infantilization paranoia cannot recuperate. Their machine breaks when one points out the limitations of their system and how it captures them as well. You will just be ignored of course, but that is a sign you are on the correct path.

But, as Foucault writes, do not be sad even though what we are fighting against is abominable. The connection to the reality of how things are, and not to be seduced into the forms of representation of the fake narrative, is the true revolutionary force. If they cannot pigeonhole you, what can they do? If they force you to “believe,” then they show their fascist hand, and the game is up. If they ignore you, they also show their fascist hand as they show you that they really do not respect difference, despite their protestations of “diversity” and “inclusion;” these protestations are fake and are an attempt to conceal their fascism. One can always tell if they come from a position of fascism; if a solution is offered to them, which will lead to peace, calm, and serenity, and it is ignored and/or rejected by them, then it shows that they desire strife and misery for you. They desire misery and hardship and would like you to believe the bogey man does exist; e.g., Starmer’s “the rise of the far-right.” Meanwhile, the real bogey man is telling you there is a bogey man; it is him. This is called gaslighting. Fascists love gaslighting people. It is a key attribute of their cunning.

Foucault urges us to “use political action as an intensifier of thought. What does this mean? He means that political practice is understood differently from traditional notions of politics, such as party activity, statecraft, or electoral competition. It is about the ways in which power is exercised, resisted, and constituted in everyday life. A key aspect of political practice, according to Foucault, is that power is everywhere, not just in the state. In other words, political practice is not limited to governments or formal institutions. It includes how social norms, discourses, and institutions shape behaviour and thought. Think about how “wokeism” or Tommy Robinson flag-waving influences how people think.

Further, Foucault argues that resistance is an important part of politics and political practice; where there is power, there is resistance. Therefore, political practice involves challenging or highlighting the fake juxtapositions of power (black and white relations; “anti-fascism”[3] vs. “far-right”) in concrete ways. Political action is also about the ethical and individual; how people govern themselves, their bodies, and their desires. Foucault’s idea of “technologies of the self” shows that personal practices can be political acts; e.g., doing one’s own research into medical interventions (e.g., masks or covid “vaccines”) and challenging the status quo by following one’s own path, via informed consent, to what one wants to do. Critique and problematization are crucial to Political practice. This involves questioning accepted truths and norms (note/ignore how the narrative pushers hate questioning; very revealing of fascistic tendencies), and exposing how social arrangements serve certain interests. It is less about imposing ideology than about creating spaces for thought and action outside dominant power structures. In summary, political action for Foucault is the active engagement with power relations—resisting, negotiating, and transforming them—not just participating in formal political institutions.

Foucault also argues that one should not demand of the state to restore the “rights” of the individual. This ties into what Jacques Lacan told the students in Paris in 1968. From his seminar:

“(Questioner): People speak about a New Society. Will psychoanalysis have a function in that society, and what will it be?

(Lacan): A society is not something that can be defined just like that. What I am trying to spell out, because psychoanalysis gives me the evidence for it, is what dominates it, namely, the practice of language. Aphasia means that there is something that has broken down in this respect . Just think that there are people who happen to have things in their brain who no longer have any idea how to manage with language. That makes them somewhat crippled.

(Questioner): One could say that Lenin almost became aphasic.

(Lacan): If you had a bit of patience, and if you really wanted our impromptus to continue, I would tell you that, always, the revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome-of ending up as the master 's discourse. This is what experience has proved.

What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.”[4]

By demanding rights or other things from the master, you enter a relationship of dependence with the master (or government/state, etc), which deprives you of being an authentic individual. In the Preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault argues we must, in some sense, de-individualize, and any group one joins must not create some kind of hierarchy contra the state but be a constant generation of such a de-individualization. Such a de-individualisation does not mean erasing yourself — it means refusing the subject-positions imposed by power (the obedient citizen, the revolutionary hero, the guilty patient. This ties into what Nietzsche describes as the individual will to power, being the artist of one’s own life.[5]

Lastly, Foucault warns us not to become enamoured of power. Foucault is cautioning that even when people oppose domination, they can easily reproduce the very structures of domination they wanted to escape. In other words, revolutionary groups can fall into mini-tyrannies, with charismatic leaders, strict rules, and internal policing. Also, intellectuals and activists can become seduced by the authority of being the one who “knows” or “represents” the truth, and individuals can secretly enjoy exercising control over others, even in small, everyday ways. One only has to look at the Tommy Robinson “movement,” the fake truther/health movement, or the woke/Antifa movements; they endanger themselves by utilizing all the tactics that Foucault warns us against.

In conclusion, we must resist becoming the hysterics that Lacan warned us about. Both the right and the left (the fake right and left, btw) demand a new master. This is not the way to a Foucauldian non-fascist way of living. By being drawn into a fake juxtaposition (e.g., “antifa” versus the “far right”) we become territorialised and individualised. We must de-territorialize and de-individualize. Then we will be truly be inhabiting the domain of the non-hysteric and become de-Oedipalized.

Coda:

I suppose in one small way, this article is an attempt, drawing on the inspiration of Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, to create a deterritorialization from the territory created by the fake anti-fascists and the “alt-right”/”far-right” bogey man. All this black hole narrative does is to suck everything into its nihilism, which is the desired result but those who are orchestrating this narrative; i.e., our so-called government and state actors, who are playing a role in the soap opera. We have to find ways to evade being sucked in, but at the same time create ways and deterritorializations that deindividuate. Nomadic thinking: a topic for another day, perhaps.

[1] From A Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Deleuze/comments/xb2e0s/what_is_the_oedipilization/

[2] Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

[3] These anti-fascists supported the medical fascism during the fake covid pandemic even when it was used on women, children, minorities and refugees. They are very far from being real anti-fascists.

[4] Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

[5] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1974.