The original hippies were Fascists.

Yes, let that sink in. Also, I did not mistitle this article. I must explain the background for my theory before I jump into it.Today, we throw around the term “Fascism” to mean the greatest political evil imaginable, but we don’t actually know the history of Fascism. Digging into the history of Fascists, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, hippies, and postmodernism revealed some shocking connections that shed light on the nature of human beings. I will elaborate on the whole thing in future posts, but for now, before I go to the mathematical and theoretical stuff, I will provide a brief example that will make you experience massive cognitive dissonance… you could call it a bad trip.

“Turn on, tune in, drop out” is the slogan of the hippies that was popularized by Timothy Leary. That’s exactly what Julius Evola did in the 1920s. At the end of World War I, Evola was 20 and trying to find meaning in his life to deal with the horrors of war. He almost completed a degree in engineering, but dropped out, because he “did not want to be associated in any way with bourgeois academic recognition and titles such as doctor and engineer.” He experimented with hallucinogens and delved deep into the study of Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric Yoga, Taoism, and the mystical traditions of a wide range of cultures. He wrote well researched books on Buddhism, Taoism, and yoga, including The Doctrine of Awakening to thank the Buddha for saving him from suicide. In the US, his books are published by Inner Traditions, which also publish books by many other popular New Age authors like Terence McKenna and Alex Grey. Like the hippies, Evola wanted a spiritual revolution against the establishment infrastructures of his time. In The Revolt Against the Modern World, he dismissed modern rational knowledge in favor of ancient wisdom. He advocated the Left Hand Path way of life, which included breaking socially constructed taboos and embracing the powers of sexuality in a spiritual way. Sounds like your stereotypical hippie, right? Well, he was admired by Mussolini, worked for the Nazi SD, and when on trial, he said, “I’m not a Fascist, I’m a Superfascist!”

Evola was not a singular case. Giuseppe Tucci, the founder of Buddhist Studies in the West, was Mussolini’s ambassador to Japan. Many on the modern political Left who are into postmodernism and New Age spirituality actually hold very similar beliefs to Fascist philosophers. The Dalai Lama had many Fascist friends and Fascist Occultism is closely linked to Buddhist Tantrism. If you think you’re “woke”, you’re not. Many Fascists had thought the same thing as you and went deeper than you. Are you uncomfortable yet? Good.

The Alt Right and the postmodernist Marxist social justice warriors (SJW) fight each other not because they are different, but because they are the same. You wouldn’t go fight a zebra or a chair, would you? This is the revelation of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory — conflicts arise out of similarities, not differences. The Tantric Buddhists explain this phenomenon in terms of the Khandro-Pawo reflection. You fall in love with someone because he or she is a mirror to your soul… but if you see ugliness in that mirror, you will create a conflict.

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

We don’t realize that we are all mirrors who constantly engage in mimetic conflict. Trump’s post-truth chaotic tweets and the Alt Right’s politically incorrect memes are the same phenomenon as the SJWs’ arguments for gender and race being social constructs. What we hate the most is the ugliness of ourselves reflected in other people. The behaviors and rationalization excuses of people on any political position are the same: you believe in the mythologies of your in-group and wage meme wars against your out-group, which sometimes escalate into physical violence. The specific demographics are different for each individual, but you always oppose the out-group in a mimetic conflict. These who preach tolerance and egolessness the most are often the most hypocritical. We must accept that we are all monsters. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I will not deny that I am heavily influenced by Tantric Buddhism and Nietzsche, which are both big influences to Fascists and SJWs. The key is in understanding how to resolve the cognitive dissonance that drives people into mimetic conflicts, rather than denying contextually useful ideas through overgeneralization just because someone you didn’t like happened to have used that idea.

Far Left doesn’t mean opposite of Far Right; it just means that it’s the most effective way to fight against the Mainstream Right. Similarly, Far Right is simply whatever the Mainstream Left fears the most. Far Right is Far Left’s mirror image that’s often indistinguishable from each other. Both are effective because they are so alien to the Mainstream. The Mainstream defines the labels of “Right” and “Left”. It’s a vague duality that’s inherently undefinable using strict, technical language, much like “male” and “female” or “yang” and “yin”. The fringes are originally going in all directions, but when interacting with the Mainstream, they are forced to take a dot product of the vectors, which gets rid of all the other directions. Politics is biased towards reducing every position to a projection onto the x-axis — which isn’t even stationary, but drifting and rotating over time. When a fringe reaches sufficient momentum, its non-x coordinates no longer exert an infinitesimal effect and instead is added to the x-axis to redefine a new x-axis. See Figure 1 for details.

Figure 1

Suppose that society is a hemisphere, then let’s define Right vs Left as an arc that goes along the surface of the hemisphere that goes from one side of the equator to the other through the north pole like a longitude. In Figure 1, O is the center of the hemisphere and N is the north pole. The arc ANB is the initial political spectrum. L is Mainstream Left and R is Mainstream Right. Most people think one dimensionally, so they mistake the political spectrum as the straight line AOB, which isn’t the true arc of the spectrum, but its projection onto the cross-sectional circle of the hemisphere. L and R are a short distance directly across from each other on opposite sides of the north pole.

When you’re at the north pole, if you go a mile south, then a mile east, then a mile north, where do you end up? Back at the north pole. If you bring two north sides of a magnet together, they repel. The Mainstream Left and Right are both close together on opposite sides of the north pole, so they must repel each other. The meet at the north pole, clash and repel by “going south a mile”, travel along a latitude along the same rotational vector, then meet back up at the north pole and repeat the process.

After L and R clash at the north pole and move south respectively, the Mainstream Left wants to find a solution to defeat the Mainstream Right and look to the Far Left for solutions. Where is the Far Left? Not on the arc ANB! Because if it is on the same arc, then there is no real innovative ideas — the innovation must come from variables that aren’t considered in current Mainstream discussions. If you’re still on the arc ANB but closer to the equator, you aren’t Far Left; you’re just really passionate about the current Mainstream Left position. Let FL represent Far Left. FL is a point on the hemisphere that is not on the arc ANB. FL is first projected from the hemisphere to the cross-sectional circle to FL’’’, then to FL’’ on AOB, then to FL’ on ANB. Finally, we realize that the Far Left is further the the “left” of the Mainstream Left, so we call it the “Far Left. The Mainstream Left uses parts of the Far Left for its own agendas while discarding the rest due to its tendency towards oversimplification. However, once the Far Left reaches sufficient momentum, it redefines the Left-Right spectrum into arc A’NB’. The Mainstream position cannot suddenly shift to the Far Left position, but it shifts to align with it, with a movement from L to L’, which is on arc A’NB’. R shifts to R’ to reflexively in a mimetic mirroring response. Now, what’s defined as Far Left and Far Right will have to change again. What was previously the Far Left are now just the most passionate members of the Mainstream Left.

You will notice that this model doesn’t quite account for the similarities between the hippies and Fascists. That’s because the map is not the territory. No models can sufficiently explain all the complexities of life. The purpose here is the propose this general field of topological metapolitics rather than know the best model right off the bat. Perhaps a cylinder could be better or maybe some N-dimensional solid that I couldn’t visualize. The key ideas are in the mechanisms of projection and rotational movements along the surface of a solid. Perhaps the hemisphere itself is also revolving around some other object while that “solar system” is traveling along yet another vector. This schema also isn’t restricted to politics. It can help explain any social interaction that involves opposing factions, for example, the choosing between “PC Master Race” and console gaming.

This is a sensitive topic to write about, but I had to do it to propose a new way of thinking that better reflects my observations of reality. Part of Mimetic Arbitrage is to take small risks for potentially big gains. The way to solve big problems isn’t to avoid uncomfortable truths, but to recognize the methods for resolving the cognitive dissonance and mimetic conflicts. I’m also interested in how people with stronger math backgrounds might expand upon this.

Thanks for reading and please follow if you accept that we are all monsters.

This article was first posted at Mimetic Arbitrage, my blog for consulting related to Mimetic Theory and antifragility.