The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

of the gigan-[197]tic problem of human incapacity for freedom and refuted any guidance of social development.
They were Utopians and perished in Spain. They only saw the longing for freedom, but they confused this
longing with the ability really to be free and to be capable of living and working without authoritarian leadership.
They refuted the party system but were unable to suggest how the enslaved masses could learn to govern their
lives themselves. Hatred against the state alone will not achieve anything. The problem is deeper and more
serious.
The international Christians preach peace, brotherly love, compassion and mutual aid. Ideologically, they were
anti-capitalist and thought of human existence in international terms. Thus they had basically a socialistinternational
attitude, and called themselves, as e.g., in Austria, Christian-Socialist. In practice, however, they
opposed, and still oppose, every step in social development in the very direction which they have made their
ideal. Catholic Christianity, in particular, has long since shed the revolutionary character of primitive
Christianity. It asks its millions of adherents to take war as a "fate," as "expiation of sin." Wars are, in fact, the
result of sins, but in a different way. The Catholics place a peaceful existence in a hereafter, preach the necessity
of tolerating misery in this world and systematically ruin people's capacity for honestly fighting for their freedom.
They do not protest when rival churches, say, the Greek Orthodox, are bombed, but they point to God and culture
when bombs fall on Rome. Catholicism creates structural helplessness in the masses of people so that, when in
need, they appeal to God instead of their own strength and self-confidence. It makes people structurally afraid of
pleasure and incapable of pleasure. This is the root of a good deal of human sadism. German Catholics bless
German arms and American Catholics bless American arms. One and the same God is supposed to lead both
inimical camps to victory. The irrationality of this is obvious.
Social Democracy, which followed Bernstein's adaptation of Marx's sociology, also suffered shipwreck on the
problem of mass structure. Like Christianity and anarchism, it lived on the com-[198]promise of the masses
between striving for happiness and irresponsibility. Thus it deveolped a vague ideology of an "education for
socialism" without vigorous, honest work on concrete life tasks. It dreamed of social democracy without
understanding that the structure of the masses must be basically altered before they are capable of being "socialdemocratic."
In practice, it was far from realizing that schools, nurseries, trade schools, etc., must function in a
self-regulatory manner, that one has to fight, vigorously and objectively, any reactionary tendency, including
those in one's own camp; that, finally, one has to give the word "freedom" a concrete meaning if one is to
establish social democracy. It is better to fight fascist reaction as long as one is in power than to develop the
courage to do so only after one has lost it. In many European countries, social democracy had at its disposal all
the necessary power to overthrow the old patriarchal power within the people and outside them, the power which
finally found its bloodiest triumphs in the fascist ideology.
Social democracy assumed that man—though crippled by thousands of years of patriarchal power—was capable
of democracy and self-government. It refuted serious scientific endeavor, as of a Freud, to comprehend the
complicated human structure. Thus it became inevitably dictatorial within its ranks and compromising toward the
outside. "Compromising" not in the good sense of the word that one has to understand the standpoint of the
opponent and has to agree with him where he is right, but compromising in the sense of sacrificing principles for
fear of disputes and in the sense of trying "to be on good terms" with an adversary bent on murder. It was
Chamberlainism in the camp of socialism.
Social democracy was ideologically radical and practically conservative, as expressed in such monstrosities as
"His Royal Highness and Majesty's socialist opposition." Without intending to, it helped fascism, for fascism of
the masses is nothing but disillusioned radicalism plus nationalistic philistinism. Social democracy suffered
shipwreck on the contradictory mass structure which it did not understand.
The bourgeois governments of Europe had a democratic ide-[199]ology, it is true, but in practice they were
conservative administrative bodies with an aversion to fundamental, scientifically grounded freedom movements.
The tremendous influence of the capitalist market economy and of profit interests outweighed all other interests.
The European bourgeois democracies shed their original revolutionary character of the years after '48 much more