Here in the United States, the word "fascism" is being thrown around a great deal, and when I went to study the history of fascism, I found it being propped up by a large number of "fifteen-dollar words" that are unnecessarily complex.

I also found that historians and social scientists are arguing about what fascism is -- to this day -- even though the Italian Fascist government (the original Fascists) and the related German Nazi government were defeated and removed from power by 1945.

No one alive today would be silly enough to call their own power fascist power, because it's a failed approach that causes endless pain and upheaval for no good reason. So calling someone a fascist, or calling an organization or structure fascism, is simply an insult.

And we can do better than that.

In this episode, I look at the multiple fifteen-dollar words that make up fascism, and I also simplify them into things we already know are trouble: cultic mechanisms of control (all fascist governments rely on cultic mechanisms), and hierarchies of human worth (fascistic governments love to sort people into simple-minded good vs. evil categories).

And we know what to do with those problems. We can take an off-ramp from them without the need to insult people or learn a boatload of fifteen-dollar words.

Book mentioned in this episode: Escaping Utopia: Growing Up In a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over by Janja Lalich and Karla McLaren: https://bookshop.org/p/books/escaping-utopia-growing-up-in-a-cult-getting-out-and-starting-over-janja-lalich/59ceed42511741ff?ean=9781138239746&next=t