Why Rejecting Strongmen Doesn’t Mean We’re Free

Many people sincerely oppose authoritarian figures. They reject scapegoating, strongman politics, and overt domination when it appears in public life. They vote against it. They speak out against it. They distance themselves from it. And because of this, it feels natural to assume that fascism—having been recognized and rejected—has been kept at bay.

But this assumption rests on a misunderstanding of how authoritarianism actually works.

The forms of fascism we most readily oppose are the ones that arrive as rupture. They threaten identity by making domination visible. They announce themselves through uniforms, slogans, and enemies. They destabilize the moral story we tell about ourselves. 

That is why they provoke such strong resistance: they force a confrontation with who we believe we are.

The fascism that does the most work, however, does not arrive this way.

It does not target outsiders. 

It targets disruption itself. 

It does not impose control through force, but through continuity. It operates quietly, as an internal discipline that keeps coherence intact when reality becomes destabilizing. This form of fascism does not look like hatred or aggression. It looks like reasonableness. Professionalism. Neutrality. Responsibility. 

It never says “you must.” 

It simply makes certain responses feel impossible.

Here, fascism is not used as a moral label or historical equivalence, but to name a specific logic of enforcement that suppresses disruption in order to preserve coherence.

This is why rejecting strongmen does not free us from authoritarianism. 

The two forms operate in different registers and serve different functions. Overt fascism seeks to dominate others. Covert fascism seeks to stabilize the self. Because they solve different problems, they can coexist without disrupting one another.

In fact, opposing the first often protects the second.

By rejecting authoritarian figures in public, we affirm our identity as non-authoritarian. That affirmation becomes a kind of insulation. It reassures us that domination is something we stand against—something external, recognizable, and already accounted for.

Meanwhile, the internal enforcement mechanisms that prevent rupture, suppress alarm, and foreclose exits remain untouched, because they are not experienced as power at all. 

They are experienced as realism.

This is why climate inaction persists even among those who are deeply opposed to authoritarian politics. Climate disruption does not primarily threaten our values. 

It threatens our coherence. 

Responding to it would require rupturing professional norms, destabilizing symbolic identities, and integrating somatic alarm that has long been managed rather than trusted. Internal fascism exists precisely to prevent this kind of destabilization.

So the contradiction is only apparent. We can oppose authoritarianism where it threatens who we think we are, while practicing it wherever it preserves the structures that allow us to remain who we are. 

The absence of uniforms does not mean the absence of enforcement. 

It only means that the enforcement still remains inside.

Before moving further, it’s important to name the register of what follows. The account below is not offered as an empirical reconstruction, nor as a claim that this primordial terrain can be directly observed, measured, or recalled. Skepticism here is warranted. And yet, this framework provides a highly plausible explanation for a persistent contradiction: how we can sincerely oppose overt fascism in public life while quietly reproducing its logic internally, through architectures that suppress disruption and foreclose exit.

The terrain being described is largely inaccessible precisely because it is occluded by the very confusion scaffold that stabilizes us. It precedes language, deliberation, and reflective thought, making it difficult to encounter directly. But its effects are not hidden. They remain legible in the patterns we enforce, the disruptions we cannot tolerate, and the exits we repeatedly fail to open. While this site of repair may be pre-cognitive, it is not beyond reach. It can be rewritten—not by returning to it directly, but by working from a later capacity: a post-primordial agency that becomes available once we recognize what has been quietly imprisoning us.

This account draws on converging insights from cognitive science, developmental psychology, and contemplative traditions, which point to ontology and orientation—rather than belief or intention—as the primary conditions for sustained contact with reality.

What follows is not an account of failure or refusal, but of a passive ontological misrecognition that precedes both.

At a primordial, pre-reflective level, non-duality is not recognized as a viable mode of being. Experience is suddenly encountered as though it should be anchored by an observer self—one that cannot be located. This absence is passively misread as danger: a threat of engulfment, a loss of ground, a sense that something essential is missing. What is destabilizing here is not experience itself, but the assumption that a stable self should be standing behind it.

This is not a failure of capacity, nor a bypass of an available orientation, but an ignorance that precedes both: a misrecognition of what is actually occurring.

This misrecognition becomes the site of what can be called core wounding: not damage inflicted after the fact, but a pre-reflective condition in which reality—once encountered without division—is now experienced as destabilizing before it can be known otherwise.

To protect against collapse within this misrecognized reality, the psyche turns to confusion. Confusion functions as a scaffold, allowing coherence to be imposed where orientation feels absent. It generates a map of experience organized around a self, enforcing continuity and control as a substitute compass in a world now assumed to be dangerous. In doing so, the pre-reflective holding state that once sustained contact without division is rejected, and coherence becomes something that must be continually enforced.

The more this core wounding remains unrecognized and unintegrated, the more urgently coherence must be enforced.

As long as we mistake authoritarianism for something that only arrives from the outside, we will continue to oppose it politically while reproducing it internally—maintaining systems that rely on overzealous coherence enforcement to keep this misrecognized self intact, suppress disruption, and demand non-disruption, even as they undermine the conditions for life.