Life or Death: The Psychological Roots of Fascism
“Overcoming difficulties leads to courage, self-respect, and knowing yourself.”
—Adler, What Life Should Mean to You, 1931
Across history, fascism has exploited one universal truth: human beings long to belong, to matter, to be seen. When these needs go unmet, the ground is fertile for authoritarianism.
This article contrasts two psychological foundations:
– Alfred Adler’s life-affirming path of community, empathy, and growth.
– Sigmund Freud’s death-aligned legacy, perfectly suited to capitalism’s need for repression and guilt.
We explore how fascism feeds on broken belonging, how capitalism internalizes repression—and why reclaiming Adler’s vision may be our last chance to choose life.
1. Social Belonging (“Gemeinschaftsgefühl”)
Rather than exclusive, identity-based “us vs. them” solidarity, Adler advocated genuine empathy and interconnectedness. True social interest involves belonging to humanity itself, fostering solidarity rooted in shared human experience and collective well-being.
2. Meaningful Purpose and Significance
Adler argued that genuine self-worth comes from contributing constructively to community or society—through creativity, collaboration, and service—not from dominance or superiority over others.
3. Healthy Management of Inferiority
Recognizing and honestly addressing personal insecurities and feelings of inferiority prevents compensatory, aggressive superiority complexes. Adler emphasized self-awareness and growth, embracing vulnerability and transforming it positively.
Practical Adlerian Approaches as Antidotes to Fascism:
- Inclusive Community Building: Cultivating spaces where all individuals feel valued and interconnected.
- Constructive Collective Goals: Providing people with meaningful, collective-oriented objectives, redirecting energy away from superiority-based narratives toward genuine improvement.
- Empathy and Mutual Respect: Fostering dialogue and collaboration across differences, preventing dehumanization.
- Self-awareness Education: Helping individuals understand their insecurities, preventing them from falling prey to compensatory ideologies promising false power and superiority.
In short:
Adler’s psychological solution to fascism lies in creating meaningful community ties, providing authentic and purposeful collective endeavors, and guiding individuals toward self-awareness and healthy emotional development.
Freud, Capitalism & Death
However, humanity decided to take another path.
Rather than embracing Adler’s vision of collective healing and growth, society gravitated toward Freud’s darker framework. Freud discovered the raw, subjective nature of desire—the libido as a force beyond conventional morality—but then recoiled.
Instead of letting desire unfold toward new forms of community and creativity, Freud reterritorialized desire onto the nuclear family, guilt, and repression.
Desire was internalized, trapped within the Oedipus complex, policed by the fear of castration, and ultimately subjected to a new law:
“The goal of all life is death.”
— Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
As Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, Freud’s system neutralized the revolutionary power of desire and made it compatible with the emerging capitalist machine.
Capitalism, like Freudian psychoanalysis, decodes the natural flows of life, only to recapture and bind them again.
- Flows of creativity are redirected into consumerism.
- Flows of connection are reduced to private family loyalty.
- Flows of vitality are internalized as guilt, sadness, and the acceptance of authority.
Thus, Freud’s theory became the perfect psychology for capitalism:
It taught individuals not how to heal their alienation, but how to accept it as destiny.
As Deleuze wrote:
“Freud made the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of desire—Libido. But since he realienated this essence, reinvesting it in a subjective system of representation of the ego, and recoded this essence on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself.”
— Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
Humanity, faced with a choice between life and growth and death and guilt, chose the model that fit best with capitalism’s need for obedient, self-repressing individuals.
Rediscovering the Antidote
Today, as new waves of fascism exploit feelings of alienation, fear, and lost significance, the stakes are clear:
Will we continue walking the Freudian-capitalist path toward death—internalized repression, division, nihilism—or reclaim the Adlerian path of life, community, and conscious healing?
To reclaim the path of life, we must rekindle social interest across borders and differences, offer meaningful collective purposes, and encourage self-awareness to break the chains of inferiority and fear.
- Rekindling social interest across borders and differences.
- Offering meaningful, collective purposes.
- Encouraging self-awareness to break the chains of inferiority and fear.
Fascism feeds on the broken promises of belonging, purpose, and dignity.
The antidote must offer not just a negation of fascism, but a new, living reality:
A global community where belonging, significance, and growth are real—and where life itself reclaims its rightful place over death.
Building a life-affirming collective reality demands not just new ideas, but a new spirit—one rooted in unity, creativity, and shared consciousness.
To explore how such a vision could take shape, I invite you to discover HiveGeist:
a living framework for rethinking connection, meaning, and the future we can still build—together.
If this piece moved you and you believe in the vision of HiveGeist — confronting ego, unmasking fascism, and planting seeds of collective transformation — I would be deeply grateful for your support. Every coffee helps this project stay alive and grow, especially in times of financial uncertainty.
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