The Metamodern Community Has a Fascist Problem

Fascism is stupid man’s socialism. We shouldn’t forget that Mussolini was a socialist before he became a fascist, and it’s hard to ignore that national-socialism, or nazism, has “socialism” in its very name. Similarly, today, we see a form of stupid man’s metamodernism advocated by what I call the neo-reactionaries. It’s a failed attempt to adopt metamodernism, the most cutting-edge progressive ideology of our time (like socialism a century ago), by refusing to expand your circle of solidarity, falling for simple narratives, and allowing yourself to be guided by anger and belittlements.

You find these people in and around the metamodern community, integral circles, the so-called liminal space and so on. Every person is unique, but if we simplify, these folks can essentially be divided into two groups: a) those who’ve previously subscribed to progressive ideas but have gradually regressed back to more faustian values, and b) those who never truly belonged in metamodern circles to begin with but stuck around solely for the emotional candy bar of being able to tell themselves that they’re high stage.

Now, in the latter case it’s obvious that the person’s fascistoid tendencies led them to metamodernism in the first place; wanting to be the Übermensch, a superior breed of man, better than all the rest—metamodernism can certainly deliver the goods. But in the first case, it’s often the curious phenomena of the metamemetic wormhole at play.

Let me explain:

Every metameme, or more specifically value meme, has a wormhole leading back four stages if you don’t adequately transcend and include the former. We’ve all seen so many of our dear pomo (postmodernist) friends regressing back to animism when they fail to integrate modernity and Enlightenment values.

Now, we similarly see all these good but essentially lost souls who never get over their allergies towards pomo and “woke” (or suddenly develop new ones when they reach an age where they can’t follow what the kids of the day are up to) and only use metamodernism to put forth anti-woke sentiments, who end up regressing all the way back to faustian values—and faustian values in a modern society, that’s literally the definition of fascism. And with those fascist tendencies, enter Trump & Co.

So, if you ever wondered: political metamodernism is per definition a progressive movement. That doesn’t mean that conservatism is bad, or that it can’t be prudent to go back to some of the old ways every now and then, but you simply aren’t gravitating towards the metamodern value meme if all you do with it is bashing postmodernism and complaining about wokeness.

There’s a silver lining to everything and a broken clock is right twice a day and all that, but if you see the new Trump administration as a step forward for humanity, chances are very slim that you’re actually metamodern. Or put differently, you’re just as metamodern as Mussolini is socialist.

It starts with a belittlement. Maybe several. Maybe one too many moments of being dismissed, of feeling small, of watching your supposed intellectual inferiors win the social game while you sit there with your unappreciated genius and an empty inbox. Maybe you’ve spent years cultivating your high-stage mind, nurturing the delicate orchids of second-tier thinking, only to find yourself ridiculed, rejected, or—worse—ignored.

This is the psychological mechanism that leads the once-progressive mind to regress, to reach desperately for the comforting iron grip of Faustian values.

At its core, fascism is not built by strong men—it is built by insecure men (and the occasional insecure woman). Those who wanted to be Übermenschen, but, when confronted with a world that wouldn’t give them their rightful place at the top, opted for the next best thing: a politics of resentment, a community of collective grievance, a romanticization of the past where their value was self-evident.

And let’s be clear: Socialism that does not expand its circle of solidarity will, sooner or later, become national socialism.

It’s a simple formula: If you believe in collective upliftment, but only for those you deem worthy—your people, your nation, your ingroup—you will inevitably arrive at a system that says, “These are the good ones, and those are the ones who must be excluded, contained, or punished.” Fascism is just socialism with a fence around it and a gun in the guard tower.

Now, let’s return to our dear, fallen metamodernists—the ones who started out playing with complex developmental theories and ended up spewing Twitter threads about the decline of Western civilization.

It happens like this:

1) Metamodernism introduces the wormhole.

Every value-meme has its regressions. If you do not fully integrate postmodernism, its critique of power, and its messy, ambiguous, empathy-driven ethos, then your rejection of “wokeness” becomes your fast-track ticket to reactionary politics. The leap from “I just want to have nuanced discussions” to “Maybe liberal democracy is a mistake” is shorter than you think.

2) You get tired of losing.

Metamodernism attracts people who value complexity. But complexity is not always rewarded. The world is still, unfortunately, a game of dominance, charisma, and attention. When you’ve spent years developing nuanced perspectives only to be outperformed by some loudmouthed influencer with a meme account, resentment grows. And resentment seeks simple, powerful narratives.

3) The Faustian values call your name.

Faustian values—achievement, willpower, strength, hierarchy—are seductive. They tell you that you don’t need to integrate postmodernism, that you don’t need to understand the kids and their ever-evolving pronouns, that you were right all along. They whisper that society is just too weak, too decadent, too unwilling to reward the strong.

4) You reframe your regression as enlightenment.

Here’s where it gets dangerous: Because you were once progressive, because you engaged in complex discussions, you convince yourself that your return to traditionalism, hierarchy, and power-worship is not a regression, but a transcendence. You tell yourself that you see the bigger picture, that you’ve evolved past naive idealism. You even begin to feel pity for your old, soft-hearted comrades who still believe in things like equality and empathy.

And so, here we are: Once-metamodern intellectuals now regurgitating reactionary talking points, once-progressive minds now calling for an “orderly” and “hierarchical” society, pretending that their return to simple narratives is a sign of maturity rather than a failure of growth.

The antidote? Expansion. Always expand. Your circle of solidarity, your cognitive complexity, your emotional depth. The moment you contract, the moment you build walls instead of bridges, the moment you choose resentment over integration—that’s the moment you start sliding backward, no matter how sophisticated your excuses.

Metamodernism is per definition progressive. If your version of it leads you back to glorifying the strong over the weak, hierarchy over inclusion, and resentment over creativity, then, my friend, you are not metamodern—you are just another Faustian soul, bargaining away your depth for the fleeting comfort of dominance.

Between the position of "postmodern" social justice and "metamodern" multiperspectival developmentalism—between the pomo irony and memo ironic sincerity—between the pomo antithesis and the memo "protosynthesis"... there is a dark, wide gap, an abyss.

This is, unsurprisingly, the abyss of the neo-reactionaries: anti-pomos, (anti-feminist) masculinists, neo-nationalists, Petersonians, meta-right, the integral alt-right, the authoritarian right integralists (almost entirely made up of the waste of the largely failed integral movement, almost only older men, spending very much time on social media), neo-conservatives, meta-nazis, anti-environmentalists, anti-sociologists (who want to turn the world into a forced therapy session of icky workshops, because it's "all about the individual")...

These are all pathological positions, all failing the developmental transition from pomo to metamodern. They are people who do understand the faults and pathologies of pomo, but who fail to integrate the pomo insights, ethics and critiques.

The neo-reactionaries, from the relatively innocuous ones like Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web (perhaps not *so* intellectual, after all), to the rising nationalist and proto-fascist sentiments around the world (US, Russia, China, Brazil, India, Europe...) all share one trait: they all lack a solution and a vision of the next stage of society.

Hanzi Freinacht wrote the following description of fascism in Nordic Ideology. Even if you’ve already read it I can strongly recommend a second readthrough:

“Fascism is the cata­combs of the modern ideo­logical metropolis: It constitutes a vast network of secret and forgotten under­ground tunn­els connecting all of the poli­tical ideolog­ies. I guess you can say the same about all the ideologies to some extent—they all inter­connect—but fascism remains the most denied and least under­stood.

The poli­tical metamodernist must learn to travel these dark tunnels with­out becom­ing a creature of the night. You drain the sewers, clean them up, put in proper lighting, make sure the pipes work—you get the picture. As such, political metamodernism is both the ideology that is the closest to fascism and the one most in opposition to it. The catacombs are there, whe­ther we like it or not. The political metamodernist travels them and cleans them up; the liberal innocent denies their existence and sleep­walks in their dirt.

There is, naturally, something exquisitely demonic about fascism. This demonic aspect can be understood in terms of relations between “meta­memes”: Fascist and nazi thinkers used early postmodern insights (like the mass psychology of Gustave Le Bon and ideas about image control in the media, some pretty advanced psycho­anal­ytical and situational-psychological ideas as well as socialist criti­ques and the communist art of agitation) to mani­pulate a distinc­tly mod­ern society at a moment of crisis in order to wrest control over modernity’s advan­ced political mach­inery and econo­m­ic prowess; to rest­ore what is nominally a postfaustian society (traditio­nal), but in prac­tice amounts to a num­ber of faustian goals and ideals (the con­quest of the world, a master race, sheer power for the heck of it, war for the sake of war, the return of esoteric power gods, skulls on the sleeve, and so forth). That’s exactly what the archetype of a demon signifies: a fallen angel, one close to God who uses an elevated and exalted position, an access to rare truths and insights (postmodern), for crude and narrow purposes (faust­ian).

That’s the essential truth; fascism is so profoundly evil because it is dem­onic in this primary archetypal sense. A demon is a fallen angel, some­thing profound and beautiful in the service of something base and shallow. Developmental imbalance. And every time you have such glaring dev­elopmental imbalances, you can know for sure the hell patrol is com­ing.

Political metamodernism can only be true to its cause and polit­ically effect­ive if it faces this great demon of modernity—fascism—and asks him for his central truth, for his gem (yes, demons have gems, they love ‘em).

‘So, okay then, dear mister get-kids-to-murder-and-torture-innocent-people-in-secret-death-camps, what’s your secret? What could you possi­bly tell me? What do you have that I, the enlightened and democratic modern mind, lack and secretly desire?’

The green little devil smirks slyly and replies:

‘One word, one word. There is a longing inside of you; one that I live out more fully than you, one that you deny, but still haunts the outer rims of your mind as it beckons to the innermost core of your soul. And on the hour of your death, it will grant me victory over you. The word is heroism.’

Yes, everyday life under modernity’s democracy and capitalism denies and suppresses an impulse shared by all of us: the drive for great­ness, for superiority, for con­quering death, for ascendance. A small part of us knows that we want more, that this life—and our role in it—is too petty, too drab, too trivial, too self-serving, too spiritually impoverished. We know we were meant, in some sense, to take the hero’s journey, but we got caught up in mortgages and deadlines, and we tell ourselves that’s all we ever really wanted.

We hide this side from one another, from ourselves. It embarrasses us immensely. We find ways to subtly and gleefully dismiss the deepest striv­ings of others as boyish, immature, puerile, distasteful, deluded. We deep­ly resent the glimmering greatness of one another because it reminds us of the subtle lies we live by. And instead we reenact these longings in movies, in books, in music, in fantasies and historic personae. If someone around us wishes to go down the highway of heroes, we use all the strategies we can to ridicule their effort:

‘Hah! They would have themselves be a movie char­acter, a Rambo! They lack humility. But I am mature—I really am—and I will never be a hero. Ever. I don’t even want to; only if fate forced my hand—which I by the way have a feeling might happen anytime soon—would I ever put on display the inner virtues that are uniquely my own! Until then, here’s to keeping an honest job and watching TV. With some bloody dignity.’

But when we utter these words to ourselves, we find our inner voices ring­ing strangely hollow. The green little devil’s whisper lingers on: We want to be heroes; we know that we really are heroes, and we want to fight the good struggle, and win. We want to conquer mort­ality. We want to be unleashed as creators beyond our social roles and masks, beyond the trivi­al confines of everyday life. We want to sacrifice ourselves, as Gilga­mesh, for the sake of unity so that we may live forever.”

So I would define political metamodernism as the successful integration of postmodernism into a developmental pathway for people and society. It points us towards a real, concrete updating of our institutions: local, national, transnational and global.

The neo-reactionaries are where the 21st century forces corresponding to 20th century Nazism will grow from: a sick, murderous force—all due to a developmental imbalance, to a disembodied and inauthentic attempt to transcend postmodern values without properly including them.

I guess the conclusion is obvious: integrate pomo. Don't fall into the abyss. Most of all, don't mistake them for metamodernists; they are our twisted little sister.

For the next ten years or so, twisted sister is probably going to run the world stage, until her edginess reveals its lack of imagination and political impotence. The times aren't yet ripe for political metamodernism. Today's 15-25 year olds will likely be stamped with this sickness, watching Peterson clips hysterically and going on about Judeo-Christian identity and even Julius Evola.

Ironically sincere metamodernists must make the best of these brief dark ages of the global psyche. We must begin to prepare the ground for institutional shifts into deeper democracy, sustainability, transnationalism, expansions of human rights, free information and sharing economies. That's why we must begin to act now, even if our day is in another 10-15 years.