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Fascist leaders disdain the very idea of “thinking”—what I have termed integrative responsiveness—about politics or any other event. When asked by socialist politicians to explain his position, Benito Mussolini—who saw himself as Hitler’s mentor—replied, “The Socialists ask what is our program? Our program is to smash the skulls of the Socialists.” In “The Doctrine of Fascism” (1932), Mussolini used ten thousand words to describe the same solution. Writing for the Italian Encyclopedia, Mussolini proclaimed that Fascism made philosophic reasoning (a type of integrative thinking) unnecessary: “Fascism is action and it is thought.” Or, as he put it, Fascists are not violent men, though many do “belong to the restless but meditative class.”
Mussolini blamed the catastrophe of World War I upon liberals and their false doctrines, especially the sanctity of the individual. The (Jewish, Christian) notion that individuals are ends in themselves is illusory and harmful: “the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.” The only liberty is, therefore, the liberty of the individual within the State. The “Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people.” Rejecting socialist dreams of universal peace, of the value of good will, Fascism “trains its guns on the whole block of democratic ideologies, and rejects their practical applications and implements.”
Like Mussolini, American slave owners and the politicians and priests whom they controlled realized that their system of governance—domination of subjects who wished to be free—required them to react to abolitionism with as much force as necessary. Although he was brutal, Mussolini was not stupid. He traced the inefficiencies of European governments to struggles between political groups whose policies and philosophical differences made democracies sloppy and prone to stasis. Like all tyrants, Mussolini recognized that directives from a central authority bypassed the quagmires of squabbling parliaments. Searching for fair and just outcomes was foolish. No form of government can be judged sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect or eye of eternity) he asserted. On the contrary, the “permanent and universal reality in which the transient dwells and has its being” of Fascism is that individuals are members of a spiritual calling. Individuals gain value when they are members “of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution.” Mussolini made himself perfectly clear: “Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal, will of man as a historic entity.”
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Past American presidents have understood that individuals, no matter their utility to the state, are valuable in themselves. The rule of law, based on that faith, makes ‘smashing the skulls’ of one’s opponents criminal, anti-American, and fascistic. President Trump seems reluctant to affirm this core doctrine of our common heritage.
Volney Gay, PhD
St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute
Vanderbilt University