The Attraction of Nazi-ism as "Negative Initiation"

Humans need healthy ways to access transcendence; Fascism offers them a hate-trance as substitute. We need a new path.

Initiation ceremony on Torres Straits Islands.

I definitely feel a significant tone shift after this week’s election. While our future here remains unpredictable, the “Blue Wave” not only swept New York, Virginia, and New Jersey, but also Mississippi and Georgia. Across the country, people may be getting tired of Trump — sick of his staggering corruption, his endless lies. While the Right wants to control the election results, it seems unlikely they will be able to undermine the integrity of the vote sufficiently before the midterms next year. Unless Trump declares martial law to stop the elections (which is certainly possible), MAGA could lose in a historic rout.

I have read many essays and articles comparing U.S. authoritarianism with other Far Right and fascist movements around the world. Generally, a dictator needs to be very popular, at least for the first years of their regime, to consolidate power. Trump’s popularity is already at an all-time low, and sinking fast. But I do not think we should celebrate prematurely. I find it hard to imagine Trump — a narcissist sociopath with rapidly decaying impulse control — leaving office voluntarily. He will probably do almost anything — and I mean anything — to maintain control. We shall see. Trump’s cronies know they may face jailtime if the MAGA grift collapses.

As the Right has gone more extreme and more strident, we’ve learned that the Republican Party has more than a little “Nazi problem.” This is no longer a situation where Nazi ideology is confined to a marginal group of extremists. Forms of Nazi ideology, instead, continue to spread, like dark flood waters, across wide swathes of the GOP.

“It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience [of ecstatic trance] as unimportant and avoidable ... it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it.”

We find Stephen Miller — a Jewish man suffering with mental illness, disowned by his family for his sadism and cruelty — plagiarizing Joseph Goebbels in his speeches, such as the one he made at Charlie Kirk’s memorial. “We stand for what is good, virtuous, and noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us... What do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness, jealousy, and hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing.” This evokes Goebbel’s slogan: “Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles.” (“You are nothing, your people are everything.”)

MAGA influencers like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon tweak the algorithm by making Nazi salutes in charged public moments. We find overt references to an obscure SS insignia hidden in the cartoon-y DOGE logo. A troupe of not-so-young “Young Republican” beltway staffers were just outed for making “funny” remarks in group chats about loving Hitler, putting their enemies into the gas chambers, hating Jews, etcetera. A Republican congressman was busted with an American flag with a Swastika on his office wall. And so on, and on. The Overton Window is on the move!

On the Right, we find an inveterate tendency for radicalization to go ever-more radical. The “outrage machine” of social media drives this process, rewarding rage and hostility over agreement or affability. Trump mastered a primal/instinctive “entertainment” style based on Dopamine addiction and over-stimulation of the Amygdala, fusing politics with Reality TV. As a charismatic narcissist, he created a situation of mass psychological contagion, as his would-be successors seek to imitate and learn from him.

The MAGA faithful quickly get bored by the latest outrage. They await the next outrage to ratchet up their level of shock and overwhelming crisis. This leads to ever-increasing violence, fury, contempt, and horror, trending toward the possibility of mass incarcerations, resource wars, and everything else which is so predictable from history, unless we stop the authoritarian takeover.

Authoritarians distort the basic human impulse toward transcendence, nonordinary states, and initiatory practices. I believe humans possess an innate instinct (particularly men and, above all, younger men) to transgress, seek transcendence, express sacred violence. and rebel. This instinct to transgress, transcend, rebel is rooted in our neurology and the structure of the brain-mind system. This urge is a positive thing, if channeled properly. What makes us dangerous also makes us interesting. Traditional or indigenous societies understood and learned to harness the power of ecstatic trance, creating initiatory processes and rituals that used it strengthen social bonds.

Across many cultures, initiation requires a guided experience of terror, isolation, and vision: Youg men from the Sateré-Mawé culture in the Brazilian Amazon thrust their hands into nests of bullet ants whose neurotoxic stings induce hours of visionary shaking; on Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, land divers leap from high wooden towers with vines tied to their ankles to prove their courage and fearlessness; in Papua New Guinea, intensive cuts on the back and chest cause scarification to symbolize initiatory rebirth; among the Fulani people of the Sahara, the Sharo Festival tests adolescent boys with public flogging without a cry; some lowland South American rites reportedly include temporary burial with only a reed to breathe, to journey into the realm of the dead; Australian Aboriginal “walkabout” sends youths alone into the wilderness to gain instruction from the ancestors; nineteenth-century accounts of the Mandan Okipa describe days of fasting, piercing, and suspension from skewers as a vision-seeking rebirth. Native American men are pierced through their pectoral muscles and hung on trees during the Sun Dance, which lasts several days.

Whatever the form, the pattern is the same: ordeal, symbolic death, and reintegration as an adult who has chosen, voluntarily, to be bound by the community’s rules. If this neurological instinct isn’t given an avenue to express itself — if the urge toward transgression / transcendence isn’t honored and integrated into the social body — it turns nihilistic and self-destructive. That is what we find in our society — and it may soon lead to our collective annihilation unless the underlying problem is recognized and addressed.

The German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, who died while trying to escape the Nazis in 1940, understood this tendency. Writing back in the 1920s, he saw that the modern world was entranced by the new world of commodities, losing touch with the communal “ecstatic trance” that guaranteed sacred continuity. Such rites included Dionysian festivals and annual Mysteries celebrating, and reenacting, the transformation of primordial chaos into order.

Benjamin realized the modern world’s forfeiting of ceremonies compelling “ecstatic contact with the cosmos” posed a severe threat to humanity: “It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable ... it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it.¹” Without such periodic rituals of regeneration, humans fall into hypnotic episodes of feverish destruction, seeking the same release. For Benjamin, this was the occult meaning of the First World War: “An attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.” A century ago, Benjamin saw how mankind’s alienation from itself was deepening “to such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” He anticipated our time.

In The Biology of Transcendence, Joseph Chilton Pearce argued that initiation is not a cultural flourish, but a socio-biological necessity, linked to how the brain develops. Human development unfolds through critical phases. In childhood, there are stages of bonding and play. In adolescence or early adulthood, a conscious ordeal is needed to catalyze new neural integrations, breaking free of the tyranny of the prefrontal lobe to reach whole-brain activation.

In early life, secure attachment and free play prime the limbic system and neocortex for empathy, imagination, and symbolic thought. Adolescence demands a contained confrontation with fear and death, which traditional societies stage as rites of passage. These intentional ordeals are designed to reorganize the self at a higher level of function. Since modern culture lacks such intentional ordeals, adults stagnate. We suffer from prolonged neoteny, status anxiety, fascination with domination, and periodic violence in the form of wars or acts of stochastic terrorism to discharge pent-up aggression.

For Pearce, initiation completes a neurobiological circuit, from survival to transcendence and communion. Without it, people — particularly men, since women, according to many indigenous traditions, are partly initiated by nature through menstruation and pregnancy — cannot attain adult maturity. They get old but they remain “kidults,” trapped in an adolescent mindset.

“Culture” is a trap that must be escaped to allow for the healthy maturation of a person. Pearce notes that “We are shaped by the culture we create,” yet “our culture is what must be transcended.” In traditional societies, authentic initiation is culture’s organized way to do that work (of overcoming cultural conditioning) without causing social collapse: a safe “death” of the child-self so a larger, ethically anchored identity can emerge.

What’s causing the increasing radicalization — all the way to Nazi-fixation — among young people, particularly men, on the Right is the lack of initiatory ritual in our society.

Without culturally sanctioned techniques to explore consciousness and undergo ordeals as an evolutionary opportunity in a positive sense, young men, particularly, will still seek out intensification or trance states, but they will do this in destructive ways, through social media tantrums, anti-social outburts, and, eventually, acts of violence. They may get addicted to drugs of abuse or pornography. They may go from video-game addiction to becoming high school shooters. Or, these days, they might also join ICE.

The 27-year-old Libertarian, Trump supporter and Nazi sympathizer Nick Fuentes uses what Ben Lorber, a research analyst at Political Research Associates who has followed Fuentes’ rise for the last several years, calls “strategic displays of irreverence.” Fuentes has to keep proving his authenticity to his Groyper base by insulting his followers and mocking figures on the Right such as Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. He has built a big following by spewing racist, misogynist provocations on his livestreams, delivered with a “just for the lulz” sneer and calculated for maximum offense. He gleefully deploys racial and religious slurs that “feed the beast” of nihilism and rage.

Fuentes promotes the “Great Replacement” theory, which argues that liberals and Jews are orchestrating the “replacement” of white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. He said that Derek Chauvin’s conviction for the murder of George Floyd proves that minorities are “being put at the top of a racial caste system.” He compared Nazi concentration camp crematoriums to baking cookies, in an elaborate Holocaust denial analogy. And so on.

I see Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, whose recent interview with Fuentes has caused rifts in the MAGA movement, as prime examples of uninitiated men. Without access to direct transcendence or gnosis, via psychedelics or other inner development techniques, they are trapped.