Where's the Revolution?

As Fascism tightens its death-grip on the U.S., why do most people seem so unresponsive, disconnected, and detached?

I am back at my usual morning writing cafe, which is like a clean, white co-working space. Usually every chair is taken by 10 am. Most of the customers are in their twenties or thirties, stylish and well-groomed. We all sit silently for hours staring into our little screens, working on our individualistic careers as “data serfs” in this techno-feudalist neo-Fascist state. Sometimes I marvel at how we all kind of have the same job now: We sit at keyboards and do “something or other” that absorbs our attention.

I often wonder — I find it fascinating — why there seems to be almost zero spirit of resistance or rebellion in most people I know or see around me. After all, if you are in your twenties or thirties now, you have to envision yourself living five or more decades into the future. Once entrenched, Fascism often lasts for thirty years or more. When it fails, it is often because it exhausts itself in horrible wars for conquest, after purging its population, creating Holocausts or Gulags in which many millions of people die cruel and horrible deaths, and so on. As I’ve explored, there are many indicators that the U.S. could soon move in that direction.

As a young person in the U.S., you are now looking forward to a depressing future in a grotesque totalitarian surveillance state seeking to systemically destroy the institutional knowledge and social fabric of the country, crush the middle class, take away health care from the poor, remove environmental restrictions so corporations can despoil and exploit, and stop the meager and insufficient efforts we were making to slow down global warming and avert imminent climate catastrophe, while turning the U.S. into a facsimile of North Korea or Russia. The infrastructure of our tepid “democracy” — the voting system — is under attack, in danger of being fatally compromised or totally dismantled.

I find it amazing that people don’t seem to care very much. At least people do not express the sense of urgency or emergency that the situation warrants. In different communities that I am part of, it even seems “uncool” to focus on the epic political and social catastrophe taking place all around us. Most people I know in the “consciousness community” (ecstatic dance, ayahuasca, yoga, etc) have stopped watching the news or reading analysis of what’s going on. While understandable, I think this is a serious mistake.

I want to explore the reasons why this is where we are now, and, also, how we can change that dynamic to mount a successful resistance. I realize the situation looks incredibly dire at the moment, but we do have to recognize that it isn’t “over.” The U.S. is a very big country with a very diverse economy. There are eight million more registered Democrats than Republicans. The super-wealthy oligarchs along with their henchmen make up a tiny fraction of the general populace. The Blue States produce 71% of the country’s GDP and have enormous leverage (the new “soft secession” movement is a very interesting development).

I want to better understand why people — young middle-class Americans particularly — seem, for the most part, unresistant, dissociated, detached, checked out. I don’t mean to over-generalize. I know there are people of all ages involved in activism or resistance in different ways. But generally, as The Banter put it: “Like the frog that jumps into a pot of lukewarm water, Americans do not seem to grasp that the fire beneath it is already roaring, that it will soon be boiling, and that the sides are too steep to escape.”

Sometimes I wonder if I could be underestimating the people at my cafe — perhaps they are quietly working on radical plans to resist or fight back against Fascism. But then I walk around the room and snoop, sneaking glances at what they are working on. Nothing political or radical. Mostly it is stuff like digital marketing or UX design, or they may be shopping online, or studying for law degrees, or whatever.

What we are experiencing globally, but particularly in the U.S., is a dire level of wealth concentration. The vast mass of humanity must acknowledge we share one common enemy: The oligarchy or the financial elite who have ruined the system to serve themselves. Oxfam reports that the richest 1% globally have gained more than  $33.9  trillion in wealth since 2015—adjusted for inflation—enough to eliminate global poverty twenty-two times over. Much of that accumulation is in the top 0.1%. The ultra-rich accumulate wealth at unprecedented rates, while multitudes suffer in poverty or, in the U.S., live as “precariat.”

So why are the mass of people — including educated, intelligent young people — so unresponsive, disconnected, and detached?

If I start with myself, I would say one problem is we don’t know how to be effective — to leverage the abilities we have. I don’t see anything “out there” that I can join that seems powerful and purposeful enough to make a difference. So I hover around. I’ve paid some dues to Democratic Socialists of America, but somehow I lost interest. I joined Andrew Yang’s Forward Party and Yanis Varoufakanis’ movement, but they haven’t fired me up to do anything. I’ve tried a few times to sign up for Indivisible Zoom calls, but keep forgetting about it or losing steam. I’m tracking the new mutual aid movement in Tompkins Square, but haven’t volunteered yet.

Historically, I am not much of a joiner. Apparently I’m waiting to be completely convinced by some initiative — some all-too-human passion needs to grab me.

Like everyone else, I also struggle with focus these days. I skim through the incessant deluge of Instagram stories, Facebook posts, Threads, and Twitter feeds, feeling outraged, anxious, afraid, and inspired in turn. The overall impact is disconnection and disempowerment. I struggle with that quality of “optionality” that Tom De Zengotita wrote about it his book, Mediated (“…the real world, dissolving into optionality, is reconstituting itself on a plane that transcends ancient solidities of nature and custom, craft and industry.”)

On any given day, I could learn to make AI short films, invest in Crypto, protest private prison slave labor, watch a 1970s paranoid thriller, study NLP, cobble together another social media post for Instagram, take a psychedelic trip, produce a video essay for YouTube, try to learn French, go for a hike or bike ride, etcetera. Often I don’t feel the inner necessity, the magnetic pull, to do any of it. And I am in a privileged position as I do not have large debts to pay off. I get to determine how I use my time for the most, as long as I stay on my place on the Capitalist treadmill.

One of the main things that a Fascist regime needs to do is instill fear of reprisal. In this way, they can prevent resistance before it gains traction. I admit I sometimes ask myself now, “Should I actually ‘like’ this Instagram story or re-share this Leftist Youtube video? Will they someday soon be using AI to track my social media footprint?” Yet I am also aware that this is a trap they have set for us — of fear and second-guessing. I don’t want to fall into it.

It is understandable that people feel that protesting IRL or posting online is just performative at this point — that it has no impact. To summarize: There is the sense of cognitive overwhelm, the feeling that what we do individually doesn’t matter, and fear we may be attacked later if we act up now. I get all of that. All in all, speaking up or resisting doesn’t seem like a good bet.

Yet I can’t imagine it is healthy for us to pretend this nightmare isn’t happening or ignore it — to cling to a few more months of relative “normality” while Fascists utterly entrench themselves in every area of the Federal Government before they take the next evil step. I notice there is a massive mental health crisis happening, and getting worse. Strangely, given the apocalyptic vibes, young people are apparently having much less sex and drinking less alcohol than they did a few decades ago.

One thing I find utterly amazing and bizarre is that, in some sense, Putin and Russia won a war against the U.S. — slaughtered us, essentially — without firing a single shot. They used “mind weapons,” Russian political technology, which we were unable to defend ourselves against, despite the many thousands of Americans educated at elite institutions like Harvard, Brown, MIT, Berkeley, and so on. The Russians got help from our “homegrown” Fascists like Steven Bannon and Mike Flynn, plus foreign influences like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network, which has played a decisive role in the breaking of the American Psyche, as well as Elon Musk’s Twitter.

What we're witnessing feels like something more than political capture. It is a form of internal psychic colonization. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about the "burnout society,” organized against democratic imagination. Han argues that modern capitalism has shifted from external discipline (bosses watching you) to self-exploitation. Han writes:

Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting laborer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.

We've internalized the demand to optimize ourselves constantly—to be productive, creative, networked, always “on.” This engenders a specific kind of exhaustion: not the fatigue of physical labor, but the depletion that comes from never being able to stop performing your own optimization.

What we're witnessing is cognitive capture—the systematic depletion of the mental resources, the focused attention, needed for collective resistance. The same systems that demand we constantly optimize our individual lives have made it nearly impossible to imagine organizing different kinds of lives together.” The brilliance of this form of control is that it feels voluntary (“Just Do It”). People think they're choosing to focus on their careers and personal growth, when actually their capacity for political imagination has been quietly harvested.

The old Marxist notion of “false consciousness" feels quaint compared to this. People have true consciousness of their predicament but feel powerless to act because the very cognitive architecture needed for resistance has been colonized. We know we're trapped in Plato's cave, but the shadows have become so sophisticated, so responsive to our individual preferences, that leaving feels like losing ourselves.

Yet perhaps this dissociation contains its own instruction. What if the apparent passivity isn't weakness but a kind of unconscious strike—a refusal to participate in the machinery of our own subjugation? The spiritual bypassing in my consciousness community, the detached professionalism of my cafe companions, the general vibe of "quiet quitting" from civic life—maybe these represent the early stages of what James C. Scott called "hidden transcripts." A mass intuition that the old forms of resistance (protests, petitions, electoral politics) are no longer adequate to the magnitude of systemic capture we face. But if so, then what?

The tech oligarchs’ and White Christian crypto-fascists’ success in capturing our democratic institutions exposed the profound inadequacy of those institutions to address planetary crisis or support human flourishing. What emerges from this recognition isn't despair but a kind of apocalyptic realism—the understanding that our situation demands not reform but metamorphosis. Whether it succeeds or fails, the coming resistance won't look like the movements of the past. It can emerge quickly, effloresce suddenly.

To give my cafe coworkers and myself the benefit of a doubt, perhaps, while seemingly so detached from politics, we are unconsciously prepping for a new kind of politics, a “psycho-politics” that realizes the battlefield is not just the state or the economy, but consciousness itself. That is what Putin and his mind-hackers figured out, and how they wrecked us.

The revolution, if it comes, could look less like storming the Bastille and more like a collective remembering of what we actually are beneath the programming—a species capable of dreaming itself into new ways of being, beyond what the current “death-cult” system can create or imagine.