If you wrote nationalism or racism or right-wing down, scratch those out. Fascism’s nature dooms it to take nationalistic and racist courses, but those are symptoms, not the disease. Here is the disease in one sentence:
Fascism encourages power to congeal while the people are divided against each other.
Simple Picture
ELI5: democracy is a game where the citizens cooperate and the leaders compete. Fascism inverts it: the leaders cooperate (behind closed doors) and the citizens compete (against each other, endlessly, for the leaders’ benefit). When citizens complain about the competition, the leaders point to an external enemy. When that stops working, they start a war.
The Dual Opposite of Democracy
Democracy establishes competition for and within power to prevent unaccountable monopolies. Citizens cooperate toward shared goals — infrastructure, fair legal environment, peace unless necessary. Those who hold power must compete; an election is a nonviolent revolution. An incumbent’s loss removes the loser and sends a message about the will of the people.
Fascism reverses both flows. The people are put into endless competition — for jobs, status, survival — while power colludes and unifies. The within-elite competition still happens but must happen in secret, behind a social barrier. Power can fight itself but must show a unified front. It is more important to be strong than to be right. The low must never see the reticence or in-fighting among the high.
People won’t tolerate endless competition unless certain conditions are imposed. Fear of a made-up enemy works for a time. Bordering nations and ethnic minorities can be demonized. Walls that serve no purpose can be built. Eventually people wise up. The endgame: a narrative of national or racial superiority. If the people believe themselves superior, they might tolerate domestic authoritarianism in exchange for the promise of conquest. Italian Fascism never got the trains to run on time, but banning people from calling late trains “late” made the country seem efficient.
Corporate Fascism
This framework applies to corporations with eerie precision:
An employee under managerial adversity rarely gets another chance. A manager who accepts a transfer candidate from another team invalidates the first manager’s judgment and breaks the expectations placed upon rank. So it almost never happens. HR serves management, not employees. Going over the boss’s head gets you fired faster. The aggressive move must be punished. An example must be made.
Managers protect their own across companies, even when those companies are supposedly in competition. Why would a manager at an investment bank care that you said something two years ago about a manager at Google? There is no connection between investment banking and web search. It is managers protecting managers — because the Capitalist Party is more than one company, and it must protect its high officers.
Reference checking proves the point: a manager takes the word of a manager at a competing company over the account of the person who lived through something. The priesthood boundary applies — only your reputation within the priesthood matters, and the priesthood’s solidarity crosses institutional lines.
The “never bad-mouth a former employer” rule exists not because honest discussion damages companies — one disgruntled employee sharing truth does almost no damage — but because the fascist element believes that even the most harmless dissent must be punished. This is orthodoxy enforcement at the corporate level.
Fascism and the Feminine
Fascism has no hatred for what is female, yet it seeks to obliterate what it perceives as feminine.
Cats are no more female than dogs, yet cats are perceived as feminine (rebellious, avoidant, useless) and dogs as masculine (loyal, courageous, stoic). Fascist societies crush all they perceive as weak — what is vulnerable, cautious, artistic, spontaneous, or nurturing. Managers who value mentorship, employee development, and internal social justice are derided for doing “female work” or “womanaging,” while abusive “tough” managers are promoted.
This is the dog distinction given its political edge: fascism is a dog system. It values loyalty, hierarchy, obedience. The cat virtues — curiosity, independence, the constitutional inability to find the social mirror interesting — are existential threats to a system that requires everyone to be climbing the same mountain. Johnstone’s insight applies: the status game is running in every interaction, and the fascist system is what happens when the status game becomes the only game.
Blood and iron, profits and loss — only those matter. Everything else is an object, either to be cast away or made into a weapon.
The Feedback Problem
Corporate turnarounds usually speed up a company’s demise. A board’s solution to failures caused by executives is not to turn the company over to the workers who have been failed — that would be socialist! — but to hire new executives from the same toxic social elite. No one is truly accountable, nothing changes, and improvement is impossible.
This is exit-voice-loyalty in its most pathological configuration: voice is punished (dissent gets you fired), exit is controlled (references follow you across companies), and loyalty is coerced rather than earned. The system has destroyed all its recuperation mechanisms while maintaining the appearance of meritocratic competition.
Taleb’s skin-in-the-game principle is exactly what corporate fascism violates: executives capture upside while distributing downside to employees and shareholders. The fascist element is those who steal a free option from society — taking credit when things go well and pointing blame downward when they don’t.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “fascism means Nazis — it can’t happen here.”
The midwit take is “calling corporations fascist is hyperbolic — they’re just badly managed.”
The better take is that fascism is a structural pattern, not a historical period. Any system where power congeals while the people are divided, where dissent is punished and the powerful protect their own across institutional boundaries, where competition is imposed on the powerless while the powerful collude — that system exhibits the fascist pattern regardless of whether anyone wears a uniform. The Cathedral is the same pattern scaled to a civilization and disguised as its opposite: power congealing not through parades but through the moral authority of academia, prestige media, and the permanent bureaucracy, each of which punishes dissent while showing the world a unified front of liberal openness. The question is not whether it can happen here. The question is whether it already has, and you simply work there.
Main Payoff
Dissent at Google is valued insofar as it is ineffectual. When it has effects and executives take notice, the person gets fired. Private-sector managers don’t fire low performers or high performers — being lazy creatures, they rarely know the difference. They fire whoever costs them time.
The “never bad-mouth a former employer” rule, reference checking as cross-company solidarity, the punishment of internal transfers, the derision of nurturing managers — these are not isolated management failures. They are the fascist pattern operating at the scale of an industry: power congealing while the people are divided, showing a unified front that must never crack, crushing the feminine virtues that threaten the hierarchy’s self-image.
References:
- Michael O. Church, Fascism, and What I Learned by Struggling Against It