Speculative fiction has, again and again, imagined worlds where Fascism was not defeated, where Hitler did not lose. But these worlds were always impossible. The nature of authoritarianism leads to it’s own collapse. As climate change increases the probability of natural disasters, hierarchal organizations will be less and less able to grapple with the consequences.

As the Syrian Civil War showed us, if regimes will fail to adapt then counter-power can replace them. Assad’s government was incapable of adapting to the drought and subsequent events that lead to the civil unrest that marked the beginning of the Syrian Revolution. When the state failed to ensure the supply of bread, alternative institutions stepped in. Both liberatory (Rojava) and oppressive forces (ISIS) were able to seize power. Assad’s government, though it took more than a decade, ultimately succumbed to the limitations of its own authoritarianism.

In your daily life, you make a number of decisions without thinking much about it. For more complex decisions, you may have a process for decision making, or you may not. But at a certain level of complexity, especially in large hierarchal systems, it becomes critical to have some sort of decision making framework. One of the more common frameworks is the OODA loop.

The OODA loop has 4 phases: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. Each phase can either feedback an observation, forcing a return to the beginning, or can feed forward information to the next phase. So within the OODA loop there are multiple opportunities to adjust direction. This feedback/adjust mechanism makes OODA decisions agile. However, in some cases, that advantage can become a vulnerability.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.

• Ursula K. Le Guin

While Le Guin reminds us what is possible, this quote is not a strategy. But there are tools we can use to derive a strategy to pull the boot off our necks and bring the body behind it to the ground. What is that strategy? To use the terminology of cybernetics, the strategy to collapse a system can be stated as, “create sufficiently complex situations that they surpass the attenuation capacity of the system, and do so at a rate that is faster than the relaxation time of that system.”

What do we do with a system so toxic and oppressive that we cannot survive under it? When we cannot change it, we have been told, we must destroy it.

“Star Wars: Andor” is rich in the cultural zietgiest. As we grapple with the growth of fascism, it captures a clear picture of how fascism operates and an inspiring message of resistence. In this moment, it is impossible to miss one of the most popular quotes on the Internet.

Here we must again return to a point discussed in Dawn of Everything. While the sovereign projects the identity of a “super human” or a “God on Earth,” being an authority above all adults and thus a sort of “super adult,” the same sovereign also is restricted. Different cultures place different restrictions. Some say the feet of the sovereign may never touch the ground, and thus must be carried everywhere. The privilege of the sovereign may entitle them to care-taking. Indeed, when one thinks of the European monarchs from which European (and settler colonial) tradition descends, we notice a strange Infantilization: as a child, the sovereign is guarded, groomed, clothed, fed, sometimes even carried, and otherwise attended to their whole waking life. All of the resources of a kingdom are at their disposal, as though they were being raised by the combined work of an entire nation.

Every day the cult becomes more obvious as it’s abuses mount, as it centralizes around a singular sovereign. But we can’t let ourselves be distracted from the fact that the cult predates it’s current version. Indeed, we should understand the current changes not as “a cult taking over” but as “a cult changing shape.”

Let’s look at the transition from the Divine Right of Kings to Liberalism using the Graeber Wengrow domination framework. Prior to Liberalism, a monarch was the seat of sovereignty. That is, the monarch had (sometimes limited) ability to exercise violence. The bureaucracy supported the infrastructure of violence. Competitive politics was not, as far as I’m aware, a major factor in these systems.

Steven Hassan, a cult expert and cult survivor, developed the BITE model of Authoritarian Control to describe how cults take and maintain control. This can help therapists to identify and support those exiting cults, as well as helping cult survivors identify and avoid cults in the future.

BITE stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion as categories which cult actions try to control. While, the site notes, some elements are elements of all cults. So we should not expect society that claims to be “free” expressing very many of these.

Neoliberalism neatly cleaves the world in two: myth and reason. Myth, in this case, means roughly “a story made up to explain things that is not backed by data.” Liberalism is the basis of a modern society, based in science and reason. It is informed by “natural law” like evolution and capitalist economics. Meanwhile, myth provides the framework for “primitive” societies, like those colonizers carried out a systematic genocide against in order to create the US.

In world of The Matrix, we see a resistance movement already in progress. In the Animatrix we see the system they’re trying to escape as it’s being built. But we never see the first escape; we see how the system is constructed within the mind and how we can manipulate the rules while inside of it, but we never see how to pivot out of it. For those of us who feel the wrongness of the various hierarchies of the world, itching in our minds, this is the missing piece we’re all looking for.