this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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Reducing fascism to amygdala size is idealist pseudoscience (in the vein of nazi race science), biology does not dictate politics. Material conditions drive history. Fascism emerges when capitalist contradictions sharpen and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall creates crisis. The bourgeoisie faces two paths. Either socialist revolution or they turn imperialist violence inward to preserve accumulation. The Nazis suppressed the left to protect industrial capital. Krupp and IG Farben did not care about conservative values but cared about markets and crushing unions. Calling it National Socialism was a tactic to co-opt worker sentiment while serving monopoly capital. Fear is merely a symptom, the disease is capitalism. When accumulation stalls the mask comes off, focus on who owns the means of production not brain scans.
You are mostly correct. Except the bit about fear being a symptom. Fear is the driver. The amygdala bit is an interesting fact. Those with bigger fear centres tend to vote for the no change party.
Fear isn't the driver. Fear is produced. Where does that fear come from? Not from brains. From material life. Precarity. Job loss. Debt. Crisis. These are capitalist relations, not neural pathways. If amygdala size determined politics, how do you explain workers who risk everything to strike? Or revolutionaries who face death without flinching? Consciousness changes through struggle, not anatomy. Doubling down on amygdala talk is phrenology-tier pseudoscience, same logic as Nazi race science. Measuring skulls to explain politics didn't work then, measuring brains won't work now. The "no change party" exists to preserve bourgeois rule, not because of brain scans. This idealist framing naturalizes oppression and lets capital off the hook.