this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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Im not really disagreeing with you, but kind of sharing some perspectives that are related.
I think humanity is something spiritual that can be lost and regained. What makes us human isn't just that we belong to a certain animal species. Dehumanizing happens to both the oppressors and the oppressed. Paulo Friere goes into detail about how the illiterate peasants he worked with, who are like oppressed for generations, need to like have their humanity restored or returned to them before they will want to start to read and improve themselves. And the process he uses to do this is his pedagogy, and its very unconventional. He's not saying they aren't human, but that they have had their humanity stolen from them, they've internalized through occupation that their lives don't matter, even less than animals, and so behave accordingly.
In Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon details how the colonizers lose their humanity, and how they end up taking it from the colonized, leaving both groups in a dehumanizing cycle of repression that quite literally destroys peoples ability to feel remorse or have any kind of self-reflective internal mechanisms. People become quite literally haunted by death and trauma.
Friere actually is so confident however in peoples ability to change, that he believes it is the historic mission of the oppressed to restore the humanity of their oppressors.
Some of these fascists indeed are just evil, others know what they do is wrong and somehow do it anyway, but others I think have had something taken out of them by their experiences. Some may get it back in the revolutionary process of transforming society, but others will need to be defeated and face some kind of justice before they can begin their process. So how we might accomplish this without reproducing the conditions that robbed people of their humanity in the first place?
But fascism is such an incredibly insidious objective condition. Its not even like a set of beliefs, which is why rationalists struggle to define it. I often think about Anders Brevik (but perhaps I shouldn't) who carried out a mass murder spree claiming over 75 lives, many children, and the reason he did it supposedly is he wanted to influence Norwegian courts to adopt a stricter standard of carcerial justice. He wanted to make things worse for everyone, especially himself, by carrying out an act of terrorist carnage. Idk if a person like that wants to be reformed, he wants and chooses to be a dead eyed monster. But he's probably influenced a lot of people who can be reformed. But that's not a job I'm capable of carrying out, since such a transformation of people won't happen before truly revolutionary change to society.