Climate Change and the Rise of Fascism have a lot in common. They're inextricably linked in a lot of ways, actually. Here's one that we would do well to pay close attention to: distrust of government.

It turns out, government is literally the thing preventing anarchy, and trust me, you don't want anarchy. Luckily, though, anarchy doesn't exist in nature. Order always arises. This is a fact of evolution. The question is what kind of order will arise. Government is just a description of this order. It is both necessary for survival and unavoidable in any case. So, saying "I hate government" is literally the same as saying, "I hate how the universe is." Which... fine. Go for it. And good luck changing it.

The question is how we arrange our government. That's what matters. And most people with laudable and scientific values espouse some form of democracy, where everybody is, at least in theory, treated equally.

But... we don't really like being treated equally, and most people, when they complain about government, are objecting to having been treated equally. We call up customer service, and they tell us they have a no return policy on worn clothes, and we would like to speak to the manager, because we'd like them to treat us differently than everybody else.

Most of the time, when we want to be treated differently, we want to be treated better. We want what we want faster. We want more of it. We don't want to pay full price for it. And this, as you can surely extrapolate, is why we're all on a path to choking to death on poisoned air, desiccated from a lack of drinkable water.

The most important function of government is regulation.

And if we're going to have any hope of surviving the coming decades with anything approaching a healthy, happy society, we're going to have to get used to a lot more regulation. We're going to have to realize that we are not the exception to the rules, and accept that life is sometimes slower than we'd like, and we can't literally have everything we want, exactly the way we want it, all the time.

This is a difficult sell, because the Fascists weaponize the same line to cut Medicare and Social Security. "We just have to learn to live with it because we need to balance the budget." Except, the lie in plain sight. None of them are on Social Security or Medicare. It doesn't change anything for them, because they are the exceptions to the rules. In a well regulated, democratic society, they too would rely on Social Security and Medicare, and wouldn't dream of cutting it.

And thus, the paradox is exposed. We are often correct to note that the way various governments work is unfair. And we'd like to be treated better. And we're correct in wanting that some of the time. But in order to get what we want, we have to stop making it about us, individually, and begin making it about us, collectively. Either apply this rule to *everybody* or make a new rule for everybody.

The absolute worst thing to do is *decrease* regulation, when what we actually want is *increased* regulation. Because it's hard for us to see past our own experience. But this is probably the only thing that will save humanity.

#fasism #climatechange #government #progressivepolitics

Police say the former student who killed three people and wounded 13 in two schools in #Brazil had a swastika pinned to his vest and had been planning the attacks for two years, the 16-year-old boy has been arrested.

#schoolshooting #fasism

https://nitter.net/AP/status/1596595658630348804#m