Let me put it metaphorically. While the Berlin Wall was falling, Soviet TV brought on a psychic, a guy to do séance sessions. And the idea was that he would tell people, if you have back pain, bring a cup of water, put it next to your left ear, move it around. He was kind of controlling people’s minds. A very conservative reading of that event would hold it as proof that the whole Soviet experiment, as they call it, was just mass hypnosis, daydreaming, mind control. And the fall of the Berlin Wall was like penetrating that dream. An alarm clock — reality waking up. Now, we are 30 years after that supposed penetration of reality into the dream, and it’s obvious that that’s not what happened.
What happened is more like a Luis Buñuel film. We fell into a deeper dream where we think we woke up. It’s called false awakening. We are in this long false awakening where we are inside the dream, but we think we are awake. So, we don’t have access to the dream of, say, socialism. But we also don’t have access to reality. We are stuck in this false awakening. And of course, the digital amplifies this false awakening. Specifically, in terms of fascism, the energy of the extreme right everywhere today — admiration of the state and hate for government, which follows Alberto Toscano’s concept of late fascism. But where did they get this hatred for government? They got it from neoliberalism. Fascism is now the heritage of neoliberalism.
Interview with Joshua Simon