Fascism as Collective Psychology
Collective Delusion.
Bob Moran's post highlights something essential — and disturbing — about our current culture: a mass moral failure disguised as humility and reason. We're told leaders "admitted they got it wrong," but what we hear instead are evasions, rationalisations, and slippery deflections: “If the information had been correct, I would have been right.” That’s not an apology — it’s a dodge.
This kind of reasoning reveals a deeper crisis than poor judgment. It shows how truth was never part of the equation. It wasn’t that they “turned out to be wrong.” It’s that they were never morally or intellectually right in the first place — because their position was born of fear, conformity, and the desperate urge to belong. What Bob exposes is not just political cowardice, but spiritual confusion: the inability to distinguish right from wrong, even when the stakes are as grave as they get.
As I’ve written elsewhere:
Fascism isn’t born in the mind of the lone fanatic — it’s forged in the crowd.
It’s a collective mindset, where fear seeks order, doubt clings to certainty, and individuals surrender conscience for belonging.
Fascism doesn’t spread through reasoned argument, but through emotional contagion — ritual, repetition, and myth — until the “we” drowns out the “I.”
The tragedy is that many of those now begging for understanding were not misled by facts, but driven by a hunger for control, for safety, for approval. They didn’t weigh moral responsibility — they handed it over. They didn’t reason — they complied.
Moran is right to say that if we continue to forgive and elevate such figures into leadership, hoping they will lead us out of the mire they helped create, we will be disappointed — and complicit.
Because the real error wasn’t factual.
It was moral, and it was collective.
And that’s a lesson we can’t afford to forget.
Gabsy.