Geez sorry this is way too long of a rant lol

It's fine. It's good to vent. The first half of your post with the microbe analogy got at the important issue that our systems our what causing the problems. This is not being disputed. I get disliking intellectuals over complicating things and missing the point. However in this case, this intellectual's point is that there is a self reinforcing mechanism in those systems.

Neo liberalism leads to fascism. Neo liberalism creates economic inequality that gives fascists room to reach the masses via blaming peoples' problems on an out group like migrants. But Neo Liberalism also entrenches that inequality as a value in the people living under it. So when the fascists arrive and promise to uphold that inequality and in fact expand upon it, there is already a large group of people who believe the fascists are establishing the natural order of things. I often see people online asking the question how can anyone support Trump. Whether Trump realizes it or not he does embody what his supporters value. Trump is very much a symptom.

There is a modern definition of fascism which is about instilling a belief in “Inequality through mythological and essentialized identity”

I read through it, it does a good job of covering the many facets of fascism. Ur Fascism also does a good job of defining fascism. However I am not defining fascism where you quoted me. I am defining the divisions in America. We are a divided society. But not in the way most people think. It's not left vs fascists. We have people on the right fighting for late stage capitalism because they grew up with that and have made its flaws their values. We have people on the left who have no interest in fighting for our democracy. They have grown up with the flaws in our democracy that enable minority rule and made those flaws their values.

But tell me more about the extrinsic values of Trump :D The guy belongs in psychiatric care, the real issue is how can a sick person like that get so rich and powerful. We cannot expect amoral systems to produce productive results. It’s got nothing to do with values.

You are right, we can't expect late stage capitalism to have productive results. This idea is not an abstract concept and is really less about Trump. Again he is just a symptom. This gets at how people feel about our systems of government and economics. It really does have to do with what people value. People, myself included, often say the Republican Party doesn't stand for anything. That they have no values and the voters are just rooting for their political party like it's a sports team. While the Republican Party itself doesn't have a real platform, their voters do stand for something. They stand for capitalist system where a minority of them can be rich like Trump.

But things are breaking now. For one we’re still on the worst case climate change pathway RCP8.5 - we haven’t diverged a bit in 30 years: Because we are absolutely unable to make rational logical decisions as a civilization. This is very strong evidence that what we’ve been doing doesn’t work on a fundamental level.

Yes, things are getting bad because of our systems. But there is no point at which things will get bad enough to make people realizes the system needs fixing. I think this idea explains the why behind the saying people use when describing Russia "and then it got worse." Living under flawed systems that generate inequality doesn't make people want to change the systems. Instead people normalize the systems. So if we rely on things getting worse and assume that eventually people will be forced to try to fix the systems we will be disappointed. They will in fact create even worse systems, based on the flaws they internalized as values, that then make things even worse. It is a feedback loop.

But the old formula lead to this situation. In a way that makes the old formula just as bad. Because anyone who tries to mess with primary motivation - moving along energy gradients - is filtered out. When was the last time you read an article about the psychologically corrosive nature of advertising or PR?

Unfortunately this individual didn't do a great job of getting his point across in the article. I clearly haven't done much better. I can really only insist to people that there is a valuable idea here. We need people to reexamine their values. Or else people on the right are going to keep voting for Trump and people on the left are not going to be interested in upholding democracy, our best tool for enacting positive change. edit: typos