Normcore Fascism

death by chill guy

Young white men, heirs to a lineage of conquest and cruelty, would sooner burn the world than confront the ruins left by their forefathers. Not because immigrants stole their jobs, their women, or their land, but because the system that promised them supremacy is collapsing under its own contradictions. Capitalism has no future for them. So they reach for fantasy. Some lash out, others retreat into civility. But both carry the same false consciousness. They write on their bio: I’m a proud German. I’m a proud Australian. I’m a proud American. I’m a proud Israeli.

Proud of what? Of a nation built on blood and denial? What exactly are you proud of? Proud to inherit debt, decay, and delusion? Proud of mass shootings and privatised prisons, of drone strikes and dead-end jobs? America No. 1! In what? In violence, in bankruptcy, in the illusion of choice. And Germany? Proud of what? Precision engineering built on erased graves? A bureaucracy of genocide buried beneath punctual trains and export surpluses? This is (shame)pride.¹ It’s pathology. A superiority complex built to mask a rotting core of unprocessed guilt. The more they chant “never again,” the more they outsource the camp.

Nationalism was the drug invented by Napoleon to gain control of the masses. He understood it as the perfect mechanism: mass sedation through manufactured belonging. It requires the dehumanisation of the other, because we are special. We are better. We belong. And they don’t. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if they die.²

This is how they’re controlled. Feed the “chill guy” the fantasy of superiority.³ Normcore fascism. Nothing loud. Just the quiet conviction that he belongs, that he’s better. It’s unconscious, of course. The deal is simple: you are superior, therefore someone else isn’t. There must be an Other. Someone not in the photo, not in the anthem, not at the table. But behind every superiority complex is a festering wound. A low, constant hum of inferiority. Of ungrieved guilt. They know. But they don’t want to know.

As Trump launches illegal strikes on Iran, as Israel’s lapdog, Germany’s surrogate. And no one blinks. No congressional approval. This is an inherited pathology. A bastard strain of European antisemitism, cultivated by the British, refined by the French, perfected by the Germans. It is now repackaged as Zionist ethnonationalist exceptionalism and exported as military doctrine. The so-called news channels play it like sports. Super Bowl aesthetics for surgical airstrikes. This is the psychic condition of the West: war rebranded as spectacle, empire streamed in HD, death reduced to content. While everyone numb themselves with weed, alcohol and Pornhub.

Nationhood is a fiction. On paper, it claims shared language, shared culture, shared religion, shared blood. Sometimes a flag. Sometimes a myth. It’s as real as Mickey Mouse, as the US Dollar. But none of it holds. Languages diverge, cultures hybridise, and religions split and splinter. Blood is mixed. Memory is selective. The state, by contrast, is real: a legal mechanism, a bureaucracy of borders, taxes, police, and paperwork. Is this what you’re proud to be a part of? It’s a responsibility, not a football jersey. Like all feelings, it can be manufactured. Scaled. Weaponised. It doesn’t even need to be true. It just needs to be felt.

Maturation, on the other hand, is the ability to hold ever-increasing contradictions without acting out. To remain with the discomfort. To allow the self to be implicated within history. To stay in the wound. To recognise the self as implicated. Not innocent, not outside. But instead, it’s easier to swap out negative feelings with toxic positivity, a matcha latte and a yoga class.

That’s why we see the fervour of nationalism. A group of psychically immature children, holding weapons of mass destruction. These people are not able to tolerate the ambivalence of the Other. They refuse to tolerate the shame of their own history. So they cling to flags. To songs. To maps. To invent fantasies written on magical paper. In Kohlberg’s moral development,⁴ this is stunted development at the conventional level—the obedience to authority, desire for approval, and fear of difference. These are the people ready to be deployed, to be manipulated, to kill and be killed. These are the foot soldiers of the death cult known as the West.

Napoleon weaponised the opioid of Nationalism to help him turn the peasants against their lords. A revolution repackaged as obedience. But the German mind, the bootlicking mind, cannot bear the weight of freedom. It panics in the face of responsibility. It searches for a new daddy. And a new daddy always comes.

But the daddy has no phallus: just a uniform, a slogan, a mask. The peasants obey anyway. Hoping to be the phallus. They kill with conviction. They call it duty. Later, when the blood dries, they’ll build a new memorial. They’ll demonise their last daddy. A new Netflix special. They’ll chant lest we forget, because they have already forgotten.

1. Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self.
W. W. Norton & Company.

Shame and pride are not just emotions but organising structures of subjectivity. Shame arises when the self perceives itself as exposed, inadequate, or rejected before an internalised or external gaze. Pride, its psychic counterpart, can signal integration and affirmation, or act as a defence against humiliation. Both operate on a spectrum from developmental necessity to psychic pathology.

In pathological constellations, shame can become chronic, leading to avoidance, self-alienation, or masochistic submission. Pride, when defensive, becomes brittle, inflated self-worth masking deeper wounds. These affects are central in the formation of the ego, especially in early relational dynamics where the self is mirrored, judged, or misrecognised.

In cultural and political contexts, shame is often assigned, while pride is withheld. Marginalised subjects carry inherited shame, while dominant identities inflate with unexamined pride. Both affects are thus also ideological tools: shaped by history, structured by power.

2. Kohn, H. (1967). The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background. Macmillan.

This classic text traces the rise of nationalism from the Enlightenment through the Napoleonic era, analysing how figures like Napoleon co-opted Enlightenment ideals to foster a new kind of mass political identity, grounded in militarism, myth, and exclusion.

3. The “chill guy” meme is a defensive structure posing as personality. His detachment isn’t genuine calm but a superiority complex masking shame and vulnerability. By performing ironic distance, pretending to be above drama or emotion, he avoids exposure and gains symbolic capital. But this chillness is compulsive, not free; it relies on others being “too much” so he can appear unbothered. Psychoanalytically, it's disavowal dressed as mastery. A fragile self shielding itself from desire, anxiety, and the Real.

Morrison, A. P. (1989). Shame: The underside of narcissism. The Analytic Press.

Morrison explores how shame underlies narcissistic defences, including superiority and detachment, offering a clinical lens to understand personas like the “chill guy” as compensatory structures masking affective fragility.

4. According to Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, the conventional level is marked by conformity to authority, social norms, and the desire for approval. Moral reasoning here is rule-bound and externally governed. When development stalls at this stage, individuals are more susceptible to ideological capture, where they are more likely to obey orders, police dissent, and rationalise violence as loyalty.

Kohlberg’s moral development has three levels, each with two stages:

1. Pre-Conventional

Stage 1: Obedience and punishment – right is avoiding punishment.

Stage 2: Self-interest – right is what benefits the self.

2. Conventional

Stage 3: Conformity – right is gaining approval, being seen as “good.”

Stage 4: Law and order – right is obeying rules, maintaining order.

3. Post-Conventional

Stage 5: Social contract – right is upholding rights and agreed norms.

Stage 6: Universal ethics – right is guided by abstract moral principles.

Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. I. The philosophy of moral development. Harper & Row.