Before he was George Orwell, he was Eric Blair, police officer

This comment reads like a Mitch Hedberg joke

Just finished his "Down and out in Paris and London"[1] about life in extreme poverty as an unemployed man, as a low-wage worker and as a tramp in the 1930s. A good read and a short book.

[1] https://annas-archive.org/md5/6486c7cb2f83f4a97cc02728ff77c2... (Public domain)

It is not necessary for beliefs or stories about it though!

The neoliberalism of the 80s was a conservative movement, but it was still liberal, it still allowed for the proliferations of basic freedoms, and people's lives (depending on where you lived in the world) either stayed mostly the same or improved dramatically.

Now that neoliberalism is falling apart, and the world is careening towards an ecological catastrophe, and no established state government is able to manage the crisis, totalitarian powers are coming to prominence to fill in the gap for people's despair: but little do they know, these leaders (or at least the people actually running the show) don't even care about their people, they care about transforming the human world into a purely aesthetic, destructive, violent and chaotic place for the purposes of some sort of sublime limit-breaking enjoyment beyond what can be achieved under the regular conditions of capitalism--the ritual sacrifice of the entire world.

Now, if you don't get duped by these Nazi types, then you'd want to figure out a way to resist that, but even democratic socialism and anti-fascism are not enough: recall that the Nazis only ever came to power because the German revolution failed, because the SDP (social democratic party) intentionally bombed it so they could retain parlimentary power, and employed who would later become the SA, the Freikorps, to do the dirty work and kill all the revolutionaries.

In fact, the political ideology one would have to adopt under these circumstances could not be positively described, since all positivity gets swept under the totalizing system of neoliberal (or what the Frankfurt school called late) capitalism. The power of fascism is a kind of rationalizing of what is essentially irrational: the destruction of all humanity for a new machine god (call it AI or whatever you want). The rationality that overcomes this irrationality would appear within the irrational rationality as itself totally irrational. Something completely crazy, but in fact its so crazy that it starts to become the only thing that makes sense: demands that reach well beyond the stars. Its like Charles Fourier, who "claimed a shift in our local cosmic conditions would change the chemical makeup of the earth’s oceans, so that they would taste like lemonade."[0] It may sound absurd, but why is it more absurd than choosing to live in a society that is actively trying to kill you?

[0]https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/get-thee-to-a-phalanste...