By: Lisa M. Hayes
People keep asking what to do in the face of rising fascism, as though the answer will arrive only as a public act, a platform, a confrontation, a vote, a protest, a policy, or a perfectly worded statement. All of those things may matter. Collective action matters. Political action matters. Material action matters.
Community defense matters.
We absolutely need each other in the world, not just in theory.
But before any of that can hold, there is a more intimate question: what kind of self has fascism been trained to rule?
Fascism does not only survive through force. It survives through obedience, exhaustion, fear, hierarchy, spectacle, shame, and the constant manufacturing of human insecurity. It requires people who are alienated from themselves. It works best on people who have been taught to distrust their own bodies, suppress their own instincts, seek permission from power, and measure their worth by compliance, productivity, desirability, and proximity to approval.
Capitalism helps build that kind of person every day.
It does this by teaching people to experience themselves as unfinished products. Not lives. Not souls. Not beings with inherent dignity. Products. Projects. Fixer-uppers. Problems to solve. Bodies to discipline. Identities to optimize. Selves to improve until they are marketable enough, thin enough, young enough, productive enough, pleasant enough, and profitable enough to be tolerated.
Self-loathing is not a side effect in that system. It is fuel.
If you hate yourself, you are easier to sell to. Easier to manage. Easier to rank. Easier to shame. Easier to divide. Easier to keep busy with your own renovation while the world burns around you. If you are locked in constant self-correction, you are less available for revolt. If you are always trying to become acceptable, you are less likely to ask whether the standard itself is violent.
That is why self-devotion matters politically.
I do not mean a shallow, branded, aesthetic version of self-love that stops at candles, skincare, and affirmation cards, though pleasure and beauty have their place. I mean something much more disruptive than that. I mean uncompromising and unapologetic self-devotion. I mean ending the internal arrangement in which your body is a burden, your needs are an inconvenience, your joy is frivolous, your desire is dangerous, and your worth is conditional.
I mean becoming unavailable for the worldview that says your value must be earned through suffering and performance.
Fascism needs people who are already practicing abandonment. It needs people trained to betray themselves on command. It needs people who have made peace with hierarchy inside their own bodies. It needs people who think domination is normal, punishment is virtue, and tenderness is weakness.
A person in real relationship with themselves is harder to recruit into that logic.
A person who trusts their own humanity is harder to flatten.
A person who has broken up with self-hatred is harder to control.
A person who no longer experiences themselves as a fixer-upper project is less likely to worship power for permission to exist.
This is not the whole work, but it is foundational work.
If you do not know what to do about fascism, start by refusing the daily rituals that train you for submission. Stop speaking to yourself like an occupying force. Stop treating your body like enemy territory. Stop making a religion out of self-correction. Stop calling it discipline when what you mean is self-contempt. Stop assuming that cruelty makes you strong. Stop assuming that joy makes you unserious.
Return to yourself.
Feed yourself like your life matters.
Rest like your exhaustion is not a moral failure.
Dress like your body belongs to you.
Speak like your voice is not waiting for institutional approval.
Make beauty that does not ask permission from the market.
Protect your attention from systems designed to keep you dysregulated, ashamed, and hungry for validation.
Become someone the machine has a harder time digesting.
That kind of self-devotion does not make a person less political. It makes them less governable by fear. It makes them less available for manipulation. It makes them more capable of solidarity, because they are no longer building their identity out of scarcity, panic, or proximity to domination.
They can recognize other people’s humanity more clearly because they have stopped waging war against their own.
The first step is not the only step. No one is saying personal healing replaces structural analysis, mutual aid, organizing, or resistance. It does not. But if you want a sturdy foundation for any of that work, begin here: with a self that is not already colonized by shame.
Begin with fierce self-respect.
Begin with radical tenderness.
Begin with the refusal to be turned against yourself.
Begin with the decision that your life will not be organized around becoming acceptable to systems that were never designed to love you back.
Self-love is anti-fascist because it interrupts the training. It breaks the spell. It weakens the inner architecture that authoritarian systems depend on. It reminds you that your body is not a problem, your humanity is not a flaw, and your existence is not a thing that must be justified through obedience.
That is not everything.
It is, however, a beginning.
And in times like these, a real beginning matters.
