Max and Sarah sketch a framework for understanding three core fascist motivations, based on Max's forthcoming book The Player and the Played: From Gamified Capitalism to 21st Century Fascism.
- An OPPORTUNIST motivation to personally benefit from authoritarianism
- A PARANOID fear that the "natural" order is collapsing
- A PSYCHEDELIC infatuation with the power to bend and break reality

THOUGHT SNACK is an occasional podcast from Sense & Solidarity where Sarah Stein Lubrano and Max Haiven explore the big ideas that make and break our world.

Sense & Solidarity is a platform where people who want to radically change the world can learn together and build individual and collective capacity. https://senseandsolidarity.org/

Sarah Stein Lubrano is a writer and researcher who specializes in the social psychology of politics. She is the author of Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds (2025). https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com

Max Haiven is an researcher and educator who uses writing, teaching, games, podcasts and other techniques for the radical imagination. His latest book is Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022). https://maxhaiven.com/

Music by Dan Gouly.

What Motivates Fascists?: Opportunism, Paranoia and Psychedelic Power (THOUGHTSNACK 01)

In this inaugural episode of The Order of Unmanagable Risks we talk with artist and writer James Bridle, about the politics of algorithmic opacity, populist technologies, and new ways of seeing through capitalism’s darkness.

James' artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Their writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Observer. "New Dark Age", their book about technology, knowledge, and the end of the future, was published by Verso (UK & US) in 2018, and they wrote and presented "New Ways of Seeing" for BBC Radio 4 in 2019 (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000458m). Their work can be found at http://jamesbridle.com.

The Order of Unmanagable Risks is an occasional podcast hosted by Dr. Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou and Max Haiven about capitalism, anxiety and points inbetween. It is produce by the Common Anxieties Research Project (http://anxious.community) and supported by the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) and UCL's Institute for Advanced Study.

"The gifts of darkness?" with James Bridle (OUR001)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) is a research and creativity workshop for the radical imagination active around the world and locally in Thunder Bay, Canada.

What Motivates Fascists?: Opportunism, Paranoia and Psychedelic Power (THOUGHTSNACK 01)

The ReImagining Value Action Lab

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