The Myth of Unity Through Uniformity.
There is a sickness spreading across the world, and it tastes like copper pennies in the mouth of democracy. No, actually it tastes like shit, not that I ever tasted it, but... It wears the mask of strength, this pathogen, but beneath its swagger lies the most exquisite weakness humanity has ever perfected: the terror of our own thoughts.
The fucking terror of our own thoughts! Can you hear it?
I was raised in the belly of communism's corpse, nursed on atheist milk and dialectical lullabies, yet here I stand, so far from that ideology I might as well be standing on another planet. But the thing about being raised by revolutionaries is that you learn to recognise the stench of conformity from a thousand miles away. You learn that every utopia carries within it the seeds of its own particular brand of hell.
And now, in 2025, we're watching the world choose its poison with the enthusiasm of addicts returning to their favourite dealer.
Ninety-one autocracies to eighty-eight democracies. Let those numbers roll around your tongue like broken teeth. For the first time in over two decades, the tyrants outnumber the free, and we're applauding our own funeral procession with the vigour of the terminally deluded.
Trump's America writhes in its second act of self-immolation, 183 executive orders in 200 days, each one a love letter to the void where democracy once lived.
Political scientists have a term for this moment: "authoritarian breakthrough" (Foreign Affairs, 2025) - that precise second when the masks come off and power stops pretending it needs permission, when democracy's death rattle becomes audible to everyone except those still desperately covering their ears.
Putin's Russia has perfected the art of making opposition figures disappear, 783 political prisoners rotting in cells while Navalny's corpse serves as a monument to what happens when you dare to think differently. Europe, that supposed bastion of enlightenment, watches fascism creep through its parliaments like black mould through wallpaper, seven EU countries now governed by those who would burn the very idea of dissent if they could figure out how to set fire to thoughts.
But here's the delicious irony, the cosmic joke that makes me laugh until I taste bile: they're all doing it because they're terrified. Terrified of complexity, terrified of difference, terrified of the beautiful, chaotic, maddening diversity that actually makes societies strong.
There's something grotesquely erotic about fascism's love affair with sameness. It's masturbatory in its self-obsession, this need to see one's own reflection multiplied infinitely across every face, every thought, every trembling neuron of society. Schedule F in America, stripping tens of thousands of civil servants of their protection, replacing competence with loyalty, expertise with sycophancy. It's not governance; it's narcissism weaponised at an institutional scale.
Political scientist Donald Moynihan saw it coming: "This would burn down the civil service system and create a government of the lawless leading the incompetent." (Donald Moynihan, McCourt School of Public Policy)
The lawless leading the incompetent. Let that phrase roll around your mouth like broken glass. That's not hyperbole; that's the blueprint, the manifesto, the wet dream of every authoritarian who's ever confused obedience with excellence.
We tell ourselves the fairy tale that humans are naturally sheep, that we're hardwired to follow, to conform, to bleat in unison with the herd. It's bullshit, of course, a comforting lie we tell ourselves to explain why we keep choosing our own cages. The truth is far more disturbing: we're not born slaves to conformity; we have to be broken into it, trained like dogs to salivate at the bell of authoritarian certainty. Every psychological study worth a damn shows that people will resist the majority, will think for themselves, until the cost becomes too high, until the exhaustion sets in, until thinking becomes more painful than surrendering.
And this is where the genius of modern authoritarianism reveals itself. Putin's Russia has perfected what RAND analysts call the "Firehose of Falsehood" - flooding every channel with so many lies, half-truths, and contradictions that truth itself drowns in the tsunami of bullshit. After Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down, Russian media didn't just lie once; they vomited dozens of conflicting stories simultaneously. Ukrainian jets did it. No, wait, it was a CIA plot. Actually, the plane was already full of corpses. Not to make you believe any particular lie, but to exhaust your critical thinking until you throw up your hands and say, "Who the fuck knows what's real anymore?".
Garry Kasparov, that beautiful bastard who knows Putin's game better than most, nailed it: "The aim is to exhaust your critical thinking and annihilate truth." (Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion and Putin critic)
They don't need you to believe their lies; they just need you to doubt all truths. They have an army of parrots on Facebook, TikTok, X. They use bots and zombies, human zombies. It's psychological warfare at its most elegant, turning your own mind into the prison. When everything might be false, nothing is worth fighting for. When every source contradicts every other source, you retreat into the narcotic comfort of not caring. The firehose doesn't just spread propaganda; it drowns the very possibility of knowing.
The psychology is exquisite in its perversity. Those who crave authoritarianism show "reduced openness to experience and greater need for closure," which is just academic speak for being so fucking terrified of ambiguity that you'd rather lobotomise society than deal with the anxiety of not knowing. They need their world simple, binary, pre-chewed. And the firehose of falsehood delivers exactly that - not truth, not even coherent lies, but the blessed relief of giving up on truth altogether. Why think when thinking hurts? Why seek truth when lies are so much more comfortable, so much more entertaining, so much easier to swallow?
Viktor Orbán's Hungary has become the global template for this particular species of cowardice, maintaining the theatre of elections while gutting every institution that might dare to contradict the script. Giorgia Meloni's Italy performs moderation for international audiences while writing laws that would guarantee her coalition 55% of parliamentary seats regardless of what voters actually want. It's democracy as taxidermy, preserving the appearance while removing everything that made it alive.
And then there are those pathetic creatures who lie awake at night, sweating through their sheets, terrified that somewhere, somehow, an immigrant is coming to steal their mediocrity. As if mediocrity were something worth stealing. As if their tepid existence, their beige dreams, their missionary-position lives were prizes that hordes of darker-skinned people were clamouring to possess. The immigrant, in their fever dreams, becomes everything they are not: virile, hungry, alive with purpose. They project onto the immigrant all the vitality they've surrendered, all the passion they've anaesthetised, all the life force they've traded for the narcotic comfort of knowing exactly who they are and exactly where they belong.
The truth that makes them vomit bile at three in the morning is this: the immigrant has already won simply by moving, by refusing to accept that geography is destiny, by having the magnificent audacity to believe they deserve better. Every immigrant is a walking insult to those who've made a religion out of staying put, who've confused stagnation with stability, who've mistaken their fear of change for loyalty to tradition. The immigrant's very existence whispers the unbearable truth: you could have been more, you could have moved, you could have risked, but you chose to rot in place and call it patriotism.
But here's what these apostles of uniformity don't understand, what their terror-shrunken amygdalas cannot process: diversity isn't weakness, it's the only thing that has ever made us strong. It's violence against the comfortable lies we tell ourselves, certainly, but it's the kind of violence that creates rather than destroys.
Research shows diverse teams solve problems three times faster than homogeneous ones. Companies with diverse leadership see increases of $42 million in firm value. Ethnically diverse research groups produce higher-impact work. But these are just numbers, sterile facts that don't capture the visceral truth: diversity forces us to think, and thinking, real thinking, is agony for those who've built their entire identity on borrowed certainties.
Cambridge researchers discovered something that should terrify every authoritarian alive: "Diversity creates socially rooted electorates with almost an existential need for political rights and civil liberties." (Cambridge University, American Political Science Review)
That existential need, that desperate, unquenchable hunger for freedom, that's the virus authoritarians cannot kill, cannot control, cannot ultimately defeat. It spreads through diverse communities like wildfire through dry grass, unstoppable, unpredictable, beautiful in its destruction of everything uniform and controlled.
When you're surrounded by people who think like you, dress like you, fuck like you, pray to the same absent god as you, your brain goes into hibernation mode. You stop preparing, stop questioning, stop evolving. You become intellectually flaccid, cognitively impotent, a mind so atrophied it mistakes its own weakness for strength.
Nazi Germany's Gleichschaltung, that beautiful German word for forcing everything into the same mould, created strategic failures that helped lose them the war. Stalin's purges of anyone who might think differently led to agricultural disasters that killed millions. Mao's Cultural Revolution turned China into an intellectual wasteland that took decades to recover from. Every single time humanity has tried to enforce uniformity, it has created brittleness that shatters at the first real challenge.
Trump's Justice Department targeting over 100 perceived enemies in his first 100 days isn't governance; it's the political equivalent of a snuff film, democracy being strangled in real-time for the arousal of those who confuse cruelty with strength. Law firms that once defended democracy now face sanctions, banned from federal buildings like lepers cast out from the temple of the new order.
Putin's Novichok nerve agent attacks aren't just assassination; they're performance art, each poisoning a statement that says, "We can reach you anywhere, we can turn your own nervous system against you, we can make you die screaming while the world watches." It's power as spectacle, authority as grand guignol.
The Alternative for Germany finishing second with 20.8% in federal elections, gaining 10.4 percentage points despite being classified as a "confirmed right-wing extremist movement," tells us something profound about the human psyche: we'd rather be wrong together than right alone. We'd rather march in lockstep toward the cliff than stand still and think about where we're heading.
The Axis of Upheaval, that delightful quartet of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, has created something unprecedented: a globalised system of oppression that shares technology, tactics, and the fundamental belief that human complexity is a bug to be fixed rather than a feature to be celebrated. China exports surveillance technology to 80+ countries, creating digital panopticons where every thought that deviates from the norm can be detected, catalogued, punished.
This isn't just authoritarianism; it's authoritarianism with a user manual, a how-to guide for turning human societies into machines that produce only one output: obedience. The BRICS expansion, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, these aren't just political alliances; they're support groups for tyrants, safe spaces for those who find the mess of democracy too untidy for their obsessive-compulsive need for control.
Thirty-nine point two percent of the world's population now lives under authoritarian rule. Three billion souls learning to think in greyscale, to dream in approved narratives, to love Big Brother not because they want to but because the alternative, the beautiful, terrifying alternative of thinking for themselves, has been made more frightening than submission.
But here's the thing about diversity, about dissent, about the glorious clusterfuck of different minds rubbing against each other like tectonic plates: it creates friction, and friction creates heat, and heat creates change. Every study, every historical example, every psychological experiment points to the same conclusion: societies that embrace cognitive, cultural, and institutional diversity don't just survive; they evolve.
The mechanism is almost sexual in its intensity. When you know you're going to work with people who think differently, your brain starts firing on all cylinders. You prepare harder, think deeper, question your own assumptions with the ruthlessness of someone who knows they're about to be challenged. It's intellectual CrossFit, cognitive combat training, and it makes you stronger in ways that nodding along with the crowd never could.
The research confirms what every artist, every revolutionary, every true thinker has always known: "Diverse perspectives jolt us into cognitive action in ways that homogeneity simply does not." (Scientific American, 2014)
That jolt, that electric shock of difference, that beautiful violence of contradiction, is what keeps our minds from atrophying into comfortable stupidity. It's the defibrillator applied to a dying consciousness, the slap that wakes you from intellectual coma.
Even expecting to work with diverse others improves performance. Just the thought of difference makes us better. It's as if our brains, those magnificent pattern-recognition machines, need the chaos of competing patterns to truly come alive.
I think about my own journey, from the atheist communist womb that birthed me to this moment, standing so far from that ideology I need binoculars to see where I started. That distance isn't betrayal; it's evolution. It's what happens when you allow yourself to think, to change, to be wrong, to be contradicted, to be magnificently, gloriously uncertain.
The fascists of 2025, from Trump's executive order factory to Putin's poison laboratories to Europe's parliamentary populists, they're all selling the same snake oil: the promise that if we all just think the same thoughts, wear the same masks, hate the same enemies, we'll be safe. But safety purchased with conformity isn't safety; it's death by a thousand identical cuts.
Democracy faces its darkest hour since the 1930s, certainly. The global Democracy Index has fallen to its lowest level in 18 years. Freedom of expression worsens in 44 countries. The numbers are catastrophic, apocalyptic even. But hidden in this disaster is a truth so beautiful it makes me want to weep: authoritarian systems built on enforced uniformity contain the seeds of their own destruction.
They eliminate diverse perspectives, independent analysis, adaptive capacity. They create brittleness that becomes fatal when facing complex challenges. They turn societies into monocultures, and monocultures, as any farmer will tell you, are devastatingly vulnerable to the right disease.
So here we are, watching the world choose tyranny with the enthusiasm of lemmings approaching a cliff, and I'm laughing because the joke is on them. Every dictator, every populist, every would-be führer selling the drug of conformity is peddling weakness disguised as strength. They're building castles out of matchsticks and calling them fortresses.
The path forward isn't through unity of thought but through the beautiful violence of disagreement. Not through the comfort of consensus but through the discomfort of perpetual challenge. Not through the pornography of power but through the eroticism of uncertainty.
Diversity isn't just our strength; it's our salvation. It's the only thing that has ever saved us from ourselves, the only force powerful enough to break the hypnotic spell of our own worst instincts. Every time we choose conformity over complexity, we're choosing death over life, even if that death comes wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
The fascists want us to believe that sameness is strength, that uniformity is unity, that if we all just paint ourselves the same colour, we'll somehow become invincible. But colours bleed, uniforms tear, and the only thing that has ever made humanity beautiful is our magnificent refusal to be just one thing.
I was raised by communists but became something else entirely. That transformation wasn't weakness; it was the most profound strength I've ever possessed. The ability to change, to think, to disagree with your own past, to evolve beyond your programming, that's what makes us human. That's what the authoritarians fear most. That's why they're so desperate to stamp it out.
But here's the secret they don't want you to know: we're harder to kill than they think. Diversity isn't just resilient; it's antifragile. The more they try to crush it, the stronger it becomes. Every act of repression creates resistance. Every imposed uniformity generates its own opposition. Every attempt to create a single story produces a thousand counter-narratives.
The world may be choosing fascism in 2025, but fascism, for all its swagger and violence, has never won in the end. It always collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, its own inability to adapt, its own terror of the very diversity that makes survival possible.
So let them have their moment. Let them build their brittle empires of sameness. We'll be here, in all our magnificent, chaotic, diverse glory, ready to rebuild when their monotone world inevitably cracks. Because that's what we do. We survive. We adapt. We evolve.
And we do it not despite our differences, but because of them.