Have a Happy New Year. Or You Will Die.

Pleasure now, more than ever!!

When I was five or six or something, I was at the house of my parents’ friends and there was a cat and it looked cute and fluffy and I wanted to touch it to experience its fluffiness. But when I reached out to do so, the cat swung its paw at me, hissed, and scratched me pretty badly on my arm. I was shocked. From that second forward, I hated that cat—this vehicle of supposed pleasure—for surprising me and causing me pain instead.

I’d like to say I have a simple fear of cats, based on a very small trauma from childhood. But no, it was and is more than that. From that moment of pleasure-seeking-turned-into-pain, I began to strongly dislike cats.

Which is to say, I’ve realized I was turned into an anti-cat fascist.

My dislike for them is, like the hatred within the hearts of many fascists, based in some small amount of semi-justified fear (for me: the fear of being swiped again; for fascists: the fear of a downward-trending economy, fear of their culture rapidly changing, fear of losing power, etc.), but that does not make the hate itself, or my dehumanization of cats (deanimalization?) rational or right. I have taken my fear and turned it into a degradation of an entire species.

This is how bad things begin.

We are not all fascists (I hope you are not!) but I think we all contain the ability to think (and thus potentially act) fascistically. And though it’d be easier to blame the current state of the world solely on the people who’ve begun to act publicly and obviously on this fascistic way of thinking, it is important that we investigate the dormant fascistic thoughts within all of us—how anti-social, and how fear-based we as a society, regardless of individual political persuasion, have become.

This is not solely for cat-haters. You may love cats. But, to ask a rhetorical question (as the answer is obviously yes): have you ever been hurt by someone who or something that you thought would bring you pleasure? An adventure that turned into disaster? A love affair that ended in tears and anger? And if so, have you done the work to make sure this did not turn you into a cold and cut-off person, a person able to dehumanize yourself, and thus more easily dehumanize others?

It is one thing to realize you have been traumatized (we’re all traumatized these days, aren’t we!). It is another to ensure that that trauma and that fear, no matter how justified, do not disable you from seeking pleasure and connection, and do not disable you from contributing pleasure and connection back to the world; that they do not stop you from being alive.

The scarier the world gets—the more we are punished and chided for seeking out pleasures—the easier it becomes to respond by shutting down. And, unfortunately, this is not only bad for you, it is bad for the world. It creates a kind of death spiral: through the dehumanization of yourself, you presage the dehumanization of all.

Which is to say, in 2025, it would not only be good for every one of us to seek out pleasure and fun, it should be a responsibility we take very seriously. Dance, have sex, whatever. Do not forget the thing you were doing before you became so afraid—the proverbial attempt to pet the cat: you were seeking pleasure, and you still deserve to achieve it. The world needs you to achieve it.

This year was perhaps a high-point in anti-social, anti-pleasure, pro-control and fear-based thinking: The proliferation of online videos teaching people to turn their houses into fortresses of “security” and surveillance and that the Target parking lot is a common site of human trafficking; The fact that true crime continues to be one of the most popular genres of entertainment; Parenting models that teach that sleepovers are always dangerous, that letting your kid out to play is not worth the risk (even Canadian pediatricians have called out the lack of risk-taking amongst youth these days), and that sharing toys is not a worthwhile behavior to be instilled. The fact that more and more people are calling themselves “introverts” or diagnosing themselves with other forms of anti-social personality disorders—essentially proclaiming that they not only find social interaction hard, but should not be encouraged or expected to interact socially. Whatever “decentering friendship” means. “DoorDash discourse”—the insistence that it is okay to be terrified of the person you have hired to bring food to your doorstep—might be the most obvious example of our ever-increasing anti-social tendencies. But I’d argue DoorDash itself, along with Uber and TikTok and every other technology that encourages people to not interact face-to-face, are forms of anti-social conditioning that lead people to increasingly fear any and everything beyond the privatized space of ultimate control that we call “home.”

Fascism is obviously on the rise in this country and in many others too. But fascism does not only require political power, it requires minds that are susceptible to its charms.

As the Nazis rose to power in Europe in the 1930s, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich attempted to understand how people could be attracted to the party’s beliefs. Reich was possibly extremely crazy, and as he got older and moved to the U.S. his theories and his practices got ever-more bizarre, involving things placing naked people (including Norman Mailer and JD Salinger) in faraday boxes to concentrate their orgasmic energy in an attempt to cure things like cancer and schizophrenia. But Reich was amongst the first to really understand that fascism was not only a politics, but a mindset.

Reich believed that as society became more repressive, shunning things like sexual pleasure, that people would start to see any pleasure not only as morally repugnant but as dangerous to their very being.

Summing up Reich’s 1933 book Character Analysis, Timofei Gerber writes that the repressed person begins to build an armor around themselves that prevents any danger from crossing their psychic threshold, but in doing so also prevents any pleasure from getting in and prevents any pleasure from being released:

The movement is thereby successfully blocked, but with that, all feelings are essentially killed and result in an inner deadness. This feeling of emptiness, of a loss of a contact with the world...is that which causes nihilism, the urge towards self-destruction, the feeling of meaninglessness.

In this fortress-like psychic condition, anything that could heal you (therapy, sex, connection to your fellow human being) is seen as a threat. Pleasure becomes danger.

We can see this in Nazi Germany’s vilification of the seemingly-hedonistic Weimar era. And we can see it today in politicians blaming of everything negative on society on, say, trans people (what is transitioning if not chasing one’s pleasure despite the dangers). And we can see it in ordinary people’s ever-increasing fear of any and everything that makes being human great, which are things that inherently involve danger: leaving your house, socializing, having friends, letting your kid possibly break their arm by falling off a bike. (As an aside, I think it’s not a coincidence that the most popular form of mental health medication is the one that causes up to 75 percent of people who take it to not be able to have satisfying sex, but that’s for another newsletter :P).

This fear of pleasure and humanity and the creation of a psychic armor to “protect” oneself from this fear, is not a tenable situation. Humans need some form of release. And this is how people become sadistic. Gerber writes:

If the armor gets too thick, it causes itself unpleasure; and if that unpleasure is not to lead to self-destruction (depression), the inner pressure needs nonetheless be released somehow. So as to at least feel something, the individual must force itself to release some energy after all, through the cracks in the shell. But as this energy has to fight itself through a very thick shell, and is also accompanied by anxiety, it does not produce pleasure either. The violence of this ‘piercing through’ expresses itself as destructive urges, as sadism.

Extrapolate this to a societal level and you see how DoorDash is basically Hitler. Just kidding…kind of…But you can maybe see how the blockage and fear of pleasure is a necessary precursor to outright fascism!

Reich’s work jives with the work of Adorno, who believed (in the summation of historian Peter E. Gordon) that, “the authoritarian personality does not always turn explicitly fascist; its politics may remain dormant, only to emerge under certain social-historical conditions.” And jives with the work of analyst Erich Fromm, who believed that, “the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed.” And jives with the work of Hannah Arendt, who wrote of how, “isolation may be the beginning of terror; it is certainly its most fertile ground.”

The more isolated and fearful we become of each other, of our own freedom, the more susceptible we become to the sadistic processes that provide some form of pressure release. Which is to say: people not only become Nazis out of fear or hatred, but because it is cathartic for repressed people to become fascists.

Though, of course, it is not possible to individually reverse the conditions of our society—the isolation, the fearmongering, the actual increased dangers many of us do face out in the real world (police repression, for example)—we are still responsible partners in this interplay.

That interplay can either be something like a death spiral towards our ultimate destruction—society making us afraid, us becoming more cut-off and thus prone to dehumanization, that making society more isolated, and on and on and on. Or it can be a…life spiral…like a helix of DNA—ourselves and the outside world (which is to say: each other; everyone who is not us) wrapped up together, mutually necessary to build something much greater than each of us are capable of on our own.

We may not feel like we have much power these days. But that is also what the fascists us want us to think. They want us to sense the real dangers of the world, and allow ourselves to become scared of them, to build up impenetrable psychic armors to protect ourselves from them until we become inhuman, and thus are able to invalidate the humanity of any and everyone else.

So, go, do the things that make you scared. Do not fear trauma. Be traumatophilic. Go have sex. And do drugs. And dance. And eat outside your own damn house. I’m gonna go pet a cat. If I don’t, I will, in many, very real ways, die.