Fascism Is a Consequence: How Communication Systems Drift Toward Dictatorship

Fascism does not enter society from outside. It is a phase assumed by the relations through which society communicates before it becomes a regime imposed through its institutions. Recurrent differences of identity, threat and authority become coherent enough to reproduce themselves across populations, organisations and time. As they recur, they do not merely connect pre-existing political actors. They help produce the actors, identities and available actions appearing within them.

This suggests something more unsettling than the familiar claim that people sometimes choose fascism. Fascism is not simply something that human beings do. It is something that can happen to and through us: a recurrent configuration of relations that emerges through human action, reorganises the conditions under which subsequent action occurs, and progressively recruits its participants into reproducing the structure that is acting upon them. This does not abolish agency or responsibility. It explains why neither agency nor intention is sufficient to explain the system they participate in producing. The fascist is not ontologically prior to fascism. The system participates in producing the political subject through whom it can persist.

Complexity alone does not cause fascism, and technology does not mechanically push society towards dictatorship. The transition lies in the harmonic structure of communication. Particular distinctions begin returning together with sufficient frequency, amplitude and relative timing to organise how subsequent events are interpreted. A relation is repeated until it begins producing the terms it appears merely to connect: a people, an enemy, a leader, a betrayal, a crisis. Different incidents are drawn into the same pattern. Different grievances acquire the same antagonist. Different institutions begin anticipating and reproducing the same response.

Coherence must therefore be distinguished from sameness. A relation can remain recognisable across changes of actor, medium and vocabulary because the transformations preserve its organising difference. Indeed, some difference is necessary for anything to propagate at all. If every position became identical, there would be no relation, no information and no movement through which identity could persist. Fascistic closure does not achieve perfect uniformity. It restricts which differences may count while continually producing an excluded difference in the form of an enemy, traitor, contaminant or deviant through which its own identity can continue.

The relevant system is not a platform, nation, ideology or media environment considered in isolation. It is a planetary field in which states, technology corporations, financial markets, intelligence services, militaries, news organisations, political movements and populations continually alter the conditions encountered by one another. This field is not a container surrounding otherwise independent entities. It persists through their transformations. A disturbance in one domain becomes market volatility, platform activity, diplomatic friction, electoral rhetoric and security policy elsewhere. Those responses return not to the same actors unchanged, but to actors already reorganised by the exchange. No participant stands outside the process, and no participant needs to comprehend the whole for the whole to acquire direction.

A political order is therefore not exhausted by its governments, institutions, ideologies or leaders. These are visible components of a larger communicative constellation: recurrent distinctions, identities, expectations, probabilities, asymmetries, institutional responses and relations of authority that continually reorganise what can plausibly happen next. When enough of these relations become mutually reinforcing, trajectories increasingly return to a recognisable region of political organisation. The resulting symmetry is not equality, balance or simple repetition, but persistence under transformation. Leaders, slogans, technologies and crises can change while deeper relations among identity, authority, threat, belonging and opposition remain substantially invariant. Ideology is one expression of this configuration, not necessarily its originating cause.

This is why fascism is so often mistaken for its most visible occupants. A demagogue, party or movement appears to generate a transformation already becoming probable through relations distributed far beyond them. The leader matters, sometimes catastrophically, but occupies a position whose conditions precede its occupant. Political entrepreneurs intensify available modes. Technology organisations accelerate and monetise them. Opponents recirculate them. Institutions reorganise around them. What eventually appears as central command emerges through local adaptations that no single actor designed as a whole.

Once a leader or regime consolidates, earlier grievances, slogans, institutional failures and acts of opportunism are gathered into a history that appears to have been moving towards the outcome all along. The realised future reveals relations within the past that were previously dispersed, then rewrites them as destiny. Causation moves forward. Meaning can return across it.

Fascism can consequently be defined as the coercive political organisation of recurrent identity, hierarchy and enemy relations into a self-reinforcing regime whose local coherence depends upon continually producing and redistributing the insecurity it claims to resolve.

Fascism-like insecurity is the affective surface of this phase before, during and beyond formal fascist government. It appears when ambiguity is repeatedly encoded as deception, institutional delay as betrayal, difference as contamination, correction as disloyalty and unresolved complexity as the work of an enemy. Cruelty and hatred are not incidental additions to the structure. They are how its relations are experienced and enacted by the people caught within them.

Historical fascisms remain historically specific. They combine a myth of the unified people, national rebirth, hierarchy, leader authority, political violence and the destruction of plural constraint. Griffin (1991) identifies the ideological core as a populist ultranationalism organised around national rebirth from decadence. Paxton (1998) approaches fascism as a historical process through movement formation, political rooting, seizure and exercise of power, followed by radicalisation or entropy. The present account does not replace either. Griffin specifies the recurrent ideological morphology; Paxton traces its political passage. The systems question lies upstream and across them: how a communication field makes those myths, movements and institutional transitions increasingly available, mutually reinforcing and capable of recurrence before a fascist party or dictator consolidates formal control.

1. Order, Entropy and Compression
A complex society contains more relations, perspectives, memories, interests and possible responses than any individual or institution can represent. Complexity is not pathological. It is the ordinary condition of collective life. A society remains viable by preserving enough internal difference to detect error, revise its descriptions and respond to conditions no central authority can fully comprehend (Ashby, 1956).

The danger arises when the growth, speed and coupling of communication outrun the time, trust and institutional depth available to integrate it (Rosa, 2013; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2019). Under these conditions, compression acquires an advantage. A binary accusation travels faster than a causal account. A recognisable enemy requires less interpretive work than a distributed system. Certainty can be performed instantly. Understanding takes time.

Even this pressure does not produce fascism by itself. Societies can endure intense complexity without becoming fascist. Complexity becomes politically decisive when the same compressed relations begin recurring together, directing collective attention towards the same identities, threats and demands for closure. An information-overload account treats fascism as a passive cognitive failure before excess data. The deeper process is recursive. Communication does not merely overwhelm people. It establishes the expectations, categories and pathways through which further communication becomes probable.
Repetition lays down structure. What returns becomes easier to recognise; what is easier to recognise more readily returns. A grievance can be articulated through many political languages. Repeatedly connecting it to betrayal, foreign threat, cultural contamination or corrupt elites establishes those relations as increasingly available routes for later grievances. The surface issue changes while the organising relation persists. Housing, migration, crime, war, gender, bureaucracy and economic insecurity become interchangeable entry points into the same recurrent structure.

Entropy is central here, but entropy is not disorder. It describes the distribution of possibility across alternative relations and configurations. Order constrains that distribution by making some interpretations, actions and transitions more probable than others. Yet order does not abolish what it excludes. It redistributes difference across boundaries and timescales while producing new dependencies and consequences.

Absence is therefore not blank. Unrealised possibilities remain the field against which any realised order acquires definition. Ambiguity, delay and incomplete self-knowledge are not accidental defects in collective life; they preserve room for comparison, correction and transformation. Fascistic communication converts this structural incompletion into accusation. A gap becomes concealment, an unresolved consequence becomes conspiracy and uncertainty becomes evidence of hidden agency. The system tries to fill absence with an enemy while depending upon an unresolved threat for its own continuity.

A border stabilises one jurisdiction while reorganising movement around it. A security doctrine reduces uncertainty for one institution while generating uncertainty for others. A classificatory system makes a population administratively legible by suppressing differences that later return as political facts. Local coherence is purchased through consequences displaced elsewhere or deferred until later. Order generates entropy, then increasingly depends upon the differences and disturbances that its own operation produces.

Technical systems intensify this dynamic. They multiply the number of actors able to affect one another, reduce the interval between action and response, preserve past communication for renewed circulation and convert behavioural reaction into data used to select what appears next. They enlarge the field of possible relations while extracting locally predictable patterns from it.

Attention markets require novelty, behavioural variation, conflict and response because these supply the signals from which prediction, targeting and engagement are produced. Moral-emotional language, out-group hostility and false information each possess documented advantages within networked circulation (Brady et al., 2017; Rathje et al., 2021; Vosoughi et al., 2018). A perfectly settled field would yield little new information and little reason to return. The commercial system profits first by converting insecurity into activity and again by selling temporary orientation within that insecurity. It does not need to manufacture every disturbance. It needs disturbance to remain measurable, actionable and recurrent.

Fascistic order develops the same dependency in a more violent form. It promises to abolish uncertainty while requiring a continuous supply of threats, enemies, betrayals and emergencies through which unity can be renewed. Complete closure would dissolve the antagonisms around which its identity formed. The enemy must remain close enough to threaten, distant enough to oppose and reproducible enough to be replaced. Difference is displaced rather than eliminated, and its return becomes evidence that stronger control is required.
Insecurity legitimates compression.

Compression excludes corrective information and produces delayed consequences. Those consequences return as institutional failure, resistance, volatility or crisis. The regime interprets their return as further insecurity. Its proposed cure continually reproduces the conditions of its own political necessity.

2. The Harmonic Transition
Communication is organised in time. Feeds, news bulletins, market openings, polling cycles, diplomatic statements, military alerts, commemorations, elections and narratives of decline recur at different frequencies and amplitudes. Content matters, but content is not the sole source of organisation. Recurrence establishes expectation. It determines when attention gathers, which distinctions are ready to be activated and how quickly one response calls forth another.
The theory of coupled oscillators offers a disciplined analogy for this transition. In the Kuramoto model, units with different natural rhythms can, once coupling becomes strong enough, develop a macroscopic degree of phase alignment without becoming identical. Their collective organisation is summarised by an order parameter: a description of how coherently the population is moving at a given time (Kuramoto, 1975; Strogatz, 2000, 2003). Translated cautiously into communication research, the relevant quantity would not measure agreement, truth or ideological commitment. It would describe how closely the timing of recurrent attention, framing and response has aligned across otherwise heterogeneous actors.

This distinction matters because synchronisation is not consensus. Participants can remain opposed in meaning, unequal in power and separated by stable lags while still orienting to the same public rhythm. Alignment can therefore increase while substantive disagreement remains intact. The system acquires a common temporal reference without acquiring a common mind.
A spectral account asks which relations return, how strongly they return, at what intervals and whether recurrences at different timescales reinforce one another. An accusation repeated hourly can couple with a daily news cycle, an electoral campaign, a security doctrine and a longer historical mythology. The messages do not need to be identical. They need only keep organising attention around compatible relations.

Cognitive entrainment is bound to and occurs through this spectral organisation. People do not merely receive repeated content; they learn its timing, which cues complete it and what response belongs next. Attention, affect and interpretation become oriented towards recurrent pathways until different events are recognised as instances of the same threat and elicit the rehearsed response. Participants need not share identical beliefs. They need only become selectively responsive to the same relations. At the neural scale, rhythmic input can organise attentional selection, although this finding does not by itself establish a political mechanism (Kelso, 1995; Lakatos et al., 2008). Cognition is neither outside the field nor merely acted upon by it. It is one of the processes through which the rhythm is retained and returned.

Belief and culture are stochastic organisations of recurrence. This does not mean frequency makes a statement true. It means repeated relations acquire organisational weight and change what is likely to follow. Terms such as nation, purity, security, freedom, betrayal and enemy travel across diverse contexts because they remain partly indeterminate. They compress different experiences into portable distinctions. Each use carries traces of earlier uses and prepares the field for the next.
Culture can therefore persist while almost everything carrying it changes. People change, institutions change, words change, technologies change and interpretations drift, while enough of the relational pattern recurs for the larger configuration to remain recognisable. Cultural persistence is not the preservation of identical contents. It is the successful reproduction of organisation through changing carriers.

This changes what cultural transformation means. Cultural change cannot be reduced to replacing one collection of ideas with another. It occurs when recurrence itself changes: when timing, coupling, reinforcement, pathways and probabilities are reorganised sufficiently that the preceding pattern can no longer regenerate itself in the same form. Political transformation is consequently not only a contest over propositions. It is a transformation of the relations through which propositions become available, familiar, repeatable and consequential.
This is how a crude idea acquires historical force. It does not become deeper. It becomes infrastructural. The distinction enters headlines, rankings, policies, borders, curricula, police powers, military doctrine, databases and ordinary suspicion. The concept remains small while the machinery carrying it becomes vast. What began as language returns as an environment in which the language appears self-evidently true.

Coupled participants can become phase-aligned without agreeing. Presenters learn the cadence that retains an audience. Audiences learn the performances that signify belonging. Politicians learn which frames travel. Governments learn which threats consolidate support. Markets anticipate political announcements. Platforms amplify responses that generate further measurable activity. Opponents quote, condemn and recirculate one another on a shared schedule. Their semantic conflict can conceal temporal cooperation. Such cooperation need not begin in shared intent. Shared intent can be acquired as participants learn and exploit the common rhythm, becoming analytically relevant and ontologically real while its effects become statistically observable. It is not the originating cause of the coupling it comes to express.

The transition occurs when recurrent relations become coherent across actors and timescales. The field begins reproducing a macroscopic pattern that no participant contains or commands: an attractor, not a predetermined destination, but a region of possibility into which disturbances are repeatedly drawn. Its components include recurrent distinctions, phase relations, institutional responses, identities, expectations and asymmetries. Different events become dynamically equivalent by being recruited into the same relation. Once sufficiently coherent, activity within the constellation tends to reproduce the conditions that make further activity of the same form more probable.

Such an attractor is a waypoint rather than an endpoint. It is a relatively stable region within a larger state space through which a communication system can pass and around which it can become organised. Actors, messages and technologies can change while characteristic relations among authority, identity, threat, opposition and belonging persist. Fascism, liberal democracy, populism and authoritarianism name historically recognisable configurations, not metaphysically self-contained objects. The important question is not merely what people believe, but what constellation makes particular beliefs, behaviours and institutional responses increasingly probable.
This temporal organisation has two unequal directions. Every recurrence causally alters the conditions available to what follows. Once one possible future becomes present, however, its consequences also reorganise the meaning of what preceded it. Earlier events become evidence, warnings, betrayals or origins in ways that were not available before the later configuration existed. This is not reverse causation. It is retrospective semantic selection. Keeping the two operations distinct prevents the attractor from being mistaken for destiny: the past constrained the future, while the realised future selected a new account of the past.

3. Symmetry, Opposition and Political Identity
When this harmonic pattern stabilises, the recurrent relation is often antisymmetric. This should not be imagined as two independently completed formations entering a subsequent conflict. The relation differentiates the positions. Each side acquires identity through the responses it elicits, anticipates and returns through the other.

What one side calls loyalty, the other calls submission. Each experiences itself as defensive and the other as aggressive. Each treats the opponent’s response as confirmation of the threat it had already announced. The valuation reverses while the relational form persists. The participants oppose one another in content while jointly reproducing the structure through which their opposition remains intelligible.
The field is not a third actor added to this dyad, nor a neutral medium carrying messages between two intact sides. It is the continuing fact of their mutual implication: the patterned continuity through which each modifies and is modified by the other. Neither pole contains the field, and neither remains unchanged when the other is removed or replaced. The relation, its boundaries and the identities organised through them must form again.

The invariance at stake is relational rather than material. A distinction may pass from platform to party, from party to news bulletin, from news bulletin to administrative category and from administrative category to coercive practice. If these transformations preserve the same functional division, the relation has remained coherent even though every local expression has changed. Coherence is the preservation of structure across transformation. Exact identity would tell us nothing: nothing would have changed and no difference would have travelled. What persists is the rule by which differences are converted into further differences.
Symmetry does not mean sameness, moral equivalence or equality of power.

Responsibility, capacity and violence can remain radically unequal. Symmetry names an invariance in the communicative structure. Actors, ideologies and declared objects change while the organising grammar survives: people and elite, nation and enemy, loyalty and treason, purity and contamination, victimhood and conspiracy. The occupants are replaceable because the relation is what persists through their substitution.

An antisymmetric phase attractor is a recurrent state in which opposed identities become mutually constitutive, temporally coupled and self-confirming. Each supplies the other with timing, evidence, mobilisation and justification. Their conflict is real, but it also completes the circuit that keeps the larger pattern active. The attractor is not another entity controlling them. It is the increased probability that their next transformations will reproduce the same relation.

Fascism can be approached as a particularly destructive configuration of this kind. Threat increases the probability of conformity; conformity strengthens collective identity; identity intensifies the distinction between inside and outside; exclusion generates conflict; conflict supplies further evidence of threat; and perceived threat increases the legitimacy of concentrated authority. No central intelligence is required to design the sequence. Once sufficiently coupled, the relations participate in reproducing the conditions from which their own recurrence becomes increasingly probable.

At the geopolitical scale, hostile states or blocs can become locked into this relation. Domestic identity is stabilised by foreign threat. Foreign response is intensified by domestic mobilisation. Each security measure becomes the other’s evidence of aggression. The antagonists do not collaborate. Their opposition performs the coordination.
Identity is produced within this field. A political subject is not formed elsewhere and then inserted into conflict intact. People become intelligible to themselves through distinctions made available by the relation: what we are, what we are not, where we belong, what threatens us and what must be defended. The enemy is not incidental to an identity organised through enmity. It supplies part of the difference through which that identity remains coherent. This is why the abolition of the enemy is repeatedly promised and indefinitely deferred. Complete success would transform the victor as surely as it removed the defeated.

Cruelty and hatred are the human experience of this structure. Fear directs attention towards threat, making threat more available to further attention. Humiliation searches for an object. Repetition turns suspicion into familiarity and familiarity into apparent fact. The communication constellation does not merely carry intentions formed independently within private minds. It participates in producing the intending subject and the world in which cruelty appears necessary, righteous or unavoidable.
Intent, choice and responsibility remain real. Once produced, intention becomes a source of action and returns to the field as further communication, exclusion and coercion. Structural explanation does not absolve individual actors. People and institutions possess different capacities to reproduce, exploit, resist or intensify the constellation, and responsibility follows those differences in conduct and power. Action emerges from a field that action then helps remake.

4. Populism as Semantic Compression
Populism converts heterogeneous complexity into a small set of portable political distinctions: the people and the elite, loyalty and betrayal, victim and enemy, truth and deception. These distinctions function as low-dimensional modes within a high-dimensional field. They allow different grievances to synchronise without requiring a shared causal account.
Populism does not simply discover a coherent people waiting to be represented. Through repetition, affiliation and antagonism, it helps produce the identity in whose name it speaks. Grievances concerning housing, work, inequality, migration, institutional failure, war or cultural displacement remain politically underdetermined. Populist communication binds them into a recurring relation. Different injuries can then be experienced through the same grammar: we suffer because they have taken control; institutions that deny this merely confirm their corruption.

Its reproductive advantage is temporal as well as semantic. A binary accusation can be recognised before it is evaluated. It crosses contexts quickly, gives different audiences a common emotional position and produces responses that can be measured immediately. Explanation requires time, qualification and relations extending beyond the immediate object. Blame requires a noun. Simplicity moves faster than thought, particularly through systems designed to reward speed.
Populism is not identical with fascism and does not inevitably become fascist. It can articulate neglected grievances, widen participation and challenge insulated power (Müller, 2016). Its structural danger appears when its organising distinction becomes exclusive, its opponent becomes constitutive and existential, and plural mediation is redescribed as obstruction. Correction becomes censorship, procedure becomes sabotage and institutional independence becomes betrayal. Populism then ceases merely to represent dissatisfaction. It becomes the compression layer through which an entrained field demands coercive unity.

5. Technology as Compliant Facilitation
Technology at scale preferentially industrialises the parts of human nature that are easiest to measure, repeat, monetise, automate and weaponise. Care, ambiguity, restraint and reflective judgement are difficult to quantify and slow to circulate. Fear, outrage, envy, status anxiety and antagonism produce immediate behavioural traces. Systems optimised for measurable response consequently give recurrent advantage to signals that activate people quickly and return them to the system. Digital media effects vary across contexts, but the evidence that they alter political behaviour and can propagate antagonism into offline harm removes any serious claim to neutral carriage (Müller and Schwarz, 2021; Lorenz-Spreen et al., 2023).

Technology organisations do not need to originate the attractor in order to facilitate it. Nor are they neutral channels through which an independently formed politics happens to pass. Once ranking, measurement and recommendation become conditions under which actors perceive and answer one another, those systems participate in producing the positions they appear merely to connect. They determine latency, recurrence, visibility, coupling and feedback gain. Rankings decide which signals receive another cycle. Recommendations connect one reactive state to the next. Notifications organise timing. Metrics convert response into a selection criterion. Advertising attaches revenue to the successful capture and recurrence of attention. These architectures also make coupling radically non-local: distant groups can become tightly phase-aligned while neighbouring populations remain comparatively disconnected.

Their compliance is structural. Organisations adapt to a competitive environment whose most visible measures are retention, engagement, relevance, growth and response. These measurements register local behaviour while excluding distributed consequences. Systems are optimised to increase what can be measured. The resulting changes return to the field and intensify the patterns from which the measurements were derived. Measurement becomes selection; selection alters recurrence; recurrence supplies the next measurement.

Corporate compliance does not require ideological agreement with the politics being amplified. A platform can remove extremist content while preserving the speed, coupling and incentive structure that gives antagonistic compression a reproductive advantage. A company can oppose a political actor while remaining phase-locked to that actor’s cadence, reproducing each provocation through alerts, commentary, rebuttal and renewed recommendation. Content policy changes while the deeper rhythm remains intact.

Competition strengthens this compliance. An organisation that introduces friction, slows behavioural feedback or refuses profitable recurrence risks losing attention and revenue to one that does not. Executives, engineers and policy teams make locally intelligible decisions that collectively maintain a globally destabilising state. Technical competence demonstrates successful adaptation to a selection environment. It does not confer comprehension of the system produced through those adaptations.

The result is the serial production and exploitation of a largely hapless herd. This does not mean a population without agency. It means agency exercised through attentional and interpretive pathways repeatedly selected by systems able to profit from the response. The infrastructure does not merely harvest a pre-existing collective subject. Through recurrence, measurement and feedback, it helps produce the collective behaviour it subsequently measures and sells (Bak-Coleman et al., 2021).

Many actors knowingly exploit this infrastructure. Governments conduct influence operations. Campaigns test messages. Advertisers segment populations. Political entrepreneurs intensify grievance. Media organisations convert conflict into continuous programming. These interventions matter, but they act within modes the wider system already makes available. They amplify, modulate or capture the pattern without having designed the field that selects it.

The absence of a central intention does not remove responsibility. It relocates it. Responsibility attaches to the design and maintenance of selection conditions: ranking, recommendation, friction, recurrence, monetisation, moderation, interoperability and feedback speed. Once an organisation knows that its systems give recurrent advantage to antagonistic compression, continued optimisation cannot be defended by saying nobody intended the political result. A technology organisation does not need to intend fascism to make fascistic closure more probable.

There is, however, a deeper recursive difficulty. The technologies through which such a configuration might be observed, measured and interdicted are themselves components of its transmission architecture. Detection requires representation. Classification requires recurrence. Research, moderation, fact-checking and opposition all reproduce some representation of the pattern they seek to understand or suppress. The sensor is embedded in the field it measures, and the apparatus of intervention can become another pathway of propagation.
The political structure therefore need not persist as identical semantic content. Something closer to a coherent travelling disturbance can survive while its particular linguistic carriers continually change. The slogan can disappear. The leader can disappear. The platform can disappear. The local disturbance can be absorbed and re-expressed elsewhere while characteristic relations among threat, identity, authority and exclusion continue to propagate. The medium does not merely transport the structure. Through recursive selection and retransmission, it participates in maintaining it.

This produces an interdiction paradox. An intervention that reproduces the recurrent structure strongly enough can reinforce the structure it intends to suppress. Opposition can become excitation. Classification can stabilise identity. Repeated correction can maintain recurrence. Surveillance can reproduce the same relations of centralisation, suspicion and control under examination. Increasing the amplitude of the counter-signal is not necessarily equivalent to changing the dynamics that generate the signal.

6. Symmetry Breaking, the Leader and Dictatorial Closure
A phase state is not identical to any single event within it. The state is the relatively durable organisation of recurrence, timing and coupling. A crisis, election, assassination, war, scandal or technological change alters its amplitude, tempo or local expression. Such events modulate the phase. They can deepen it, redirect it or dislodge it, but they are not the entire structure.

Specific leaders, parties, nations and enemies are local symmetry-breaking selections within this wider field. Several occupants are initially possible. Historical contingencies select one and give the distributed relation a concrete body. Once selected, that body exerts genuine causal force. It alters institutions, redistributes violence, reshapes memory and reorganises political possibility. Yet the availability of the position precedes the person who occupies it.

The demagogue is not the master architect of the system. The demagogue is a high-gain local oscillator who discovers, embodies and intensifies one of its resonant modes. A successful leader becomes a stable reference around which previously distributed signals align at different offsets: supporters praise, opponents condemn, officials anticipate and institutions adapt, but all increasingly organise their timing in relation to the same position. This creates the appearance of authorship after the fact. The leader looks like the cause because the system converges upon a face, then rewrites its distributed prehistory as the leader’s inevitable ascent.
Alignment then propagates through the hierarchy. Officials, commentators, donors, administrators and supporters anticipate the direction of the dominant signal and adjust their conduct towards it. No complete instruction needs to be issued. Participants observe what receives reward, what attracts punishment and what demonstrates belonging. Cumulative radicalisation emerges as actors compete to remain aligned. They work towards the leader because the position reorganises the probabilities of institutional survival around itself.

The historical point is not that an entire population begins thinking or acting in unison. Research on coupled oscillators describes chimera states in which coherent and incoherent regions persist within the same connected system (Abrams and Strogatz, 2004). The social analogy proposes a configuration to investigate; it does not imply that populations literally obey an oscillator model. A fascist movement can capture the timing of strategically important institutions, including party, executive, police, military, bureaucracy, major media and organised business, while substantial parts of society remain doubtful, passive, internally divided or resistant. Political synchrony is therefore power-weighted, not a headcount. Ian Kershaw’s account of officials “working towards the Führer” identifies a historically specific version of this mechanism: policy could radicalise through anticipatory alignment without an exhaustive command for every act (Kershaw, 1993). This did not make Hitler passive or absolve perpetrators. It shows how personal dictatorship and distributed initiative reinforced one another.
A single global measure of alignment can conceal this structure. The same average could describe a mildly aligned population or a tightly synchronised institutional core surrounded by dispersed publics. Any serious account must therefore examine local coherence, network position and the interfaces between aligned and drifting regions. Dictatorial closure begins when a coherent cluster gains sufficient control over the channels through which public reality is timed, recorded and enforced, not when every mind reaches the same state.
Fascism is the pathological political phase in which this alignment rigidifies. Identity becomes narrow-band. Uncertainty becomes contamination. The leader becomes a compulsory phase reference. Institutions are forced to synchronise around loyalty rather than remain responsive to discrepant information.

Dictatorship is implicated because it is the terminal simplifier. It centralises the authority to define events, name enemies, preserve or erase memory and determine when collective response is permitted. It converts plural feedback into a hierarchy of command. Dissent ceases to be information about the condition of the system and becomes evidence of corruption within it. The regime appears coherent because conflicting signals have been suppressed, not because the conditions producing conflict have been understood.

This configuration gains short-term speed by reducing negotiation and compressing decision-making. Over time it destroys the variation required for error detection, learning and correction. Officials transmit loyalty upward rather than reality. Institutions anticipate the leader’s desires. Policy becomes a performance of alignment. Ambiguity becomes dangerous because it permits unsynchronised interpretation. Independent institutions become intolerable because they preserve alternative rhythms and sources of information.

The result is brittle coherence. Administrative failure, economic distortion, factional struggle, resistance and external conflict accumulate beyond the authorised description. Their return is interpreted as proof of conspiracy and disloyalty. The regime must manufacture or intensify crisis to restore alignment. It becomes increasingly dependent upon the insecurity it promised to eliminate.

There is a deeper contradiction here. The attractor progressively narrows the differences through which the system could correct itself while recursively strengthening the relations responsible for that narrowing. Its apparent solution to complexity therefore generates conditions that make further closure appear necessary. The system becomes increasingly certain precisely as its capacity to know what is happening deteriorates.

Fascist closure can never complete its project. If the enemy were removed completely, the regime would lose one of the primary differences through which it reproduces its identity. Victory must reveal another betrayal. Purification must discover another contaminant. Emergency must be renewed. The object changes while the relation persists.
No mastermind is required. Executives optimise retention and revenue. Engineers optimise measurable performance. Media organisations optimise attention. Governments optimise strategic advantage. Politicians optimise mobilisation. Influencers optimise visibility. Audiences seek orientation, recognition or relief. Opponents respond to what appears urgent. Each action alters the environment encountered by the others, and the returning pattern selects what is likely to recur.

The absence of a mastermind does not mean the absence of intent, cruelty or culpability. Power remains unevenly distributed. Those who design infrastructure, command institutions, finance movements or deliberately intensify antagonism possess greater capacity to alter the field and bear responsibility proportionate to that capacity. Distributed causation expands the account of responsibility beyond declared intention. It does not abolish it.

7. Consequence, Then Cause: Making the Structure Observable
Fascism is a consequence, but not a passive one. It is a political morphology assumed by a communication field whose recurrent antagonisms have become phase-coherent and whose institutions increasingly select compression over plural integration. Once established, it becomes a powerful cause within the system that produced it. It increases feedback gain, narrows permissible variation, reorganises institutions and generates the threats through which its coherence is renewed.

This is not a mathematical proof of history. It is a systems theory with measurable consequences. It should be possible to test whether the proposed relations appear before and during fascistic consolidation, whether they distinguish such transitions from other forms of political instability and whether interventions that alter the relations also alter the trajectory.

The empirical unit must be the recurrent relation rather than the isolated word or message. A study could construct dated series from speeches, newspapers, broadcasts, parliamentary records, platform posts, policy announcements, policing and military communication. Each event would be coded not only for vocabulary but for the relation it performs: which identity is linked to which threat, which authority is invoked, which hierarchy is naturalised, which ambiguity is converted into betrayal and which response follows. Computational classification can extend the scale of analysis, but historically and linguistically informed human validation remains indispensable. Otherwise a change in vocabulary will be mistaken for the disappearance of a relation, or repetition of a word for persistence of a structure.

The Wiener–Khinchin theorem provides the simplest bridge from recurrence to spectral description (Wiener, 1930; Khintchine, 1934). Autocorrelation asks how strongly a time series resembles delayed versions of itself. For a wide-sense stationary process, whose mean is constant and whose autocovariance depends only on lag, the power spectral density is the Fourier transform of the autocorrelation function. A spectral peak can identify a dominant periodicity; a distributed spectrum can show that power is spread across timescales. Neither proves that a political attractor exists. The theorem shows how recurrence may be represented, not what the recurrence means or what caused it.
Historical communication is rarely stationary. Elections, wars, censorship, platform adoption, institutional collapse and archival loss alter both the process and the record through which it is observed. Analysis should therefore use rolling windows, change-point methods and time-frequency techniques such as wavelet coherence to identify when recurrent rhythms emerge, move or disappear (Grinsted et al., 2004). It must also model ordinary calendars, publication schedules, changes in data volume, missing archives, automated activity and common external shocks. Without these controls, a news timetable or digitisation artefact can masquerade as political entrainment.

Coupling becomes observable by comparing series. Cross-correlation can identify repeated lead-and-lag relations. Cross-spectral analysis can test whether institutions share frequencies; coherence can estimate how consistently they do so; phase lag can show which series tends to move first at a given timescale. If a leader’s threat frame repeatedly precedes aligned changes in television coverage, platform activity, administrative language and policing, the pattern would support the hypothesis of coupled organisation. It would not by itself prove direction or intention. A shared crisis, scheduled event or unseen coordinating institution can generate the same signature. Documentary evidence, institutional history and counterfactual comparison are therefore required to interpret the signal.

Where a genuine recurrent component can be established, a Kuramoto-like order parameter can summarise the degree of phase alignment across series (Kuramoto, 1975; Abrams and Strogatz, 2004). It should be treated as a diagnostic of timing, not a measure of belief or fascism. Amplitude and phase must remain separate: a vast quantity of uncoordinated communication is different from a smaller but tightly aligned sequence of responses. Global and local measures must also be compared. A moderate global value can conceal a chimera structure in which a highly coherent and politically central cluster coexists with drifting or resistant regions. The historically relevant question is whether alignment is increasing among actors able to define, distribute and enforce public reality. Because the choice and weighting of actors determine whose timing counts, unweighted, network-weighted and institutionally weighted results should be reported and tested against one another.

The constellation hypothesis adds another empirical requirement. The object of measurement cannot be a single ideological variable. Researchers would need to examine whether recurrent identity, threat, authority, institutional response and temporal alignment become increasingly mutually predictive. An attractor should appear not merely as repetition within individual series but as a growing tendency for disturbances from different domains to be recruited into the same relational configuration. A migration controversy, economic shock, security event or institutional dispute would differ in content while increasingly producing structurally similar transitions.

The temporal asymmetry of meaning can be tested directly. Researchers can compare descriptions of the same earlier events written before and after a leader, movement or regime consolidates. The prediction is not that the later regime changes the earlier event, but that subsequent accounts increasingly recode heterogeneous incidents as origins, warnings, betrayals and proofs of an apparently continuous destiny. Diachronic semantic analysis, archival comparison and close historical reading can measure that retrospective convergence while preserving the distinction between forward causation and backward reinterpretation.

A credible programme would combine longitudinal reconstruction with comparison. Fascist transitions should be examined alongside societies experiencing high communicative pressure without fascist closure, and alongside authoritarian formations organised through different political grammars. Interrupted time series around changes in broadcasting, platform design, censorship, emergency law or institutional independence can test whether altered coupling changes subsequent coherence. Network analysis can identify which actors synchronise first and which bridges transmit the pattern. Process tracing can then establish whether the statistical sequence corresponds to decisions, incentives and institutional adaptations documented in the historical record.

The framework generates nine empirical expectations:

Compression advantage. Antagonistic distinctions should gain reproductive advantage where communicative variety, velocity, coupling and recurrence expand faster than the time, trust and institutional capacity available to integrate difference.

Temporal coherence over volume. Political transformation should correlate more strongly with recurrent timing and cross-scale coupling than with communication volume alone. The significant question is not only how much conflict circulates, but whether the same relations recur coherently across platforms, institutions and geopolitical events.

Threshold effects. Alignment should sometimes increase nonlinearly once coupling, repetition or institutional concentration crosses a critical range. Small changes near such a threshold may produce a disproportionate shift in macroscopic coherence, while larger changes far from it may have little effect.

Chimeric capture. Fascistic consolidation should not require population-wide synchrony. It should be preceded by rising local coherence among strategically central institutions while other regions of the social field remain incoherent, ambivalent or resistant.

Dynamic dependence between opponents. Semantic opponents should sometimes display lagged recurrence, shared periodicity and mutual amplification. Interventions that change surface messages without changing this coupling should leave the attractor substantially intact.

Selection of antagonistic affect. Systems optimised for measurable response should disproportionately select high-arousal identity and out-group communication without requiring explicit ideological programming. The effect should increase with feedback speed, recommendation gain and monetisation incentives.

Retrospective semantic consolidation. After a symmetry-breaking event, accounts of the preceding period should converge around a reduced set of origins, enemies and causal narratives. The later political form should reorganise descriptions of its prehistory more strongly than it alters the material record of that past.

Substitution after disruption. Crises and political entrepreneurs should operate as phase modulators, altering the amplitude, timing or embodiment of an existing structure. Where the underlying relation persists, removing one issue, enemy or leader should produce functional substitution rather than dissolution.

Adaptive decline under enforced synchrony. Regimes that suppress internal variation should achieve short-term coordination at the expense of long-term adaptive capacity. Reduced access to corrective information should make them progressively more dependent upon loyalty tests, manufactured crises and coercive control.

These expectations distinguish the theory from the loose claim that complexity causes authoritarianism. They also make failure possible. The account would be weakened if volume alone consistently explained transition; if apparent coherence vanished after calendar, common-shock and archival controls; if strategically central institutions did not align before closure; if comparable non-fascist cases displayed the same configuration at the same rate; or if interventions that changed coupling produced no corresponding change in recurrence. The relevant variables are recurrence, relative timing, local and global coherence, network position, feedback gain, semantic compression, institutional independence and the preservation or destruction of corrective difference.

8. Intervention
The practical target lies upstream and within the relations themselves. A society must increase its capacity to integrate difference without erasing it; restore time for explanation, memory and correction; preserve institutions with independent rhythms and access to discrepant information; reduce the gain of systems that automatically reward antagonistic recurrence; and prevent attention markets from treating insecurity as an unpriced input into private accumulation.

The alternative to compulsory synchrony is not universal disorder. Complex societies require coordination. The more resilient form is polycentric coherence: institutions and publics able to coordinate across shared problems while retaining the offsets, delays and independent reference points through which error becomes visible. Difference is not merely tolerated after order has been achieved. Properly organised difference is one of the conditions by which collective order remains capable of transformation without collapse.

Technology organisations must be made answerable for the system dynamics they maintain, not only for individual items of content or declared corporate intentions. Content moderation matters, but moderation applied inside an unchanged machinery of speed, recurrence and monetisation cannot address the structure that continually regenerates the problem. The design question is which relations receive another cycle, how rapidly responses return, where amplification occurs and where friction protects collective judgement.

The difficulty is that intervention itself enters the field. The machinery used to identify a recurrent political pattern can become one of its carrier systems. Every classification establishes another distinction. Every correction reproduces some representation of the claim being corrected. Every attempt to suppress a recurrent structure changes the field in which that structure is reproducing itself. There is no external control room from which society can manipulate communication without participating in communication.
Political opposition must therefore examine its participation in the coupled rhythm. Rebuttal that reproduces an opponent’s timing, distinctions and emotional cadence can strengthen the shared structure. Endless repetition of a demagogue’s name preserves the demagogue as the dominant reference even when every repetition is condemnatory. Effective opposition cannot be reduced to transmitting contrary content with greater amplitude. It must alter the conditions through which the pattern regenerates.
This means changing recurrence, timing, coupling, amplification, delay and available pathways into what happens next. It means creating other temporalities, other sites of identification and other routes through which grievance can become political action without first being compressed into an enemy relation. Cultural change occurs when the relations responsible for cultural recurrence change sufficiently that the old configuration no longer reliably reproduces itself.

The purpose is not to eliminate difference, uncertainty or conflict. That would reproduce the fantasy of closure. The purpose is to prevent difference from being captured by a narrow recurrent structure that interprets every disturbance as another demand for purity, hierarchy and coercion. A viable society preserves enough plurality, delay and institutional independence to learn from what does not fit its current description.
Removing a dictator can be necessary. It is not sufficient. Unless the relations that repeatedly generate the demand for dictatorial closure are altered, the attractor remains available. Another issue can carry it. Another enemy can organise it. Another technology can transmit it. Another actor can occupy the position and appear, once again, to have invented the system that selected them.
Fascism is never a good idea. Its failure is structural: it destroys the differences through which a society can recognise and correct its own errors, then interprets the consequences of that blindness as reasons for stronger control.

Selected Foundations

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Brady, W.J. et al. (2017) ‘Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), pp. 7313–7318.
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Strogatz, S.H. (2000) ‘From Kuramoto to Crawford: Exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators’, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, 143(1–4), pp. 1–20.

Strogatz, S.H. (2003) Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order. New York: Hyperion.

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Companion Essays
Nice Things
Identity as Stable Phase Difference: Order-through-Offset in Communication Systems
The Logic that Lives
The Big Empty: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Generative Logic of Absence
Recursive Harmonics: The Mathematical Structure of Communicative Organisation
Measurement and Diagnostics: Observing Persistent Communicative Organisation
Semantics Follows Frequency: Why Meaning Repeats and History Rhymes
The Herd: How Social Media and Identity Politics Shape Mass Behaviour