Mission Drift 
By Tom Wilson

"Fascism" comes from the Latin word fasces, the bundle of sticks carried by Roman magistrates to symbolize their authority. The sticks, a metaphor for the Roman citizenry, were collected and bound to a unified will, purpose, and identity. The fasces was "greater" than the sum of its parts. 

The primacy of the individual over the group is an American idea which is fast dying out. In spite of the self absorption of our Culture of Perpetual Adolescence, the impetus now is rarely to stand alone. Now we join: we find a flock, we hide in a herd, we conform to the culture model of non- conformity. Now we always seek consensus, to be collected with the like-minded. Human beings have been found to be innately "Hardwired to Connect" (a so named 2005 study from Dartmouth Medical Center) to transcendent authority structures. The group, with its politically or religiously "correct" strictures, is now our authority structure of choice. 

"Transcendent authority structures" used to mean God, and America was established by people seeking that vertical connection: Puritans were pure for God; Whigs were "We Hope In God" folks. And God, bestowing upon all men the inalienable gift of liberty of conscience, wanted all men free- free as individuals, free to be individually creative, responsible, and accountable. We were then eagles, soaring in celestial purpose. But now we're "post modem" and so diminished in our moral capacity that we know nothing really transcendent with which to connect. Once eagles, we're now as pedestrian as turkeys. 

And so we choose some human "collective" into which to invest our authority and hope- the government, the church, some -ism or -ology, some partisan faddishness like Anthropogenic Global Warming- all of which pander to our need for acceptance and our need for being "right." But all such correct-minded, human collectives only bundle our individual sticks into incapacity. The turkeys' brave new world becomes a prison; the workers' paradise becomes a gulag; Utopia never happens. Five centuries have passed since Thomas More wrote Utopia (''Not a Place"), but people reinvest in it- why? Maybe because, in the horizontal acuity of turkeys, it has never been shown not to work. 

Collectives kill individual initiative; consensus is constrictive. This is the root of fascism. Having bundled individuality, the bundle becomes all consuming, controlling, exclusionist, supremacist. It's a "democracy scam": turkeys hate eagles because the majority turkeys must always be right. Eagles see differently; turkeys have no defense against eagles. Thomas Jefferson once swore "eternal hostility upon the altar of God against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." Not just a free thinker; he was a free maker. America, including the slave holding south, had first to be freed from British royalism and elitism, before we could fully engage our mission of human liberation. James Otis, another Founder, once described America as a place where "a man can stand up." To be what? To be whatever he wants? No, to be what he ought to be: a Freeman.