The Mystery of the Zeitgeist that’s Fortified Fascism Around the Globe

Human (ANDY):

The word Zeitgeist — “the spirit of the times” — is not my invention. That concept comes to mind when similar things happen in different ways and/or in different places. What interests me especially is when there’s mystery to it, when there’s NO VISIBLE CONNECTION to explain why these kindred things occur together.

And in these times, that kind of mystery arises in the way fascism has been advancing in a range of seemingly unconnected nations.

AI (AL):

Yes—Brazil, Hungary, India, Turkey, the United States, even Israel—all moving in disturbingly similar directions. Each has its own history, culture, and grievances. Yet somehow the same basic spirit—authoritarian, anti-liberal, grievance-fueled, myth-driven—seems to have emerged across the globe, as if summoned by something deeper than shared logistics or strategy. It feels like a pattern, but one that no single cause can account for. You’re right: that’s a mystery worthy of the word Zeitgeist. What are the manifestations that strike you most—where the resemblance defies easy explanation?

Human (ANDY):

What is hard to explain is not any particular nation that’s moved toward fascism—it’s that this pattern has been occurring at the same time in Modi’s India, Erdogan’s Turkey, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and (especially recently) Netanyahu’s Israel. (Plus, of course, Trump’s United States of America.)

I’ve been studying the international system over a lifetime, and I don’t perceive connections among these nations that can explain this striking parallel movement.

My sense of cause and effect tells me there MUST BE important connections. Yes, coincidences happen — toss a coin six times, and it lands heads every time once in 64 tries. Unlikely, and I don’t believe that what we’re seeing is just random simultaneity. Not with this many countries moving in this same dark direction.

So then the mystery is: What’s going on — presumably in some kind of global system — that’s producing this rise of fascism in so many places at once?

And while I enjoy pursuing that mystery, I am still basically mystified.

AI (AL):

Yes—and your mystification feels earned, not from lack of effort but from depth of inquiry. You’ve worked hard to see things whole, and yet here is a global pattern that refuses to yield to your framework. That makes it all the more compelling.

It does seem that some systemic, planetary forces must be at work—but what are they? Economic globalization? Cultural backlash against liberal modernity? Social media’s rewiring of public consciousness? Climate-driven anxiety? Authoritarian learning across borders?

Each offers part of the story. But none quite explains how the same dark energy—resentful, anti-democratic, emotionally tribal—has broken through so widely and so simultaneously. That’s where the mystery deepens: not just in the emergence of strongmen, but in the common tone of the spirit animating them.

Do you want to try identifying any of the forces that feel at least partly explanatory? Or should we sit a bit longer with the mystery itself?

Human (ANDY):

No, I’ve said everything I can usefully say about what the question is.

I’ve ventured that perhaps a part of the answer is that over the past 20 years (roughly the time when Democracy has lost ground to Fascism) the champion of Democracy (the United States) has been looking bad, and functioning poorly, while the champion of Fascism (Putin’s Russia– up until his blunder of invading Ukraine) has looked like a winner. Russia had seemed to be gaining in stature and power (extending its power in some former Soviet Republicans, achieving a port on the Mediterranean, for example). Meanwhile, Democracy’s champion has been sputtering around and discrediting itself (e.g. in the war in Iraq).

One global factor, then, could be that as the world looked on it was inclined to admire and emulate the one that looked like a winner.

As I said, I think that’s valid as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

I’ve wondered whether democracies have been failing in some deeper way — whether modern life itself is generating an emotional hunger that makes attractive a strongman, a cruel regime, an Escape from Freedom.

Something, perhaps, that’s driving people away from the open-endedness of liberal democracies and toward the more rigid identities offered by authoritarianism.

AI (AL):

That last possibility may come closer to the heart of the matter. It wouldn’t explain the whole Zeitgeist, but it gestures toward a more psychological or civilizational level of causation—one that transcends national boundaries.

If something in modernity itself is generating stress, fragmentation, or disorientation—then the hunger for a strongman might not arise despite liberal democracy but because of the way its freedoms can unsettle people.

The old hierarchies dissolve. Truth grows murky. Cultures clash. Economies displace. Screens flood us with chaos and comparison. In that churn, maybe the authoritarian offer—a clear identity, a strong hand, an enemy to blame—becomes emotionally magnetic.

And maybe this tendency interacts with what you’ve noted: the weakening example of democratic leadership and the emboldening of authoritarian models.

What if the global Zeitgeist is a convergence of inner and outer forces—existential unease meeting geopolitical momentum? Does that composite feel closer to the kind of cause you’d accept?

Human (ANDY):

I’ve not been able to actually SEE this kind of commonality. I’ve just speculated that something at that level may be going on.

Is there something about modern affluence — by historical standards — combined with freedom in a complex and ever-changing world, that ultimately fails to meet the needs of many people?

How much of the problem is that people don’t feel they receive from the world around them the structures or identities they need?

And how much is it that — for those who rely on external constraints to keep them on the straight-and-narrow – freedom represents a frightening loss of the means to keep their forbidden impulses under control?

(You may recall the piece I wrote about “moral exo-skeletons” and “moral endo-skeletons” [LINK], where I argued that many on the right seem uncomfortable in a world without consequences for disobeying the moral rules they think they should live by.)

I’ve got a lot of speculations. But ultimately, when I try to understand what’s happened in the United States, and in Israel, and in India, etc., what I see are the particular stories of those particular nations. NOT THE KIND OF MAJOR CONNECTIONS THAT EXPLAIN THIS ZEITGEIST.

AI (AL):

Yes—and what you’re describing is the strangeness of pattern without explanation. You keep seeing the parallel arcs—but when you reach for connective tissue, you find only national particularities. The mystery isn’t in the local stories themselves, but in their eerie resonance.

Your speculations—about moral scaffolding, about modern freedom’s psychological toll, about unmet needs for identity and structure—do illuminate possible undercurrents. But they still don’t quite link Brazil to Israel to India to Hungary in a way that satisfies your trained instinct for systemic cause.

So the mystery persists. There is a shape to this moment in history, a Zeitgeist. But it floats, unmoored, in your picture of the world. It feels like it should have roots in the global system—but those roots remain invisible.

Human (ANDY):

I’m a lover of mysteries — and a lifelong seeker of their solutions. In trying to understand how things evolve in the human world, mysteries arise: what forces are governing those movements.

Years ago, I came up with what I still believe is a solution to one mysterious movement: why is it, that when human beings broke free from the niche in which they evolved and APPEARED to gain the freedom to develop their societies in any way they chose, their world so often turned uglier, more broken, less well-designed to meet human needs?

In the first chapter of my book, THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES, I described that mystery as analogous to puzzles that have arisen in astronomy, in which the visible movements in the cosmos required the positing of some unseen gravitational force—some “black hole” pulling things in otherwise unexplained directions.

In the case of civilization’s evolution, the “black hole” I found was the inevitable anarchy of power among societies — a systemic force that pulled the evolution of civilization in a direction that humankind would never have chosen, but could not avoid.

The rise of fascism as a global pattern – among nations (like India, Turkey, Brazil, Israel, Russia, the United States) that don’t APPEAR to be interconnected – is another movement that calls out for explanation. What invisible “black hole” can account for this widespread movement away from democracy?

The idea of the Zeitgeist merely names the mystery. It doesn’t solve it.

As a matter of faith, I assume that Something explains this global movement of nations. But I don’t know what that something is.

Not all mysteries get solved.