The Psychology Of Defeating Fascism

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Author’s Note: I recently spoke at the 9th Anniversary Event for Indivisible Charlotte on how fighting is winning. The full speech and a follow-up Q&A are both free to watch: Fighting Is Winning and Q&A Session. The Q&A covers ground, my favorite question was “any advice for those of us with a partner who is MAGA?”

In 1967, a psychologist named Martin Seligman locked dogs in a cage and ran electricity through the floor.¹ Some of the dogs had access to a lever that stopped the shocks. Others had nothing. Same cage, same voltage, same pain. The only difference was whether the animal could do something about it. After enough rounds, Seligman moved all the dogs to a new cage where every single one of them could escape simply by jumping over a low partition. The dogs that had learned the lever worked jumped immediately. The dogs that had endured shocks without any way to stop them lay down on the electrified floor and whimpered. Escape was right there. They did not attempt it.

Seligman called this learned helplessness, and he spent the next three decades proving it operates identically in human beings.¹ The mechanism is uncomplicated. When a person experiences repeated failure to control outcomes, their brain stops registering that control is possible, not because they are weak or because they rationally concluded that nothing could be done, but because their neurological wiring updated itself to treat powerlessness as a permanent feature of the environment, the way a thermostat treats temperature. The feeling of helplessness operates more like a setting than an emotion.

This matters right now because millions of people who care deeply about the direction of this country have absorbed a version of that lesson. They have watched democratic norms buckle and institutions fail to hold the powerful accountable. They have called representatives and heard nothing back, donated money and watched nothing change, marched and voted and seen hard-won gains evaporate. Every one of those experiences is a shock with no lever, and enough of them will drive most people to lie down on the electrified floor.

But here is what Seligman also discovered: the setting resets.¹ Learned helplessness is a learned response, which means it responds to new learning. The dogs that had given up could recover, but only one way. Seligman’s team had to physically move the dogs’ legs, dragging them across the cage to safety, over and over, until the animal’s own body re-taught it that movement led to escape. After enough repetitions, the dogs started moving on their own. The experience of acting and seeing a result overwrote the experience of acting and seeing nothing. The lever started working again.

Albert Bandura spent his career studying exactly how that reset works in humans and found something that should change the way we think about political engagement.² The single strongest predictor of whether a person takes action has nothing to do with how scared they are, how informed they are, or how deeply they care. Everything depends on whether they believe their action will produce an effect. Bandura called this self-efficacy, and he identified one source of it that towers above all others: mastery experiences.² Bandura did not mean pep talks or inspirational stories about someone else’s success. He meant moments where a person does something and watches it work. A first phone call to a state legislator’s office, a conversation with a neighbor that shifts their perspective, a local school board meeting where showing up in numbers actually changes a vote. Each one of these moments rewires the brain’s expectations about its own competence. Bandura’s research showed that once a person accumulates enough of them, they stop needing external motivation entirely.² The belief in their own agency becomes self-sustaining.

And that belief, once it takes hold, starts bending reality toward itself. In 1948, the sociologist Robert Merton described what he called the self-fulfilling prophecy, a prediction that causes itself to come true by changing the behavior of the people who believe it.³ Rosenthal and Jacobson confirmed this experimentally: teachers who were told that randomly selected students were poised for intellectual breakthroughs produced exactly those breakthroughs, because belief alone changed how they taught.⁴

Now run that mechanism in reverse. When people believe they cannot win, they stop knocking on doors and showing up at public comment sessions. The phone calls dry up. The donations disappear. The conversations with neighbors about what is happening simply end. And then they lose. Which confirms the belief that started the whole cycle. Despair functions as a machine that produces the political reality it claims to describe. The prediction fulfills itself because people who believe the game is already over change their behavior in concrete, measurable ways.

Which means the inverse is equally mechanical. Acting as though our efforts matter creates the conditions under which they do. Not because the universe rewards positive thinking, but because a person who believes in the lever keeps pressing it, and a person who keeps pressing it accumulates the mastery experiences that Bandura documented, which strengthens their self-efficacy, which keeps them pressing, which changes the environment around them in ways they may never directly observe.

All of this is true, and all of it matters, and none of it reaches the deepest layer of what people are actually struggling with. Because most of us are not really asking “will my actions produce a measurable result.” We are asking something closer to “who am I in this moment, and how do I live inside it.”

Viktor Frankl answered that question from inside a Nazi concentration camp. Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and Dachau, who lost his wife, his mother, and his brother in the camps, and who built a psychological framework from that experience that has endured decades of rigorous study.⁵ He observed that the prisoners who survived psychologically were not the ones who calculated their odds of liberation. They were the ones who found a way to mean something inside the suffering itself. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote, “the last of the human freedoms: to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”⁵

Frankl called his approach logotherapy, from the Greek word logos, meaning purpose.⁵ His central claim was that human beings do not primarily seek pleasure or comfort or even survival. They seek meaning. Frankl argued that between any event and our reaction to it, a space exists where we decide who to be. We cannot always control what happens, but we can widen that space, sit inside it, and choose the response that carries the least suffering and the most purpose. That gap between what hits us and what we do about it is where human freedom actually lives. Few ideas in psychology ask more of a person, and human beings tested this one under the most extreme conditions they ever created, and it held.

Seligman and Bandura answer the practical question: do our actions produce results? Frankl answers the one underneath it: do our actions define who we are? Christopher Bryan and colleagues at Stanford proved that the second frame drives people harder than the first.⁶ Telling someone to “go vote” produces modest results. Telling someone to “be a voter” produces significantly higher turnout.⁶ The difference is that a task can be skipped when it feels pointless. An identity cannot be abandoned without abandoning the self. A person who thinks of themselves as someone who stands up does not need to see results to keep standing, because sitting down would mean becoming someone they do not recognize.

This is the frame that changes everything. Most people alive today live under some form of authoritarianism. That has been true for most of human history. The people we remember across every generation are not the ones who lamented their bad luck at being born into the wrong era. They are the ones who looked at their moment and decided to meet it, not because they ran the numbers and liked their odds, but because they knew who they were and acted accordingly. Every generation that has ever expanded human freedom started with people who simply refused to be the kind of person who accepts the unacceptable, and that refusal, repeated by enough people in enough places, is the actual mechanism by which authoritarian systems crack.

The mechanism behind that cracking is measurable. Nicholas Christakis at Harvard and James Fowler at UC San Diego spent years tracking how behaviors spread through social networks using data from the Framingham Heart Study, and what they found demolishes the idea that individual action is insignificant.⁷ Behaviors propagate through social networks up to three degrees of separation. One person’s decision to act changes the probability that their friends will act, and their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends.⁷ A study published in Nature by Bond and colleagues, using data from 61 million Facebook users, confirmed that social transmission of voting behavior generated roughly 340,000 additional votes in a single election.⁸ No one who cast those additional votes received a phone call explaining that their friend’s friend’s friend had inspired them. The influence was invisible to every person it touched. Which means every act of visible courage, every phone call, every conversation, every refusal to disengage, sends a signal rippling through networks in ways the sender will never see and can never measure. We are pressing levers connected to machinery we cannot see the edges of.

And some of that machinery is closer than most people realize. The majority of Americans cannot name their state house representative, which means they are ignoring the elected officials most accountable to them and most reachable by them. State legislators hold office by margins that a handful of enthusiastic volunteers can swing. They take meetings with constituents. They notice when someone shows up twice. Social media posts, phone calls, and ten people in a room carry real weight at this level because so few people bother. The levers closest to us are the ones almost no one pulls.

This is why process orientation matters so much. If we measure success by whether a single phone call flipped a representative’s vote, we will always feel powerless, because that is not how pressure works. Pressure works through accumulation. A representative who gets 200 calls does not phone each person to say “congratulations, you changed my mind.” But the staffer logging those calls sees the number climb. The rep reviews the tally before the next vote. The calculus shifts. No individual caller “won.” Every individual caller contributed to the conditions that produced the shift. Silence teaches us something. Every call, every email, every public comment is an experiment, and the results tell us what input produces what output. We try different approaches, track what gets a reaction and what falls flat, and adjust. The process works when we treat it as an ongoing study of what moves the machine rather than a single attempt that either succeeds or fails. We judge ourselves by whether we made the call, not whether the call made the news. We judge ourselves by whether we showed up, not whether the cameras were there when we did. That is the process. The outcome is downstream, and it takes care of itself when enough people commit to the process.

The dogs in Seligman’s experiment that learned to press the lever did not press it once and celebrate. They pressed it every time the shock came. The lever did not eliminate the shocks forever. It ended one shock, and then the next shock came, and the dog pressed it again. But the dog that knew the lever worked never stopped pressing it.¹ That is a story about identity. Somewhere between the first press and the hundredth, the dog stopped being an animal that endured shocks and became an animal that stopped them. That same transformation is available right now. We stand up, we fight back a little bit and often, and we bring others along. We do this because the lever works and because we are the kind of people who will never stop pressing it.

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Works Cited

¹ Seligman, M. E. P., & Maier, S. F. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1-9.

² Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.

³ Merton, R. K. (1948). The self-fulfilling prophecy. The Antioch Review, 8(2), 193-210.

⁴ Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

⁵ Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

⁶ Bryan, C. J., Walton, G. M., Rogers, T., & Dweck, C. S. (2011). Motivating voter turnout by invoking the self. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(31), 12653-12656.

⁷ Christakis, N. A., & Fowler, J. H. (2009). Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives. Little, Brown.

⁸ Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295-298.