Fighting fascism with shifting roles in life
Just finished Peter Pomerantsev’s ‘How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler’ and one of the points made in final chapter is not just about the narratives and communities we share but the identities we hold.
What authoritarians often offer is a stability of role or identity when life seems to be changing too much or too fast. This is comforting and confidence building for people who feel lost when they thought they would be powerful.
What Sefton Delmer (in charge of deceptive propaganda radio stations) was interested in was enabling identities and roles to become exaggerated and ridiculous. To show we choose our personal identities and individual autonomy can be in shifting identities. This relates to modern research, by Shoda, on contextual identities and how people shift and switch dependent on where they are, who they are with and what they are doing.
We help people by showing the roles and categories they are allocated or forced to choose are not all they are. Autonomy and anti-authoritarianism is in playing different roles and recognising those deliberate shifts.