Building a sustainable moneyless world Andrew Wallace
Introduction
The idea of building a sustainable moneyless future based on holons [koe] has been at the core of EOS’ ideology [design] for the last 20 years (as of writing). It’s odd then that I hadn’t come across “Holacracy” by Brian J. Robertson [hol] until last year and it took until the start of this year for me to read the book. There’s a lot in the book that overlaps with EOS and there is a lot more in the book beyond that. So, I thought I would do an article that both reviews the book and looks at how it fits in with EOS’ ideas for the future.
A quick overview of “Holacracy” by Brian J. Robertson
The book advertises it self as “The revolutionary management system that abolishes hierarchy”, which, I would say, is partly true. Holacracy is revolutionary but we still have hierarchy (at least for now). The system presented in the book is aimed at business management and is a holonic based decentralised and adaptive structure that focuses on governance and processes but not people (and the book emphasises that point multiple times). It is a system where power and authority is distributed to those people who do the work, as the book says “the person on the front line has the authority”. In contrast to the top down way most companies are run. The introduction explains holons and holacracy as circles within circles. In holacracy, a “circle” is a holon.
After introducing holacracy, the book then goes on to talk about governance. Governance is about dealing with the way the holacracy is organised. The book outlines how that works within holacracy and the meeting structure that it uses. The way meetings are structured allows everyone to contribute and help to clearly define roles, authority, and expectations. Note “roles”. In holacracy, roles come with authority and responsibilities. People are then assigned roles. Role information and who has what role is well documented so everyone knows who has what responsibilities and authority within a holon / circle.
Operations are what the company does. They are handled in tactical meetings. And like governance, like governance meetings, give everyone the opportunity to contribute. The book gives examples of how these meetings operate.
One thing I found interesting is the idea of “tension”. In holacracy, a “tension” is either an opportunity or a problem and they are both handled the same way. They are the “gap between how things are and how they could be”, as the book says. People see an opportunity or a problem and they can propose a course of action to resolve the problem or exploit the opportunity. And it is through this process of resolving tensions in the governance and tactical meetings that the organisation adapts and evolves. The dynamic nature of a holacracy is one of its strengths. Decision making is distributed and close to where the action is needed making for quick and well focused decisions. As the book says “[e]ach tension human beings sense is a sign-post telling us how the organization could evolve to better express its purpose”. All this is wrapped up in the constitution, a document that lays out how the holacracy works.
The last part of the book deals with installing a holacracy. As a holacracy is a revolutionary way to organise it can have a steep learning curve and there can be opposition for more conservative minds and from those who don’t want to distribute their power and authority. The book discusses these types of problems.
Here are a few quotes from the book :
“Holacracy moves from structuring the people to structuring the organization’s roles and functions”.
“Evolution is an algorithm; it is an all-purpose formula for innovation”.
“… the focus is always on quickly reaching a workable decision …”
“… an organization’s design is an emergent result of an evolutionary algorithm …”
“… govern the organization’s work and its roles not the people.”
Holacracy and EOS’ Approch
In EOS, a holon is based around a task. Multi-skilled teams are then formed to achieve the given task. The team organises itself and it own work. Anyone can form a holon if they see a task that needs to be done so long as that holon works towards the common goal. This is how the technical side of a technate is managed. Holons within holons within holons all focusing on building a sustainable moneyless society. Holons are also the foundation of building the people side of the technate. This type of holonic structure is very dynamic, holons are formed as and when they are needed and disbanded when the task has been accomplished. Like holacracy, EOS’s system of holons distributes authority, power, and responsibilities throughout the system so that people who know what they are doing make the decisions. However, EOS’s system does differ from holacracy in one major aspect. In holacracy we have more a formal structure with meetings, definitions of rolls, and responsibilities.
Conclusion
I think the more formal structure of holacracy does have its advantages. Structure gives clarity. One of the difficulties with holons is that it is not a familiar form of governance. Thus, people can have trouble understanding it and how it works. Having a more formal structure could help with that. Something that EOS should try?
Why do we need a theory framework about Human Rights?
The reason why is of course that to achieve sustainability, we need to focus not only on the environment, but also on the well-being of our own species. We need to establish a framework from with which we could establish foundational, universal norms.
The question then arises, why is it so that the current Universal Human Rights as defined by the United Nations, are insufficient?
Insufficiency, I would argue, is the wrong word. I would rather call it an inadequacy, which stems from the intellectual firmaments of the contemporary theory of rights. The problem is not so much the rights in themselves, as the rails of reasoning from which this contemporary western concept of rights have emanated, and the regressive effects it has – especially regarding the in some cases non-existent border between real human beings of flesh and blood, and what really amounts of abstract concepts. If we do have the goal of creating a sustainable future for humanity, our ideology must have a theory of rights on its own.
TL;DR Summary
While a concept of rights have existed since ancient times, the contemporary view on rights were expanded on from the establishment of Lockean “natural laws” in the 17th century.
These “natural laws” based the theory of early human rights from the concept of property rights. In short, all rights are derived from human self-ownership.
Thus, rights are primarily seen as an individual endeavour, aimed at granting all citizens universal protection from violence.
Since that, what rights are has been expanded quite much, but most of the intellectual foundations could be traced back to Locke.
This does however also grant entities such as corporations most of the same rights, while denying for example non-human individuals any rights whatsoever.
Moreover, property is ultimately an abstract concept gradually evolved during the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agrarian civilization.
We argue that rather than property, we could base the concept of rights on relationships.
A short history, from the Enlightenment to the United Nations
Human rights emanate from a concept called “natural rights”, which was defined by the English philosopher John Locke. The concept entails that human beings are endowed rights independent from state power – namely negative rights, which are defined in terms of the ownership of property. These property rights transcend the idea of being legally founded – instead they are viewed as a priori divinely ordained. Locke’s philosophy was partially derived from the experiences of the English Civil War and how state power was abused in the 17th century during the inter-religious conflicts of contemporary Europe, and partially a rebuttal to Hobbes’ Leviathan – a philosophical work with the opposing view that all legitimacy stemmed from state power, legalistically vested in the concept of commonwealth. Locke’s foundational idea is that each individual is self-owning, and is also owning the land with which they mix their labour (hunter-gatherers and natives are however exempt from that in Locke’s vision, as they do not cultivate the land on which they live).
Until the 19th century, the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition very much focused on negative rights, which stated that human beings were endowed with a right to not be the object of confiscatory or aggressive actions from other human beings or from violence executed by a political power – as long as the human in question did not violate the rights of any other human being. During the time when the agricultural civilisation slowly turned into an industrial one, positive rights – like limiting work hours, retirement funds, education and the right to shelter were introduced and gradually expanded into varying types of social safety nets.
In summary, human beings have rights because they are endowed with reason, which gives them self-ownership, an inviolable ownership contract on their own bodies. This remains the foundation for human rights until this day.
What are the problems with that?
There are obvious problems with deriving an ought from the ability to possess reason and from the legal concept of property. Firstly, natural rights work as a theoretical intellectual game, but in reality the concept of property evolved gradually and slowly. Early, pre-agricultural human societies did not even have a concept of personal property – rather the land was seen as a conscious being which owned itself. Thus, the concept of rights in the current western tradition is based on the idea that a human-constructed metaphysical concept somehow preceded humanity (the early enlightenment philosophers were all Christians or at least deists, so they presupposed the existence of a creator who had established universal laws before human beings and based these laws on rational foundations – while the creator was relegated away from worldly affairs with secularism, the underpinnings are still largely built on that assumption).
The problem that inevitably arises with a concept of rights based on property rights as a foundation, is that property legally can own itself, and thus be bestowed personhood. When for example a corporation poisons the water reservoirs of a district and thus ruins tens of thousands of subsistence farmers, it is usually treated as a mere conflict of interest in a judicial manner, rather than as a crime against humanity. When a corporation handles genetically modified crops irresponsibly, thus ensuring that they spread and grow in adjacent farming communities, and then sue the farmers for “pirating” the trade-marked crops, it is actually taken seriously by several institutions. The prevalent consensus of our age has been that corporations are endowed with the natural right to take possession of land, freshwater reservoirs and other resources and handle them in manners which hurt not only the environment but local populations as well.
Of course, positive rights are also enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration, but the prevalent tendency in most national legislations has been to interpret the utilisation of human rights within legal framework in a manner which clearly shows that property rights trump the other rights. The practice seems to indicate that, which hardly is surprising. After all, multi-national corporations have resources which states and politicians need, while poor subsistence farmers have nothing to offer.
We should of course not omit to mention the billions of non-human beings used in the global meat and dairy industry. Most mammals on our planet, excluding us humans of course, belong to a limited number of domesticated species, mostly utilised for the sake of their meat, their milk or their eggs. Oftentimes, they are forced into conditions where they are fixated on one spot, are enduring intense, blinding light uninterruptedly, are fed with fast-growth fodder or even pumped with hormones to grow extra fast, and are unable to fulfil aspects of their natural behaviour. They are moreover exposed to situations where they are overfed to the point of being bloated, where they are suffering from unhealthy amounts of sulphur from their own un-cleaned cages, where they are gnawing on the tails and ears of one another, where many succumb to illnesses even before slaughter and where they are exposed to anxiety and mental agony.
Yet animals are said to have no rights, because they cannot own property – because they do not possess reason. This has historically legitimised animal cruelty and has in our age contributed to the near complete industrialisation of livestock existence. While it is clear that there are other factors behind this horrendous manner of treating living beings, it is clear that our current concept of rights does not take their interests into assumption.
A new foundation for a Theory on Rights – Relationships
Rights are not a matter of facts but of values. And values are shaped by culture and philosophy, concepts which are created and upheld by human beings. This does not mean that such concepts are just ‘abstract’ or can be violated at whim, only that there is – to our knowing – no external force which will establish right from wrong. Thence, we are for better or worse endowed with the duty to define the values on which we should build a theory on rights.
There are however a few conditions on which these values must be built. Firstly, they must be consequential and built on equal rules for all human beings. Secondly, they must be able to provide at a minimum equal safety and liberty as the current model of rights, and strive to be able to offer better protection.
It is essential that rights should be understood in more than a legalistic framework – that they should be seen as a part of the culture rather than as an extension of legislative processes. Rather than being supported by laws, a concept of rights should per definition be supporting the spirit of any legislative processes. When transcending the current foundations for a theory on rights, we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater, and we must build on the civic experiences of two thousand years of western civilization, in terms of the idea that the protection of the individual should not stand or fall at the whim of anyone faction with the ability to inflict trauma through the command of violence. Therefore, just like our current idea of rights, the new foundation of rights need to be founded on the idea that rights should be seen as underpinning the legal foundations of society.
Pre-legality or “supra-legality” is however not the only condition which is necessary to define rights. They must be derived from an aspect of human existence, which should be universally understood and possible for the consistent application of equal rules. The definitions of rights established by Locke managed to achieve this goal by defining the term “self-ownership”, which despite its problems has managed to form the basis of a consistent value-system.
We argue that rights as a concept emerge:
Whenever sapient beings interact with one another.
Whenever a sapient being interacts with a sentient being.
Whenever an organised institution governed or programmed by sapient beings interacts with either sapient or sentient beings.
Sapience is defined as the ability to have conscious self-awareness of one self and others, and to be able to reason empathically. If a being has these characteristics, it follows that the being should be treated with respect and not willingly or by neglect exposed by others to conditions which endanger the health of the being in question. It also follows, since all sapient beings are defined as equal in dignity, that this sapient being should not expose others to the same conditions.
These conditions are defined as following:
Direct, unprovoked use of physical force to inflict pain or dominate a sapient being against their will.
Manipulation with the intent to force a sapient being to do something against their will or their interests.
Situations where sapient beings are being deprived of shelter, nutrients, water which inhibit their ability to function physically, cognitively or socially.
Situations where sapient beings are being deprived of safety and/or exposed to threatening situations or situations characterised by wanton coercion and arbitrary rules.
Another principle is that a human being is not defined as consisting only of the human mind and the human body, but as the access to the water, nutrients and shelter that a human body needs to continue to function. Therefore, every human being has a right to nourish themselves and to (have a place to) sleep. Within the framework of a traditional propertarian narrow view on rights, these conditions are seen as an individual responsibility rather than inalienable rights – but if these conditions aren’t met, the human being can seldom be able to fully satisfy these conditions which are necessary to function. Our belief, on the contrary, is that if a human being has the right to life, then the human being must per definition have the rights to the minimum requirements to sustain their physical life.
Practical applications
This new foundation of rights, which are derived from our sapience, is still going to protect property – but not as the end in itself, rather as an extension of the interrelational principles established by these rights. They will also mean that property rights no longer will trump the rights to life, and that land-owners, mining companies and industrial operations will find a harder time motivating why they have to create conditions which endanger the life, health and well-being of their employees or of those living nearby the places where they conduct their activities. Thus, they will provide a stronger and more equal protection, without having to rely on so many additional concepts and regulations.
It also means that property should be treated more as it de-facto must be already today. While no one arbitrarily may be deprived from what they own, and every person must be given a say in decisions pertaining their interests, there can arise issues where property needs to be transferred.
With a system of rights defined from relationships, we can establish a basis for a more equal system where every individual gains a more level opportunity to be represented and protected.
Animal Rights
Most animals have a significantly lower level of cognitive development than human beings, though there are a few which have approached or might even have reached a proto-sapient or sapient level of understanding reality. Therefore, bears, wolves, crocodiles, hippos and even domesticated animals like dogs cannot be expected to be able to honour interrelational rights.
However, all animals are sentient to the level that they are able to feel pain, anxiety and fear, and also experience things which they find more agreeable. Because of that, sentient creatures do have a right to not be exposed to cruelty by sapient creatures – and they do have a right to the pursuing of their natural behaviour. This right emanates from the fact that when we are interacting with a sentient creature, there is a relationship between our actions and the effects they will have on said creature. If we have the power to affect the well-being of another living being, we also have the responsibility in case we create unnecessary suffering.
Domesticated animals which are exploited in various forms of agricultural and social tasks can also be said to gain rights because we force responsibilities upon said animals. Sheep, cows, pigs and horses have not volunteered to be utilised as sources for heat preservation or nutrition. It follows from this that those who utilise animals have a responsibility to ensure that the animals should not suffer.
In short, while a system of rights where all rights could trace themselves back to property rights inherently privileges the owners of industrial farms, fur farms and other operations dependent on the economic utilization of sentient beings, a system of rights based on relational rights empowers those who – quite literally – lack voices to articulate their feelings.
Summary
What separates rights from privileges is the foundation that rights need to be applied equally and consistently, and be founded on norms and values which go deeper than the court of temporary public opinion (a court which could demand the gelding of sexual predators, unless these aforementioned predators happens to be local junior sports heroes).
Since rights need to be applied in such a manner, they need to be based on a consistent, universal fundament of ethics – one which could guarantee the protection of individuals and communities.
The liberal basis – Lockean Natural Rights – which denotes property as the fundament upon which all other rights rest, has been the least bad attempt until now to establish a consistent foundation of rights. However, they have been found lacking in several aspects.
Conditions which indirectly cause suffering and negative physical and cognitive effects are not viewed as violation of these natural rights.
When the exertion of property rights cause suffering to human beings or to sentient beings, no matter whether we talk about Central American debt slaves or pigs in an industrial operation, these property rights usually trump the suffering of those without voices.
Corporations and other abstract entities are awarded rights which should be meant for human beings.
Non-human beings are not seen as having any rights.
Attempts have been made to install a concept of positive rights into this propertarian model, but there have been little to none attempts to reconcile the concept of natural rights with the later additions, thus often rendering them impotent and incapable of consistently being applied since their application would often come at odds with property rights.
Relational Rights, on the contrary, are capable of dealing with all these problems. They do not see property as an inherent axiom predating even the material basis of the Universe, but rather choose to focus on the relations between beings on various levels. Whenever a sapient being interacts – directly or indirectly – with another sapient being, it establishes mutual obligations between the parties. This goes beyond actions that directly affect the bodies of said individuals. It also establishes obligations on sapient beings interacting with beings that are sentient – to not expose them to cruelty and to the best ability ensure their right to their natural behaviour.
Of course, relational rights recognise the right to self-defence if another party is initiating direct aggression. Equally of course, relational rights would – as well as propertarian rights – see that there is an opportunity for conflict, when two sets of rights are in opposition to one another within the same ethical system. That is not a weakness, since such conflicts would arise no matter what kind of ethical system we would employ. These rights are however not fraught with the weaknesses listed above, and their execution would allow for a more thorough and equal treatment of individuals, communities and even species.
The image above is, at first glance, almost amusing. It is a familiar kind of social-media screed, written in all caps, heavy with expletives and indignation, expressing a sense of cultural suffocation and personal grievance. Anyone who spends even a modest amount of time online will have encountered dozens of variations of it. The tone is petulant, the demands are oddly specific, and the outrage appears simultaneously exaggerated and banal.
For readers unfamiliar with Swedish, the text reads as follows:
**NOW DAMN IT I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF THE STUPIDITY…………
I CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS HOW I WANT NO DAMN IDIOT SHOULD BUTT IN. I EAT GINGERBREAD COOKIES AS MUCH AS I DAMN WELL WANT. I WANT TO SEE GINGERBREAD MEN IN THE LUCIA PROCESSION. I WANT TO SEE CHILDREN IN SANTA COSTUMES. I WANT TO SEE CHILDREN IN CHURCH AT SCHOOL GRADUATIONS. I WANT TO CELEBRATE MY HOLIDAYS THE WAY I WANT. I WANT TO HAVE MY TRADITIONS THAT I’VE ALWAYS HAD.
TO HELL WITH MY HERRING AND A SHOT ON MIDSUMMER’S EVE.
AND ONE MORE THING IT’S CALLED A “NIGGER BALL” SO THAT’S THAT OH HOW GOOD IT IS**
Stripped of its local references, the structure of the message is immediately recognisable. This is not merely a Swedish phenomenon. Variants of the same rhetoric can be found across the contemporary Western world: in comment sections, in viral posts, in campaign slogans, and increasingly in the language of political actors themselves. What differs are the symbols invoked; what remains constant is the posture.
The roots of this mode of expression arguably lie in the culture-war politics that crystallised in the United States during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and which have since diffused outward through global media ecosystems. Since I published Globalism contra Nationalism roughly a decade ago, this tendency has accelerated. The world has continued to slide toward forms of neo-nationalism, hardened identity politics, and a geopolitical climate marked by increasing mistrust and a growing risk of large-scale conflict.
Much ink has been spilled debating whether this development represents a resurgence of fascism, or merely a return to older forms of conservatism. Such debates, while understandable, are of limited analytical value. The kind of “I WANT” discourse exemplified above does not map cleanly onto either tradition. It is something else—less disciplined, less civic, and less intellectually coherent, but no less consequential for that.
At first glance, this form of politics appears disengaged, unserious, even harmless. It presents itself as nothing more than an insistence on personal preference and cultural familiarity. Yet history offers ample reason to be cautious with political cultures that elevate appetite, grievance, and identity while shedding obligation, restraint, and moral universality. Beneath its seemingly innocuous surface, this mode of politics has the potential to drift into far darker territory.
To understand why, it is necessary to examine how contemporary right-wing populism differs—structurally and morally—from both conservatism and twentieth-century fascism. That examination begins below.
Conservatism
Conservatism, in its classical European sense, did not begin as an ideology of anger, nor as a defence of personal preference. It emerged as a philosophy of continuity, shaped most clearly by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century, and later refined through a long interaction with Christian ethics, inherited institutions, and local customs. At its core lay a simple but demanding insight: societies are fragile achievements, not abstract constructions, and must therefore be treated with care.
Burke’s conservatism was not nostalgic in the shallow sense. It did not idealise the past as a frozen tableau, nor did it deny that change was sometimes necessary. What it insisted upon was that change should be organic, cautious, and respectful of accumulated wisdom. Traditions were not ornaments, nor consumer goods, but living practices handed down across generations. They carried obligations as well as comforts. To inherit a tradition was to become its temporary custodian, charged with passing it on—intact, meaningful, and dignified—to those who would follow.
In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, this conservative worldview was closely intertwined with Christian ethics. In Sweden, as elsewhere, Lutheranism shaped a moral culture that emphasised restraint, duty, humility, and social responsibility. The individual was never imagined as standing alone. Family, parish, guild, and nation formed a layered moral ecology in which rights were inseparable from obligations. Even those who rejected religious belief often retained its ethical grammar: the idea that one’s conduct in public reflected one’s character, and that self-control was a civic virtue.
Against this background, it is not difficult to imagine how Edmund Burke would have reacted to the “I WANT” screed. He would not have recognised it as a defence of tradition at all. He would have seen in it a collapse of manners, a confusion of inheritance with entitlement, and a profound misunderstanding of what traditions are for. Rage, vulgarity, and obsessive self-assertion would have signalled not strength, but moral immaturity. For Burke, legitimate traditions did not need to be shouted into existence; they endured precisely because they were embedded in shared practice and mutual recognition.
Nor would the reaction have been very different among ordinary Swedes of earlier generations, regardless of class. A farmer, a factory worker, a schoolteacher, or a civil servant in early twentieth-century Sweden would likely have perceived such a screed as embarrassing rather than empowering. Public tantrums were not political statements; they were signs of poor upbringing. The insistence on personal desire, detached from consideration for others, would have been read as selfishness and petulancy.
Classical conservatism understood traditions as something to be nurtured—through participation, respect, and a willingness to subordinate personal impulse to communal meaning. Traditions survived because people showed up, learned the forms, accepted their limitations, and found dignity within them. The “I WANT” screed inverts this relationship entirely. Traditions are no longer practices one belongs to, but commodities one consumes. They are treated as personal possessions, owned individually rather than held in common, and valued only insofar as they deliver immediate emotional gratification.
In this sense, the screed is less a defence of heritage than a symptom of late consumer culture. It resembles the disappointment of tourists in Norrland who feel cheated when the northern lights fail to appear on schedule, or the bewilderment of visitors to Yellowstone who ask park rangers when the grizzly bears will be holding their parade, or when the geysers are going to be turned on. Nature, in these cases, is mistaken for a theme park; tradition, in the screed, is mistaken for a product.
What emerges is a form of egocentric consumerism applied to culture itself. Customs are stripped of context, obligation, and shared meaning, reduced instead to objects of individual demand. This is not merely alien to conservatism—it is antithetical to it. A conservative tradition grounded in stewardship, restraint, and reverence would find little to recognise, and much to abhor, in a politics that treats inherited culture as something to be owned, consumed, and angrily defended as private property.
In this light, the “I WANT” screed does not represent a continuation of conservative thought, but its negation. It signals not the preservation of tradition, but the hollowing out of tradition under the logic of consumer desire—a logic that conservatism, at its best, existed precisely to resist.
Fascism
Contemporary nationalism in the Western world—whether carried by movements that present themselves as populist outsiders or by parties with clearer roots in neo-fascist traditions—draws much of its emotional energy from the sentiments encapsulated in the “I WANT” screed. This is true even when the ideological genealogy of these movements differs. The affective core is the same: resentment, cultural anxiety, and a sense of personal dispossession framed as political grievance.
If the screed is not conservatism, the question naturally arises: is it fascism?
At first glance, the temptation to answer yes is understandable. Fascism and National Socialism remain the historical reference points for any discussion of militant nationalism, and for good reason. These ideologies produced catastrophic violence, genocidal policies, and an unprecedented collapse of moral restraint. Any serious analysis must begin by condemning them unequivocally.
Yet an honest examination also requires intellectual precision. Early twentieth-century fascism and National Socialism were not merely reactionary tantrums directed at a changing world. They were profoundly modernist movements in their own way. While they rejected Enlightenment liberalism, parliamentary democracy, and universalism, they were forward-looking, revolutionary, and animated by visions of radical transformation. They imagined a future defined by duty, hierarchy, discipline, and collective effort. They demanded sacrifice—not only from designated enemies, but from their own populations. They promised meaning through submission, belonging through obedience, and transcendence through struggle.
This distinction matters.
Fascist politics revolved around the idea of the nation as an organism greater than any individual. The citizen was not a consumer of tradition, but raw material for a national project. Personal desires were to be crushed, sublimated, or redirected toward collective goals. Suffering was not denied; it was glorified. Comfort was not a right; it was a weakness. The language of fascism was not “leave me alone,” but “tell me what must be done.”
Against this background, it is worth asking how the leading figures of twentieth-century fascism and National Socialism would have viewed the “I WANT” screed. The answer is unlikely to flatter contemporary right-wing populists. Their objection would not primarily have been to the word want, but to the word I. The screed’s obsessive focus on personal desire, private gratification, and individual entitlement would have appeared decadent, bourgeois, and contemptible. The author would not have been seen as a defender of the nation, but as a symptom of the very moral decay these movements claimed to oppose.
Where the “I WANT” screed demands that the world stop interfering with personal preference, fascism demanded the annihilation of the private self in service of a higher collective. Where the screed clings to comfort, fascism demanded endurance. Where the screed frames tradition as a personal possession, fascism treated tradition as a weapon to be reforged for a new historical destiny.
In this sense, the “I WANT” posture is not fascism revived, but something more hollow. It lacks the grim seriousness, the tragic ambition, and the perverse moral coherence that characterised fascist ideologies. This does not make it benign. On the contrary, it makes it unstable. Detached from duty, sacrifice, and collective responsibility, the politics of appetite floats freely, ready to be captured, redirected, and weaponised by actors far more disciplined than those who initially voice it.
The danger, then, is not that the “I WANT” screed represents a faithful continuation of fascist thought. It is that it creates a moral vacuum in which far darker projects can later take root. Fascism, for all its horrors, still believed in adulthood. The politics of unrestrained desire does not.
Pre-Politics and the Infantilisation of Public Life
The sentiments expressed in the “I WANT” screed are, at their core, not political. They are pre-political, and in an important sense also pre-adult. They do not articulate interests, propose solutions, or engage with competing claims in a shared civic space. Instead, they operate on a level prior to politics altogether: the level of unmediated desire.
To illustrate this distinction, it is useful to recall a small but telling pedagogical experiment. At a middle school, teachers once decided that fourth-graders should learn about democracy by forming political parties. The result was predictable and revealing. Instead of programs or policies, the children formed entities such as The Ice-Cream Is Good Party and The Girls Smell Poop Party. These “parties” were not designed to govern, negotiate, or persuade in any meaningful sense. They were performative identity statements. Their purpose was not to build coalitions or win elections, but to signal belonging, humour, provocation, or personal taste.
To a troubling extent, contemporary Western identity politics—particularly on the populist right—has adopted a similar mode of expression. Instead of saying this is what our material interests are, and this is how we intend to pursue them politically, the message increasingly becomes this is what I like, because this is who I am. Political speech collapses into personal branding. Identity ceases to be relational and becomes declarative.
This shift cannot be understood without reference to consumerism. In earlier social orders, identity was embedded in networks of obligation: family, profession, community, church, union. These structures were often restrictive and imperfect, but they grounded the individual in a web of mutual expectations and responsibilities. Consumer society, by contrast, has steadily degraded identity into a bundle of preferences. To be someone is to like certain things, dislike others, and signal these affinities through consumption. Meaning is no longer something one builds or inherits; it is something one selects from a shelf.
Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that identity markers begin to function like cargo cults. When meaning is scarce, symbols become sacred. When life feels hollow, rituals are clung to with desperate intensity. The removal, alteration, or even questioning of such markers is no longer experienced as a cultural evolution, but as a personal assault. The stakes feel existential, because nothing deeper has been allowed to take their place.
What follows is a broader infantilisation of politics. The citizen is recast as a consumer, and politics as a service industry tasked not only with delivering material outcomes, but with maintaining certain emotional states. People come to expect not merely protection of rights, but protection from discomfort. When this expectation is frustrated, the response is not organised opposition or political engagement, but petulant and impotent rage—rage that cannot be satisfied by compromise or policy, and which therefore seeks its outlet in cruelty toward groups that do not share the same preferences.
There is also a demographic dimension to this phenomenon that is rarely acknowledged. Much of this discourse appears among people whose basic material needs are already met. They live comparatively comfortable lives, often as retirees or semi-retirees, buffered from economic precarity and insulated from the harsher consequences of political decisions. Yet comfort has not brought contentment. Instead, it has produced boredom, alienation, and a gnawing sense of meaninglessness. In the absence of purpose, anxiety metastasises. The result is not despair, but paranoia: a fixation on symbolic slights, imagined losses, and trivial changes framed as civilisational threats—such as the fear that “Merry Christmas” might be replaced by “Happy Holidays”.
The most serious problem, however, is not the existence of such sentiments, but their social acceptance. What was once recognised as childish petulance is increasingly legitimised as political expression. Worse still, it has become an effective tactic for garnering votes. By amplifying grievance, flattering resentment, and validating emotional impulsivity, political actors are rewarded electorally—while substantive issues are left untouched.
In Sweden, this has had concrete consequences. While public debate is consumed by symbolic culture-war skirmishes, successive governments have allowed foreign mining, IT, and energy companies to extract enormous value from national resources, often at the expense of local communities and long-term sovereignty. The spectacle of identity outrage serves as a smokescreen, diverting attention from decisions that materially shape the future of the country.
The “I WANT” screed, then, is not a coherent ideology. It is a symptom: of consumerism hollowing out identity, of comfort eroding civic adulthood, and of a political culture that has forgotten how to translate private feeling into public responsibility. Left unchecked, this pre-political rage does not remain harmless. In a world of finite resources and mounting crises, it becomes fertile ground for far more destructive forces.
Metastasis
Once, while working as a substitute teacher in a ninth-grade mathematics class, I was tasked with explaining statistics and percentages. Toward the end of the lesson, I introduced a simple applied exercise. I told the students that humanity currently consumes resources at a rate equivalent to roughly 1.7 Earths per year—that we are running an ecological deficit, drawing down stocks that cannot be replenished. I then asked a straightforward question: how should such a problem be addressed?
I expected suggestions along familiar lines. Reduced extraction. Technological innovation. Changes in consumption patterns. Perhaps even population control—an intellectually lazy answer, but one that at least acknowledged the existence of limits. Instead, after a moment of hesitation, a loud minority of boys offered a different solution altogether. The populations of India, China, and Africa, they said, should simply be wiped out. Consumption would plummet, and they could continue to live as they were accustomed to.
The remark was not made with theatrical cruelty. It was delivered casually, almost pragmatically, as if proposing the removal of an inconvenience. And in that casualness lay its significance. This, in distilled form, represents the end point of “I WANT” politics.
When ecological conditions deteriorate and abstract debates are replaced by concrete constraints, societies are forced to choose. Such moments demand civic responsibility, social obligation, and a willingness to accept sacrifice in the name of shared survival. What we increasingly lack, however, is precisely that moral infrastructure. Instead, we find populations—particularly in the affluent West—who have been sheltered from material scarcity for generations, and who react to even minor disruptions of comfort with disproportionate outrage.
This is not the politics of citizenship. It is not even the politics of interest. It is anti-politics: the howl of individuals who have been trained to understand themselves primarily as consumers, and who experience any limit as a personal affront. These are not impoverished masses fighting for survival, but what might accurately be described as decadent labour aristocrats—people whose basic needs are met, whose lives are saturated with consumption, and whose primary emotional register is boredom mixed with anxiety.
The danger lies not in their anger, but in its directionlessness. When meaning has been reduced to lifestyle, and identity to status markers, then preserving those markers becomes an absolute priority. The question is no longer what must we do together, but what must be destroyed so that I may continue as before. Under such conditions, cruelty ceases to be a moral transgression and becomes a technical solution.
This is why the “I WANT” politics cannot be understood as conservative or fascist. They are reactionary in a far more literal sense: reactive, impulsive, and unmediated by ethical reflection. They resemble, more than anything else, the sentiments of depraved eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landed aristocracies, who believed themselves entitled to the fruits of privilege while rejecting the social obligations that once justified it. When confronted with famine, revolt, or ecological ruin, such elites did not ask how to reform the system, but how to insulate themselves from its consequences.
Western consumerism has produced a similarly disassociated individual. A person taught that the meaning of life lies in the accumulation of experiences and goods, and that society exists to provide them. As ecological reality begins to unravel—through climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion—this worldview collides violently with the limits of the planet. The result is not collective adaptation, but a retreat into paranoia, resentment, and increasingly brutal fantasies of exclusion.
The metastasis of “I WANT” politics is therefore not accidental. It is the predictable outcome of a culture that has stripped identity of obligation and politics of adulthood. In a finite world, such a culture does not merely fail to solve problems. It begins to search for victims.
