Fascism Arrives Looking Inevitable: Four Films That Saw The Present Coming

Hello Reader,

Fascism does not announce itself.

It arrives looking efficient. Coordinated. Modern. It arrives with cleaner streets, faster decisions, and the satisfying feeling that, finally, someone is serious. It arrives wearing a uniform that looks better than what came before. It arrives, often, looking inevitable.

This is not a historical observation. It is a live one.

Across the West, the authoritarian turn has not required tanks in the streets. It has required something more durable: language. The language of optimization, of strength, of enemies, and order and civilizational seriousness. The rhetoric is familiar because it is designed to be. It borrows from every prior iteration of itself, compressed into the idiom of the current moment, delivered through systems built to reward repetition over reflection.

You probably noticed it. You probably named it. You may have felt slightly elevated by the naming.

Here is the hard part: that is not enough.

The director who survived the occupation

Paul Verhoeven was born in Amsterdam in 1938.

He did not study the Nazi occupation. He lived inside it, from age two to age seven, while it reorganized the country around him. He watched ordinary life adapt. He watched adaptation become habit. He watched habit become normal until the machinery of control no longer needed to announce itself because it had already become the texture of daily life.

That childhood defined everything that followed.

Between 1987 and 1997, Verhoeven made four American films that functioned as entertainment and as diagnostics. RoboCop. Total Recall. Showgirls. Starship Troopers. Each one smuggled a warning inside a spectacle. Each one watched, from a careful distance, as audiences consumed the critique, named the satire, praised the intelligence, and returned home unchanged.

That was not a failure of communication. It was the argument.

What follows is a working manual for the present. Each film names a mechanism. Each mechanism is alive right now. And for each one, there is a mental mode; a tool for seeing what the mechanism tries to hide.

RoboCop and the boardroom that keeps meeting

The clearest version of the test is the OCP boardroom.

Executives smile through catastrophe. They speak fluently about optimization while a human being is shot in front of them. The meeting continues. The scene is funny because it is obscene, and obscene because it is familiar.

A corporation has absorbed public responsibility. The social contract has been monetized. Human beings are registered as liabilities or assets depending on the quarter's projections.

Critics named this in 1987. Audiences got it. And still the film became an action franchise, a catchphrase, a Halloween costume. The recognition produced no implication. The satire became merch.

That is the first failure mode Verhoeven documented: recognition without consequence.

The boardroom does not feel far from any era in which the government begins speaking in the dialect of efficiency. When public systems are described as clumsy raw material to be restructured, outsourced, and handed back through private contracts in the name of modernization, the language is always the same: streamlining, innovation, better service delivery. The horror of RoboCop is not only violence. It is the conversion of civic obligation into a business model.

The film's hidden argument lives in a detail called Directive 4. Murphy can fight crime, but not the corporation that owns him. He can protect the public right up to the boundary where public protection threatens private power. He is not only a crime-fighting machine. He is a privatized enforcement tool with invisible compliance limits built in from the start.

That is the difference between first-order and second-order thinking.

First-order thinking stops at the pitch: cut waste, move faster, modernize government.

Second-order thinking asks: what habits get installed when public goods are evaluated through private incentives? What disappears when the state starts thinking like a contractor? What happens to workers, due process, and accountability when efficiency becomes the highest good?

The meeting moves on. The question is whether you move with it.

Starship Troopers and the seduction you are supposed to feel

Starship Troopers is where the test becomes most uncomfortable, because this time Verhoeven implicates the audience directly.

He built a world of beautiful uniforms, ecstatic propaganda, militarized citizenship, and violence packaged as belonging. The point was never simply that fascism is brutal. The point was that brutality can feel good. Order feels good. Alignment feels good. Collective identity, moral clarity, sanctioned aggression; these things carry genuine emotional charge. That is part of how they work.

The trap was not that the audience was supposed to notice the symbols. The trap was that the audience was supposed to notice their own willingness to enjoy them.

Most audiences did not notice. They cheered the right characters. They absorbed the spectacle without registering that the spectacle was the message.

Verhoeven was not asking whether you could identify fascist imagery. He was asking something harder: can you detect your own susceptibility to militarized meaning? Can you feel the pull before you excuse it?

The strongest parallel is not any single policy. It is the emotional script that runs underneath policy. When military force is packaged as strength, clarity, and civilizational seriousness, the public is invited to identify with power.

This is where steel-manning becomes essential.

Steel-manning means taking the position you disagree with and building its strongest, most honest version before you engage. Not because you are trying to surrender your beliefs. Because you cannot genuinely test an idea until you understand its best case.

Most people do the opposite. They attack the weakest version of the opposing view, the most convenient version to defeat, and call that critical thinking. It is not.

A belief that survives steel-manning is stronger than one that has only ever defeated straw men. And a mind that practices steel-manning is harder to seduce — because it has already done the work of understanding the draw before the draw arrives.

Verhoeven was not asking whether you could spot fascism from a safe critical distance. He was asking whether you could catch yourself enjoying it from inside the pleasure of watching it. That question does not get easier with time. It gets harder.

Total Recall and the self that was assembled for you

Total Recall goes one level deeper.

A worker lives inside a useful fiction. His sense of self has been edited into compliance. He believes he is choosing freely, but the range of available meaning was narrowed for him before any conscious decision was possible.

The film is about managed consciousness. Not propaganda in the simple sense of messages you are told to believe. Something more fundamental: an environment that shapes what feels possible before argument ever begins. Power that works through identity rather than against it. Control that feels like self-expression.

Nobody is forcing Quaid to believe anything. He inhabits his identity voluntarily. That is exactly the point.

This is not science fiction. The modern version is less dramatic and more ambient: partisan media, algorithmic feeds, repetition, social reinforcement, and the quiet work of branding. It does not feel like control. It feels like personality. It teaches people to feel power before they are invited to think about it. Most people do not wake up in some cinematic flash of clarity. They adapt. They inherit a frame. They mistake repetition for truth and emotional resonance for agency.

First-order thinking says: these are just messages, slogans, vibes, branding, campaign theatrics.

Second-order thinking asks: What kind of person does this media environment produce? What happens when citizens stop evaluating claims and start evaluating whether a claim fits the self they have been taught to inhabit? What happens when emotional alignment arrives before analysis?

The mental model for this is inversion.

Most problem-solving begins with one question: What should I do? Inversion begins with a harder one: if this works exactly as promised, what might it quietly destroy?

Instead of imagining success and moving toward it, you imagine failure and move away from it. Most plans do not fail because they lack ambition. They fail because they contain avoidable errors that no one bothered to examine.

Applied to consciousness: instead of asking what you believe, ask what you would need to believe if you wanted this system to keep running. Then check whether you believe it.

If yes, that is worth examining.

Showgirls and the confession that feeds the machine

Showgirls may be the cruelest test because the audience reenacts the film's thesis in real time.

The film is about a system that extracts from women, packages them, and calls the arrangement glamour. The original reception mirrored that logic exactly. The culture treated the film as a joke. Elizabeth Berkley paid the price.

Decades later, the film gets reassessed. Prestige documentaries confess the abuses of the entertainment industry. The audience streams the confession. The platform benefits.

That does not make confession worthless. Testimony matters. Reappraisal matters. But Showgirls was already asking a harder question: what does it mean when a system can survive its own indictment by repackaging it as content? When does exploitation become prestige, and confession become a new revenue cycle?

This is exploitation's last move. It aestheticizes even its own acknowledgment of harm.

The same mechanism runs in political life. We now live in a culture increasingly comfortable turning humiliation, domination, exposure, and confession into fresh layers of consumable content. Systems learn how to convert harm into spectacle, spectacle into content, and content into renewed attention. The documentary airs. The conversation trends. The system continues.

First-order thinking says: the exposé is working. Accountability is happening.

Second-order thinking asks: What does it mean when a system can confess its own abuses and still profit from the confession? What kind of audience are we becoming if we metabolize exploitation only after it has been repackaged as prestige reflection?

The pattern beneath all four films

Verhoeven made these films as entertainment because entertainment was the only delivery system that could get the warning into the room. If the critique arrived as theory, most people would never sit still for it. So he built the theory into the pleasure itself. He wrapped diagnosis in spectacle, implication in momentum, warning in the thing people had already agreed to enjoy.

Across each film, the structure repeats.

You consume the critique. You recognize the critique. You mistake recognition for escape.

The system does not need you to be silent. It needs you to be fluent in the diagnosis and behaviorally unchanged by it. A culture can become highly literate in its own pathologies and still remain sick. That may be the preferred condition of modern power: a public fluent in critique, addicted to irony, and functionally unchanged.

RoboCop asks whether you can see what happens when public life is handed to private logic.

Starship Troopers asks whether you can feel the seduction of militarized belonging before you excuse it.

Total Recall asks whether the self you call free has been pre-shaped for compliance.

Showgirls asks whether a culture can exploit people, confess it, and call the whole thing entertainment.

The updated test

The real question is not whether you understood the satire.

Not whether you caught the symbolism. Not whether you can map the films onto privatization, authoritarian spectacle, manufactured consent, and prestige exploitation.

The question is this: what does recognizing the pattern require of you now?

Because once you see that the boardroom, the battlefield, the engineered identity, and the prestige reappraisal are all variations of the same mechanism, recognition stops being the finish line.

It becomes the beginning of responsibility.

Independent thinking is not achieved. It is practiced and maintained. Choosing to think for yourself is a radical act. The films are still doing their job.

Re:Mind with Juan Carlos