Fascistic hierarchy in everyday life

Fascistic hierarchy in everyday life names a habit of turning inequality into moral rank: the strong, talented, or socially assured appear naturally entitled to stand above the weak. The book does not use the term only for explicit neo-Nazism or programs of extermination. It locates the more ordinary version in everyday judgments and encounters, then tests it against an ethic that questions whether people can meaningfully be ranked at all.

From an insult to a way of seeing

The concept emerges from Emmanuel Carrère’s account of Werner Herzog’s response to an admiring young film buff. Herzog had not read the young man’s book, yet, as Carrère recounts it, he calmly and gratuitously offended him. A friend’s concise response was that the experience might teach Carrère not to admire fascists. The sting of the anecdote lies in the contrast Carrère draws: Herzog could summon intense sympathy for deaf and mute Aboriginal people or schizophrenic vagabonds, while treating a bespectacled young admirer as a bug to be morally squashed. Sympathy for some people, in this reading, does not prevent contempt for others; the everyday hierarchy appears in the selective distribution of regard.

Carrère uses the encounter to approach what he calls the roots of fascism, but carefully limits the claim. At its extreme, hierarchy becomes a scandalous world divided between Übermenschen and Untermenschen, Aryans and Jews. His subject here is not that explicit racial doctrine, extermination, or even Herzog’s particular disdain. It is the ordinary response to the evident fact that people are unequal: some are more beautiful, more talented, or better prepared for struggle. The decisive movement is from noticing differences to accepting them as the world’s final, self-justifying order.

Inequality presented as reality

Carrère places Nietzsche and Limonov beside this extreme moral stance: all three, in his account, affirm that unequal conditions are simply reality as it is. The opposing position is dismissed by the hierarchy-minded person as pious falsehood, left-wing otherworldliness, or political correctness. The disagreement is therefore not only about whether inequalities exist. It concerns what follows from them: whether description becomes permission to rank people, and whether moral resistance to that ranking is merely a lie told to soften reality.

The book’s definition keeps the term distinct from a claim that every recognition of difference is fascist. Carrère expressly sets aside extermination and neo-Nazism, and identifies his concern as a moral stance embedded in ordinary responses to unequal lives. That qualification matters: the concept tracks the conversion of difference into superiority and inferiority, rather than treating every distinction as equivalent to political extremism.

A counter-ethic of non-ranking

Against the claim that hierarchy is simply reality, Carrère offers Christianity’s inversion of worldly scale: in the Kingdom, the least is the greatest. He also invokes a Buddhist sutra first brought to his attention by his friend Hervé Clerc. Its proposition is that a person who judges themselves superior, inferior, or even equal to another does not understand reality. These alternatives do not merely reverse the ranking and place the formerly low at the top. They challenge the impulse to measure the self against another person in the first place.

Carrère acknowledges how difficult that challenge is to absorb. It may depend on a doctrine that treats the ego as an illusion; without that premise, counterexamples arise readily. His example is the common judgment that Mahatma Gandhi is morally superior to the pedophile and murderer John Wayne Gacy. Even Buddhists, he notes, insist on distinguishing righteous from depraved conduct. Moral distinctions therefore remain, but they do not settle the deeper question of whether a person should continually locate themselves above, below, or level with everyone else.

Carrère presents the sutra’s proposition as wisdom rather than an easy rule. He says that he himself repeatedly establishes hierarchies and, like Limonov, cannot meet someone of his own kind without more or less consciously wondering whether he stands above or below them. The comparison brings satisfaction or mortification, depending on its result. The pull of ranking is not confined to a political doctrine or a public display of power; it can operate as a recurrent private measure of the self.

Limonov and authority in daily life

Limonov’s social ascent supplies a concrete setting for that measure. After moving in with Anna in a central apartment, he becomes its khozyain: not simply its host, but its master of the house, a word the narrative says carries a nuance of feudal authority. Visitors gather at his open door; people listen when he speaks. The comparison extends from household authority to rule over a city, and then to Stalin as khozyain of the Soviet Union. The word makes rank audible in ordinary social life: a domestic position can echo a political one.

The same everyday order has a more bureaucratic form in Limonov’s account of his father, Venyamin Savenko. Limonov liked to say that his father was a Chekist because the label cast a pall over the room, then undercut it by describing him as basically a gendarme. Carrère places Savenko within the Soviet principle of double administration, in which one person performs a task and another supervises its conformity to Marxism-Leninism; supervision proliferates as each supervisor acquires one of their own. Savenko’s actual duties, as described, were modest: during the war he served as an NKVD orderly stationed at a factory, and later, as a junior lieutenant, organized soldiers’ leisure and cultural activities, including dance parties on Red Army Day. He played guitar, liked to sing, and polished his nails. The contrast between the imposing security label and the modest, sociable job complicates the easy equation of a title with a single kind of power.

The difficulty of leaving the ladder

The concept’s force comes from the tension between analysis and practice. Carrère can name the ranking impulse and offer a counter-ethic, yet admits that he continues to measure himself against others. Limonov’s attraction to comparisons, and his movement into the authority of the khozyain, give the idea a social as well as inward dimension: hierarchy can be encountered in a word, a household, or a response to an admirer, not only in an extreme political program.

Carrère ends this line of reflection without claiming that he has escaped the habit. He describes writing the book as a strange way of trying to adopt, digest, and absorb the Buddhist proposition until it might shape how one sees and acts at every moment. That aim remains a practice rather than a resolution. Fascistic hierarchy in everyday life is thus both a diagnosis of how inequality becomes a scale of human worth and a test of whether the scale can be refused while its pull is still felt.