From Weimar to MAGA: How Systems Collapse When Cruelty Becomes Moral

When a society decides that cruelty is a strength and mercy a weakness, collapse has already begun. David French (2025) captures this inversion in today’s America, where millions now believe cruelty is “good, if it helps us win, and kindness is evil, if it weakens our cause.” That belief is not an American innovation. It is the same moral inversion that fueled fascism in Europe a century ago, when Carl Schmitt reduced politics to a single binary: friend versus enemy (Traub, 2025). Once that binary dominates, the ethical foundations of a society shift. Mercy becomes betrayal; loyalty becomes the highest virtue; cruelty becomes a weapon sanctified by tribal survival.

This essay dissects that process as a collapse algorithm. Weimar Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, and Stalin’s Russia show how moral inversion and authoritarian rise are inseparable. In the present, MAGA politics, Project 2025, and parallel movements in Hungary, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and India show the same pattern repeating. Complexity science gives us the tools to explain why: feedback loops, tipping points, minority rule, and fragile networks. Taleb’s insights into fragility and antifragility add to the diagnostic lens. What emerges is a global pattern of authoritarian morality metastasizing in systems under stress, and a warning: unless countered, cruelty-as-virtue becomes the attractor state.

Historical Foundations: Weimar and Fascist Europe

Weimar Germany was not doomed by destiny. Its collapse was systemic. After World War I, economic humiliation and political instability created a fragile order. The assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau in 1922 was more than political murder—it was a signal that violence against “traitors” could be framed as patriotism. Schmitt provided the theory: “authority, not truth, makes the law,” and loyalty, not compassion, defines virtue (Traub, 2025). This reduction of politics to the friend-enemy binary became what one of Schmitt’s colleagues later called the Nazi “algorithm of bestiality.” By the early 1930s, the emergent norm was simple: cruelty was duty, and mercy was treason.

Hannah Arendt (1973) argued that totalitarian systems work by dissolving pluralism until the state itself defines both morality and reality. Schmitt’s framework gave the Nazis their justification, but the collapse required social adoption: neighbors turning away from neighbors, cruelty normalized through daily feedback loops.

Mussolini’s Italy had already written the script. In 1922, his Blackshirts marched on Rome and forced the monarchy’s hand. Mussolini declared only a ruthless dictator could cleanse Italy of weakness (Blakemore, 2025). Compassion was derided as softness; violence and virility were celebrated as virtues. Franco’s Spain waged civil war as a crusade against “godless Reds,” justifying executions as holy acts. Even communism mirrored the inversion: Stalin recast mercy toward “class enemies” as treason to the proletariat (Arendt, 1973).

Different ideologies—fascist and communist—arrived at the same mechanics: define an enemy, sanctify cruelty against them, and let the feedback loops run until atrocity became ordinary. In complexity terms, each society tipped into a new attractor state where the moral inversion was self-reinforcing. Once compassion was stigmatized and cruelty rewarded, reversal became nearly impossible without systemic collapse.

Modern Parallels: MAGA and the Global Authoritarian Turn

The United States is not immune. The MAGA movement, fueled by Donald Trump’s rise and institutionalized through Project 2025, has redefined loyalty as morality. Trump’s words and actions reveal the Schmittian script: friends are pardoned even if they storm the Capitol, while “traitors” within his own party—like Mike Pence—are cast as enemies worthy of punishment (French, 2025). Ideology is secondary. Loyalty to Trump and hostility toward his enemies is the only moral currency.

Project 2025 takes this ethos from the streets into the state. It is a blueprint to purge “disloyal” civil servants, consolidate executive authority, and weaponize the federal government against perceived enemies (Boston Review, 2024; U.S. Senate Democrats, 2024). Its architects frame these moves not as authoritarian overreach but as moral necessity. This is textbook friend-enemy morality: institutional safeguards are obstacles to be destroyed.

Across the Atlantic, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán proudly calls his regime an “illiberal state,” praising Russia, Turkey, and China as models (Yglesias, 2014). His propaganda brands migrants, George Soros, and LGBTQ advocates as existential threats to Hungarian identity. In this climate, cruelty becomes reframed as national defense.

Russia under Vladimir Putin amplifies this inversion with brute force. Independent journalists and dissidents are smeared as “foreign agents.” The invasion of Ukraine was sold as a moral crusade to “denazify,” recasting war crimes as righteous defense (Snyder, 2018). Citizens are conditioned to equate patriotism with obedience and cruelty with heroism.

In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro celebrated police brutality and vilified opponents. His base adored him not despite his cruelty but because of it. The January 2023 storming of government buildings in Brasília mirrored America’s January 6th: loyalists saw insurrection not as a crime but as moral duty.

Turkey’s Erdoğan used the failed coup of 2016 to justify mass purges. Tens of thousands were fired, jailed, or exiled—all under the banner of defending the state. Mercy was betrayal; loyalty was survival.

Even India, the world’s largest democracy, has drifted toward moral inversion under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalism. Vigilante mobs lynch Muslims accused of harming cows, later celebrated as defense of faith. Revoking Kashmir’s autonomy was framed not as repression but patriotic consolidation.

Across these cases, the pattern is identical. Loyalty replaces ethics. Compassion is delegitimized. Cruelty becomes not just acceptable but virtuous. This is the collapse algorithm, replicated across contexts yet following the same systemic logic.

The Complexity Science Lens

Authoritarian morality doesn’t spread because people simply choose cruelty. It spreads because societies are complex adaptive systems.

• Emergence and Feedback Loops: Violence rewarded begets more violence. Social media accelerates this with algorithms that privilege outrage (Tufekci, 2018).

• Minority Rule: Taleb (2016) describes the “dictatorship of the small minority.” Nazis never won a majority; MAGA doesn’t need one either. The intolerant minority bends the majority.

• Tipping Points: Societies look stable until they don’t. Weimar collapsed in 1933; the U.S. bent but did not break on January 6 (Walter, 2022).

• Attractors: Once cruelty becomes virtue, societies fall into authoritarian attractors. Putin’s Russia is trapped in one; Orbán’s Hungary too. America risks the same basin with Project 2025.

• Fragility and Antifragility: Democracies built only on norms are fragile. Systems must be antifragile—learning from shocks, reforming to withstand stress (Taleb, 2012; Meadows, 2008).

The collapse algorithm is not linear; it is recursive:

1. Manufacture enemies.

2. Normalize cruelty.

3. Amplify through feedback loops.

4. Let the intolerant minority steer the system.

5. Wait for the shock that tips into authoritarian attractor.

It has replayed since 1922.

Countermeasures and Adaptation

To resist, we must act as systems engineers.

• Reinforce Negative Feedbacks: Courts, civic norms, pluralist media—feedback mechanisms must push against cruelty cascades.

• Build Antifragility: Reforms after stress (like January 6) must leave the system stronger, not weaker. Transparency, accountability, and education are antifragile moves (Taleb, 2012; Walter, 2022).

• Re-anchor Ethics: French (2025) warns that civic education is meaningless without virtue. Jonathan Haidt (2012) shows authoritarian morality elevates loyalty/authority over care/fairness. Teaching pluralism as moral strength is essential.

• Expose Elites: Anne Applebaum (2020) reminds us authoritarianism requires intellectual and bureaucratic enablers. Naming them, confronting them, and refusing their normalization is a democratic survival tactic.

Democracies cannot survive on structure alone. They survive when citizens recognize cruelty as corruption of the civic soul.

Conclusion: We Are Already in the Grips

We are not waiting at the threshold. The friend-enemy algorithm is not a future threat—it is already deeply activated. Project 2025 openly calls for invoking the Insurrection Act, granting a president authority to deploy the U.S. military for domestic law enforcement (Lawfare, n.d.; U.S. Congress, 2025). These are not abstract lines in a think-tank memo—they are orders with teeth, waiting for the spark.

What that means in practice is terrifying: armed soldiers patrolling cities, with explicit orders to use force, to detain or suppress protest, to reinforce loyalty and punish dissent (RealClearDefense, 2024; Task & Purpose, 2024). The blueprint anticipates bypassing state objections, purging civil service into obedience, and wielding violence as a tool of political purification.

We are not analyzing a possible authoritarian future—we are living within it. Every day that institutions tolerate talk of military policing, or pardons for political violence, we slide further into the attractor state where cruelty is virtue. Collapse is not a singular event; it is a process, and it is underway.

The task is clear: build antifragility, re-anchor morality, and disrupt the feedback loops of cruelty. The alternative is unthinkable.

Disclaimer

This article represents the author’s analysis and perspective. It is intended for informational and educational purposes. Comparisons across countries and eras are interpretive, not deterministic. The author condemns political violence and authoritarianism in all forms. Errors of interpretation remain the author’s responsibility

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