The ideas around the role of fear--or fascism--can stretch far and wide. Last Sunday, our rector gave a sermon on the passage from Luke's gospel (Luke 16:1-13) about the "dishonest manager." In that passage, a thoroughly despicable manager or overseer is going to be dismissed, and decides to reduce his master's profit on what he's owed and thus gain favor with the "little people" from whom he may need favors in the future. Frankly, no preacher really "likes" to handle that passage; it just seems out of character. But...it fits perfectly, I think, in a notion of social morals.
You see, the tale (we usually call them parables, but there weren't really "parables" then) actually takes up the problem of the differences between those who must negotiate this world on its own terms and those who assume that they've already got it all figured out. For the latter group, everything is neatly black and white. If you don't see things their way you are. conveniently, a) an outcast, and b) condemned to hell's damnation. In those days the "everything's black or white" group was represented by several sects, notable among them the "Children of Light," the Essenes. In his explanation of the story, Jesus remarks that even run-of-the-mill folks like that unscrupulous manager know more about how to ultimately treat one another than do the Children of Light. Life does not offer things that are black and white, good or bad, perfect or perfectly evil. Life comes in shades of gray, and it is OUR duty to understand that and to apply it in our lives.
The kind of fear that the manager felt--and exhibited--is the kind we share when we face calamity. Among the Essenes or any other fundamentalist group that bases its motives on a conservative approach that excludes outsiders, fear belongs not merely to calamity but to everlasting damnation, and they're going to tell you exactly what that means and what the (i.e., their) rules are. Seventy five years ago new rules were being written by the new conservative movements that sought to seize power and create friends and outcasts, painting everything in terms of black and white, so to speak. The threats that engendered fear were "ultimate" then: not merely fines or imprisonment (though they used that, too) but loss of all freedoms (the camps built to house the outcasts) and ultimately life. Totalitarian power does not tolerate shades of gray. It has no use for people who might agree with them one day then, having pondered how things developed, decide to disagree. Whatever kind of mechanisms are used to instill the necessary fear, it must produce a kind of dear that blinds people to the truth around them--the "gray" areas of life.
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