The End

Choosing the Socratic Dialectic or Fascist Roulette

Posted: 2/28/26

Across higher education, and increasingly across other sectors, people in positions of authority are making decisions that look less like leadership and more like cowardice. Discomfort with ideas is being treated as danger. Administrative responses are becoming reactive, opaque, and untethered from dialogue or due process. Faculty are being removed from classrooms, cut off from their students and materials, or, worse, sidelined based on unverified concerns. Much of this is often done without transparency, conversation, or any meaningful opportunity to respond.

Authoritarian systems do not start with jackboots. Authoritarianism starts with the pre‑emptive removals of critical thinking disguised as protection. Opaque decisions are veiled in fear, punishment without process, and fear‑based compliance measures. Administrators who make sustainability decisions claim they are acting to protect their institution rather than uphold the truth, and leaders silence dissent to avoid discomfort.

What is happening is a fascist version of roulette. What I am naming here is the random, fear‑driven, optics‑driven decision‑making that punishes people not for wrongdoing, but for being inconvenient or uncomfortable. That is the danger. It is no longer confined to education, religion, politics, or philosophy. The pattern is no longer confined to homes or classrooms. It is also no longer a governance problem or a problem in governance. It has become a societal breakdown, and it is happening because people in power are being conditioned to believe that if they do not act immediately, they will be punished. If they do not remove the person, they will be blamed. If they do not silence this person or subject, someone will come for them next. This is the logic of totalitarian authoritarianism.

We are not seeing ideology, but the tool of fear‑based compliance is being overtly used as a method. These are the early moves; the ones that happen long before anyone uses the word “fascism.” This is beginning to feel more of a societal authoritarian drift rather than simply “cancel culture,” and it is no longer confined to any one country or campus. We are seeing a broader shift in how institutions handle intellectual tension, especially among highly respected institutions that once served as the pinnacle of moral responsibility. When the default response to discomfort is removal rather than engagement, we move significantly distant from the principles that make education of any form, anywhere, possible. When institutional authority is used to silence rather than facilitate inquiry, the dynamic begins to resemble something far more troubling. Not because leaders are ideologues, but because they are fundamentally afraid. They are sincerely afraid to their core of backlash, mortally afraid of political pressure, institutionally afraid of losing funding, or afraid of being the next headline. It is becoming increasingly evident that we have never left Hobbes’ isolated, indigent, malicious, barbaric, and brief life in our state of nature.

Maybe fear is our nature. Fear, when institutionalized, becomes indistinguishable from coercion. When people in positions of power instinctively make decisions out of fear, opportunism, self-preservation, or, worse, moral collapse, the result is a kind of societal roulette. It has become an unpredictable, punitive reflex and something so corrosive to the very mission our democratic institutions claim to uphold.

Philosophy and education, general inquiry, and the Socratic dialectic, more broadly, depend on the freedom to question, challenge, and explore ideas without fear of institutional retaliation. If we lose that freedom, we lose something essential to a healthy and open society. When the ideals of free expression become a source of institutional anxiety rather than a shared foundation, we must consider what we are becoming or are allowing ourselves to become.

Many educators and thoughtful people across this globe are facing these pressures, and, sadly, so many more will before anything can be done. The real focus is whether we will continue to accept fear‑driven governance as normal, or insist that the integrity of learning and the future of our students and society are worth upholding. We must see Socrates as having a clear ability to choose his method of fatality, rather than a roulette pistol. We must, as a former student, now friend and colleague says, “Do better.” The period in that statement says more than any soapbox moment or sermon could ever say. So, which future are we going to choose, and where do we as educators want our boundaries to be? Thanks to my mentors and students, I know.