Félix Guattari describes micro-fascisms as forms of domination that do not only exist in states or authoritarian regimes, but also in everyday relationships. They appear in small exercises of power, in humiliation, exclusion, control, or the constant production of dependency. Individually they may seem insignificant. Together they shape how people live.

What makes these forms of power so effective is that they often do not rely on direct violence. Instead, they produce a diffuse sense of insecurity. People become occupied with anticipating problems, adapting themselves, avoiding mistakes, or trying to meet expectations that are never fully defined. Fear no longer stems from a single identifiable threat but from an atmosphere in which one is continuously required to adjust. 

What interests me is how these everyday exercises of power diminish vitality.

Vitality is not only physical energy. It is the feeling that one can act, trust, create, relate to others, and participate in the world. These everyday exercises of power work in the opposite direction. They produce uncertainty. They keep people occupied with defending themselves, justifying themselves, navigating opaque systems, or waiting for decisions over which they have little influence. The source is often difficult to identify because it is distributed across institutions, bureaucracies, workplaces, schools, landlords, and everyday interactions. No single event appears decisive, yet their accumulation produces anxiety, exhaustion, and paralysis.

Perhaps we simply have different ideas about responsibility: about what it means to hold a position of trust.

​

I understand institutions not merely as administrative structures but as places that enable people to develop their capacities rather than expend their energy defending them. Yet many everyday interactions seem to produce the opposite effect. These situations are rarely spectacular. They often appear ordinary. Precisely because they appear ordinary, they become difficult to challenge.

These forms of power often rely on an unspoken image of the "normal" individual. Rather than recognizing difference as a condition for living together, they encourage comparison with an idealized model of how one should think, work, communicate, or even feel. Difference is no longer understood as something that broadens our collective perception, but as something to be corrected or managed. Gradually, people are encouraged to become increasingly similar, shadows of one another, rather than singular individuals whose different ways of seeing enrich the world we share. As Guattari suggests, defending the right to difference is not opposed to living in community. On the contrary, a community that suppresses difference risks reducing life to conformity rather than enabling genuine encounters.

Perhaps this normalization also explains why contemporary life increasingly resembles a performance. Not only on Instagram, but also in institutions, workplaces, and daily interactions. We perform competence, productivity, certainty, confidence. We learn to present ourselves rather than to encounter one another.

But human relationships are not built through performances.

They emerge through shared vulnerability, understanding, trust, listening, and the willingness to recognize another person's experience. A performance may create an image, but it rarely creates a relationship.

This makes me wonder: if so much of everyday life has become performative, when does life itself actually take place? Where does genuine encounter begin? And how can vitality return when so much energy is spent navigating invisible structures of power rather than simply living? And how can we resist these everyday forms of fascism when they increasingly shape our workplaces and even our homes?

And when institutions that are supposed to support freelance work become places where one must repeatedly defend the legitimacy of one’s profession rather than receive support in developing it, they can unintentionally reproduce the very forms of insecurity they are meant to alleviate.

​

What is the purpose of institutions that exist to support people if their primary effect becomes producing further insecurity, self-justification, and exhaustion?

I also wonder what kind of relationship a society chooses to establish with its artists. Are artists understood as people whose work requires time, uncertainty, experimentation, and support? Or are they treated primarily as individuals who must constantly prove their economic usefulness before receiving legitimacy? The difference is not only administrative. It shapes the conditions under which imagination itself can survive.

Perhaps this is one of the central contradictions in the relationship between societies and artists. The same difference that later becomes celebrated as originality is often experienced as a problem in the present. What is eventually recognized as vision may first appear as deviation.

There is a strange reversal that often appears in this relationship: during their lifetime, artists may be required to prove their usefulness, legitimacy, and economic value; later, their existence can become a source of collective pride and economic value. The person who was once considered difficult, unproductive, or marginal becomes a monument.

The question remains: why do we so often recognize the value of artistic vitality only after it can no longer be supported?

Perhaps the most powerful fear factories are not those that produce fear through visible violence, but those that slowly transform uncertainty, self-doubt, and dependency into conditions of everyday life.