Daily Inspiration Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

Eroding solidarity is the kind of slow violence that looks, at first, like freedom: fewer obligations, less entanglement, more “choice.” Jelinek punctures that comforting story with the word paradoxically, a hinge that flips the reader from liberal optimism to political anatomy. When the everyday muscle of mutual support atrophies, people don’t become sleek individualists; they become hungry for belonging. The vacuum doesn’t stay empty. It gets filled.

Her phrasing is surgical. “Construction” signals something manufactured, not organic: substitute collectives are built by entrepreneurs of identity who can promise instant community without the messy ethics of reciprocity. “Substitute” is the insult and the warning. These are communities that mimic solidarity’s warmth while stripping out its obligations to the vulnerable and the different. They deliver emotional wages (certainty, pride, a target) in place of material ones (security, dignity, shared risk).

Jelinek, a postwar Austrian writer who has spent a career dissecting bourgeois hypocrisy and the afterlife of fascism, writes with the memory that authoritarianism rarely returns wearing old uniforms. It arrives as a club, a movement, a “people” reclaimed from supposedly corrupt elites or contaminating outsiders. “Fascisms of all kinds” refuses the comforting idea that fascism is a single historical artifact. It’s a reusable technology: any ideology that can convert loneliness and status anxiety into disciplined resentment can snap into place.

The intent isn’t just to condemn extremism; it’s to indict the conditions that make it feel like relief. Solidarity, she suggests, is less a virtue than infrastructure. When you let it crumble, you shouldn’t be surprised by what gets erected in its place.