The Authoritarian Personality

[Cain]

Part 1.

This is the first selection of quotes taken from the book on authoritarianism that Requiem linked to yesterday.

I think the two broad themes that interest me are "how does an authoritarian personality think" and "how do you change their minds" and I think the quotes reflect that.



Authoritarianism is something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves. It happens when the followers submit too much to the leaders, trust them too much, and give them too much leeway to do whatever they want--which often is something undemocratic, tyrannical and brutal.

Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

A right-wing authoritarian follower doesn't necessarily have conservative political views. Instead he's someone who readily submits to the
established authorities in society, attacks others in their name, and is highly conventional. It's an aspect of his personality, not a description of his politics.

Authoritarian followers seem to have a "Daddy and mommy know best" attitude toward the government. They do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not--just as parents can when one is young.

The last string of studies I want to lay before you regarding authoritarian submission concerns authoritarians' willingness to hold officials accountable for their misdeeds. Or rather, their lack of willingness--which catches your eye because high
RWAs generally favor punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers...

The "Milgram experiment," which we shall discuss at the end of this book, offers another example of authoritarian followers "going easy" on authorities. In his famous study Stanley Milgram maneuvered subjects into a situation in which they were ordered by an Experimenter to inflict painful, and possibly lethal, electric shocks on another person (who in fact was not hurt at all). The subjects clearly did not want to deliver the shocks, but the Experimenter told them they had to. The Experimenter even said, if pressed, that he would accept responsibility for whatever happened. Yet Tom Blass of the University of Maryland at Baltimore found that high RWA students
tended to blame the Experimenter less for what happened to the victim than most students did.  Whom did they blame instead? I found, when I replicated the study, they blamed the poor devil who was ordered to deliver the shocks, and the victim,
more than most others did.

It's striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways, in the dark, by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women, children, and others unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking, the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight.

They get off smiting the sinner; they relish being "the arm of the Lord." Similarly, high RWA university students say that classmates
in high school who misbehaved and got into trouble, experienced "bad trips" on drugs, became pregnant, and so on "got exactly what they deserved" and that they felt a secret pleasure when they found out about the others' misfortune.... Which suggests authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt.

If that shocks you, remember that the premise behind "Posse" runs right down Main Street in the authoritarian aggression mind-set. When the authorities say, "Go get 'em," the high RWAs saddle up.

Who can 'em be? Nearly everybody, it turns out. I started with a proposition to outlaw Communists and found authoritarian followers would be relatively likely to join that posse. Ditto for persecuting homosexuals, and ditto for religious cults, "radicals" and journalists the government did not like. So I tried to organize a posse that liberals would join, to go after the Ku Klux Klan. But high RWAs crowded out
everyone else for that job too. Then I offered as targets the very right-wing Canadian Social Credit Party, the Confederation of Regions Party, and the mainstream Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. These were the parties of choice for most authoritarian followers at the time, yet high RWAs proved more willing to persecute even the movements they liked than did others.

Finally, just to take this to its ludicrous extreme, I asked for reactions to a "law to eliminate right-wing authoritarians." (I told the subjects that right-wing authoritarians are people who are so submissive to authority, so aggressive in the name of authority, and so conventional that they may pose a threat to democratic rule.)  RWA scale scores did not connect as solidly with joining this posse as they had in the other cases. Surely some of the high RWAs realized that if they supported this law, they were being the very people whom the law would persecute, and the posse should therefore put itself in jail. But not all of them realized this, for authoritarian followers still favored, more than others did, a law to persecute themselves. You can almost hear the circuits clanking shut in their brains: "If the government says these people are dangerous, then they've got to be stopped."

High RWAs tend to feel more endangered in a potentially threatening situation than most people do, and often respond aggressively.

We found that in both countries the high RWAs believed their government's version of the Cold War more than most people did. Their officials wore the white hats, the authoritarian followers believed, and the other guys were dirty rotten warmongers. And that's most interesting, because it means the most cock-sure belligerents in the populations on each side of the Cold War, the ones who hated and
blamed each other the most, were in fact the same people, psychologically. If they had grown up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, they probably would have believed the leaders they presently despised, and despised the leaders they now trusted. They'd
have been certain the side they presently thought was in the right was in the wrong, and instead embraced the beliefs they currently held in contempt

If you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place "being normal" substantially
higher than most people do. It's almost as though they want to disappear as individuals into the vast vat of Ordinaries.... Once again, however, I should temper our natural tendency to overgeneralize. High RWAs would like to be rich as much as the next person would,
they'd like to be smarter than average, and so on. It's "good" to be different in some ways, it seems. And I found they would not change their opinions about abortion an inch by showing them how different they were from most others. They are quite
capable of adhering to the beliefs emphasized by their in-groups when these conflict with what is held by society as a whole. Nevertheless, they do get tugged by what they think everybody else is saying and doing.

But more importantly, the high RWAs proved incredibly ethnocentric. There they were, in a big room full of people just like
themselves, and they all turned their backs on each other and paid attention only to their own group. They too were all reading from the same page, but writ large on their page was, "Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together."

But just as the data from the NATO simulation indicate high RWAs tend to make an ambiguous situation dangerous, the Golan Heights experiment indicates that high RWAs are likely to turn a secure situation into a dangerous one.

Authoritarian followers score highly on the Dangerous World scale, and it's not just because some of the items have a religious context. High RWAs are, in general, more afraid than most people are. They got a "2 for 1 Special Deal" on fear somehow. Maybe they've inherited genes that incline them to fret and tremble. Maybe not. But we do know that they were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so.

Sometimes it's all rather predictable: authoritarians' parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists and pornographers. But they also warned their children, more than most parents did, about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks--bad guys who would seem to threaten everyone's children. So authoritarian followers, when growing up, probably lived in a scarier world than most kids do, with
a lot more boogeymen hiding in dark places, and they're still scared as adults. For them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving because it means making the "abnormal" acceptable. It's yet one more sign that perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, "This is the last
straw; soon we'll be plunged into the abyss." So probably did, in earlier times, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping.

How good, how moral are you, compared to other people? (You get to say what is "good" and "moral.") As I mentioned in chapter 1, if you're an average human being, you'll think you're a better than average human being. Almost everybody thinks she's more moral than most. But high RWAs typically think they're way, way better. They are the Holy Ones. They are the Chosen. They are the Righteous. They somehow got a three-for-one special on self-righteousness. And self-righteousness appears to release authoritarian aggression more than anything else.

Before leaving this topic, we should also realize that fear can increase submission as well as aggression. This was illustrated by a series of studies in which I asked people to answer the RWA scale while imagining their country was undergoing some internal crisis. A violent left-wing threat featuring a general strike and urban guerrilla warfare understandably caused RWA scale scores to soar. But so
also did violent right-wing threats, such as a military-aided coup in the halls of power, or "brownshirt" violence in the streets. Most people seem spring-loaded to become more right-wing authoritarian during crises. The only situation I found in which a
crisis lowered RWA scores involved a repressive government that assaulted nonviolent protestors (which I have termed "the Gandhi trap"). Otherwise, when there's trouble, people generally look to the authorities to fix things. And some authorities will gladly amass greater power in times of peril, whether they have any intention of fixing the problem or not.

By and large the students were probably pretty authoritarian as children, submitting to authority, learning whom to fear and dislike, and usually doing what they were supposed to do. But when adolescence struck with all its hormones, urges, and desires
for autonomy, some of them began to have new experiences that could have shaken up their early learnings. If the experiences reinforced the parents', teachers', and clergies' teachings (e.g. that wrecked car), authoritarian attitudes would likely remain
high. But if the experiences indicated the teachings were wrong (e.g. "Sex isn't bad. It's great!"), the teen is likely to become less authoritarian.

I have discovered in my investigations that, by and large, high RWA students had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism. Take that first item on page 59 about fathers being the head of the family. Authoritarian followers often said they didn't know any other kind of families. And they hadn't known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules. They
simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment--with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all
controlled to keep them out of harm's way and Satan's evil clutches. They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.

Interestingly enough, authoritarian followers show a remarkable capacity for change IF they have some of the important experiences. For example, they are far less likely to have known a homosexual (or realized an acquaintance was homosexual) than most people. But if you look at the high RWAs who do know someone gay or lesbian, they are much less hostile toward homosexuals in general than most
authoritarians are. Getting to know a homosexual usually makes one more accepting of homosexuals as a group. Personal experiences can make a lot of difference, which is a truly hopeful discovery. The problem is, most right-wing authoritarians won't willingly exit their small world and try to meet a gay. They're too afraid.

If authoritarian followers like the conclusion, the logic involved is pretty irrelevant. The reasoning should justify the conclusion, but for
a lot of high RWAs, the conclusion validates the reasoning. Such is the basis of many a prejudice, and many a Big Lie that comes to be accepted. Now one can easily overstate this finding. A lot of people have trouble with syllogistic reasoning, and high RWAs are only slightly more likely to make such mistakes than low RWAs are. But in general high RWAs seem to have more trouble than most people do realizing that a conclusion is false.

Deductive logic aside, authoritarians also have trouble deciding whether empirical evidence proves, or does not prove, something. They will often think some thoroughly ambiguous fact verifies something they already believe in. So if you tell them that archaeologists have discovered a fallen wall at ancient Jericho, they are more likely than most people to infer that this proves the Biblical story of Joshua and
the horns is true--when the wall could have been knocked over by lots of other groups, or an earthquake, and be from an entirely different era (which it is).

As I said earlier, authoritarians' ideas are poorly integrated with one another. It's as if each idea is stored in a file that can be called up and used when the authoritarian wishes, even though another of his ideas--stored in a different file-- basically contradicts it. We all have some inconsistencies in our thinking, but authoritarians can stupify you with the inconsistency of their ideas. Thus they may say
they are proud to live in a country that guarantees freedom of speech, but another file holds, "My country, love it or leave it." The ideas were copied from trusted sources, often as sayings, but the authoritarian has never "merged files" to see how well they
all fit together.

In fact, despite their own belief that they are quite honest with themselves, authoritarians tend to be highly defensive, and run away from unpleasant truths about themselves more than most people do.

High RWAs were quite interested in finding out the test was valid IF they thought they had done well on the scale. But if they had been told they had low selfesteem, most right-wing authoritarians did not want to see evidence that the test was valid. Well, wouldn't everyone do this? No.

High RWAs show little self-awareness when making these comparisons. Sometimes they glimpse themselves through a glass, darkly. For example they agree more than most people do with, "I like to associate with people who have the same beliefs and opinions I do." But they have no idea how much they differ from others in that way. And most of the time they get it quite wrong, thinking they are not
different from others, and even that they are different in the opposite way from how they actually are.


As natural as this is, authoritarians see the world more sharply in terms of their in-groups and their out-groups than most people do. They are so ethnocentric that you find them making statements such as, "If you're not with us, then you're against us."  There's no neutral in the highly ethnocentric mind. This dizzying "Us versus Everyone Else" outlook usually develops from traveling in those "tight circles" we talked about in the last chapter, and whirling round in those circles reinforces the ethnocentrism as the authoritarian follower uses his friends to validate his opinions.

Because authoritarians depend so much on their in-group to support their beliefs (whereas other people depend more on independent evidence and logic), high RWAs place a high premium on group loyalty and cohesiveness.

You sometimes hear that paranoia runs at a gallop in "right-wingers". But maybe you can see how that's an oversimplification. Authoritarian followers are highly suspicious of their many out-groups; but they are credulous to the point of selfdelusion
when it comes to their in-groups.

[LMNO]

I'm gonna have to print this one out.

[Cain]

Yeah, it is a little tl;dr.  I tried to cut it down somewhat.  I'll make sure the next installments are in easier to read chunks.

[OneSeventeen]

This is awesome material. I read some of it to my friend. It made me angry and it made me laugh. I can't believe, on some level, that people actually interface with the world in this manner. On the other hand... I know people like this. NICE people like this. People I love. That point about ability to change is very important, though. My best friend's wife was super high RWA when they met. He (chiefly) and I have been chipping away at that with surprising ease. It's not that logic was unknown to her... it's that she'd never been taught to self apply it (the merging files mentioned above). So frequently, merely pointing out an inconsistency is enough to get her thinking and that's almost always good.

My wife, on the other hand, started at a lower RWA than her (though still higher than he or I) and has had some RWA-lowering experiences naturally. She was a Catholic. Then, one Sunday, the priest said, "You should all, as good Catholics, vote to make gay marriage illegal." We live in Texas. Anyway, after that, she basically said, "No. Fuck it. I'm out."

Anyway, great read.


117

[Cain]

Interesting.  I'm just about to start on the section detailing how religion and authoritarianism interface with each other.  Much of it is common sense, as you'd expect, but there may be a few things of interest within.

[Verbal Mike]

A good read. Thank you.
I wish the tone were more neutral. Compared with Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, which deals mostly with the same issue, this text looks like a strange attempt to piss of high RWAs. But the points are still interesting, and I find it interesting how important the in-group dynamic seems to be.

[LMNO]

Ok, read it.  I liked this paragraph:

I have discovered in my investigations that, by and large, high RWA students had simply missed many of the experiences that might have lowered their authoritarianism.

Take that first item on page 59 about fathers being the head of the family. Authoritarian followers often said they didn't know any other kind of families. And they hadn't known any unpatriotic people, nor had they broken many rules.

They simply had not met many different kinds of people or done their share of wild and crazy things. Instead they had grown up in an enclosed, rather homogeneous environment--with their friends, their schools, their readings, their amusements all controlled to keep them out of harm's way and Satan's evil clutches.

They had contentedly traveled around on short leashes in relatively small, tight, safe circles all their lives.

It suggests that some aspects of O:M are indeed beneficial.

[Cain]

That drew my interest as well.  However, it also suggests befriending such people too.  I imagine if you did such actions without the benefit of friendship, it may be less effective.

[DORADA]

Very succeeded everything, it is the fear to known to lodiferente what joins the people in groups more than the conviction, the man is protected from the reactions of different persons. What does them of weak nature before the adversities, without responsibility, they want to be protected do not resist to live through experiences, and delegate the responsibility in the leader. They protect persons who form a part of the group even if they could be harmful persons since they do not admit the mistake it would unbalance them.
But I think that this fanaticism for the apparent "order" begins to appear as there are getting uncovered the lies and the motives of the leaders, in the measure that gets lost the fear of living the human being it(he,she) will grow in relation to the demas human beings. Our critique must come to a level contructivo announcing and approaching without prejudices towards them as human beings who look for the truth and the approximation to the others must be with generosity. The forts that walk alone and complete(upright) they can rescue consciences instead of moving away

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[LMNO]

For some reason, I find myself physically unable to read your posts.

[Triple Zero]

that's because they've been fed through an autotranslator back and forth a couple of times, and then edited to get the most obvious idiosyncracies out.

woops, did i just give away your shtick?

[Cain]

Dorada really is posting from Peru however, so its perfectly possible than she either used an autotranslator and it came out badly, or her English is somewhat mangled due to different grammar rules and that not many Peruvians outside the major cities speak any English, meaning a lack of practice.

I tend towards the former, myself.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If you read it with your brain in sort of soft-focus, it makes pretty good sense.

[Vene]

Dorada really is posting from Peru however, so its perfectly possible than she either used an autotranslator and it came out badly, or her English is somewhat mangled due to different grammar rules and that not many Peruvians outside the major cities speak any English, meaning a lack of practice.

I tend towards the former, myself.

I was wondering if English wasn't her first language.

[Cain]

I'm guessing Spanish, but depending where in Peru, it could be Quenchua or even Aymara.