The Hyper Male
Authoritarianism
Exerpts
Bob Altemeyer has gone to a great deal of trouble to explain why assholes beat up on idiots, and why idiots allow it.
Authoritarins = Zombies
Leaders = Assholes
Followers = Idiots
RWA = Right Wing Authoritarian, one who submits to his authority leader
http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf
It’s basically untestable. You have no way of discovering whether it is right or wrong, because it supposedly involves deeply unconscious defense mechanisms which the defending mechanic knows nothing about and so will quite honestly deny.
One gets nowhere with a theory that can “predict” whatever happened, after it happens.
“Do some people get born authoritarian followers?” Maybe they do. much of the social interaction within animal species is shaped by who submits to whom, and we know from breeding experiments that one can turn out increasingly dominant, or increasingly submissive offspring by controlling who mates with whom. That’s where pit bulls came from, on the one hand, and gentle laboratory rats, on the other. For some reason, psychology students will not let us run such experiments on them. But studies of identical and fraternal twins have produced some evidence that authoritarianism has hereditary roots.
Authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and–to top it all off–a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a would- be dictator.
“What good fortune for those in power that people do not think.” – Hitler
This is not only “Illogical, Captain,” as Mr. Spock would say, it’s quite dangerous, because it shows that 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, (Aristotle’s Prior Analytics = major, minor premise, conclusion) 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.
First and foremost, followers have mainly copied the beliefs of the authorities in their lives.They have not developed and thought through their ideas as much as most people have. Thus almost anything can be found in their heads if their authorities put it there, even stuff that contradicts other stuff. A filing cabinet or a computer can store quite inconsistent notions and never lose a minute of sleep over their contradiction. Similarly ahigh RWA can have all sorts of illogical, self-contradictory, and widely refuted ideas rattling around in various boxes in his brain, and never notice it.
