Authoritarianism as the Scourge of Humankind and Major Cause of War

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Fri Apr-03-09 04:40 PM
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Authoritarianism as the Scourge of Humankind and Major Cause of War

Edited on Fri Apr-03-09 04:59 PM by Time for change

I guess you can tell from the title of this post that I don�t care much for authoritarian type personalities. I have always felt them to be utterly repressive. I�ve been like that since I was a small child � as long as I can remember. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most authoritarian type of personality, my parents were probably about a 2. But even that was too much for me. Any time I detected them directing the slightest bit of authoritarianism at me, I�d give them hell.

Yet, as a child and teenager I did not have strong feelings against the wars that my country entered into throughout its history. I believed what almost all American children are taught � that my country enters into wars only as a last resort, to defend itself or in order to accomplish some sort of greater good. It was only as I began to read a lot about American history and obtain a much wider understanding of our history that I began to feel very differently about the subject. Today I consider my country�s war making propensity to be perhaps the greatest scourge of humankind in the world � especially as it played out during the past 8 years, but certainly not limited to that. It is a subject that I have posted about on DU many times.

I recently began to read the 2006 book, �The Authoritarians�, by Bob Altemeyer, after fellow DUer Larry Ogg insisted that I do so (Thank you Larry). As I was reading the first chapter of Altemeyer�s book, the connection between authoritarianism and war became blatantly obvious to me. So obvious is the connection that it seems to me that the key to the prevention of war may lie in learning how to combat authoritarianism. I discuss that at the end of this post. If you want to skip this post and go straight to the book, here it is.

INTRODUCTION TO AUTHORITARIANISM

Bob Altemeyer is a retired psychology professor who spent most of his life researching authoritarianism. There are authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders. Both are required in order to have wars � The leaders to create the wars, and the followers to vote the leaders into power, fight in the wars, and otherwise support their leaders. The first chapter of Altemeyer�s book is about authoritarian followers. He defines them as having three core characteristics:

1) High degree of submission to authority
2) Willingness to attack other people in the name of the authority
3) Highly conventional attitudes

Altemeyer provides a 22 question personality survey in his first chapter, which measures a person�s right wing authoritarian propensity (Not all authoritarians are right wing, but the great majority are). He calls it the right wing authoritarian (RWA) scale.

But keep in mind three things about the RWA scale. First of all, people aren�t simply divided up into right wing authoritarians vs. all other people. There are many gradations in between. Secondly, people are not locked into a certain type of personality just because of a score on a test. People have the ability to change � to grow. We have some former right wingers on DU. I very much admire them for having the courage to change. And thirdly, like all personality tests, it doesn�t work in everybody. People answer questions in certain ways for a variety of reasons. I�ll give you one example, from my own answers to the RWA survey.

Of the 22 questions, I scored on the RWA side for two questions, and neutral for one question. One of the questions which I scored on the RWA side was: �There are many radical, immoral people in our country today, who are trying to ruin it for their own godless purposes, whom the authorities should put out of action�. I said that I strongly agreed with that statement, largely with George Bush, Dick Cheney and their fellow Neocons in mind. I don�t really think that indicates a RWA tendency in me. But who knows, maybe it does to some extent.

THE RIGHT WING AUTHORITARIAN TRAITS AND THEIR CONNECTION TO WAR

Submission to authority

A strong propensity for submission to authority is one of the most important prerequisites for war. The national leaders who plan and create wars require the support of large portions of their population. The more RWAs in their population, the easier that support is to obtain. If a U.S. President tells his people that another nation has accumulated weapons of mass destruction which pose an imminent threat to his people, RWAs will believe it no matter how little evidence there is to support it. They�ll believe it even when there is a vast amount of evidence to contradict it. Surely wars perpetrated by the United States would be much less politically feasible and much less frequent without the large minority of right wing authoritarians in our country.

Love of monarchy
The RWA propensity for submission to authority makes them seem more like the subjects of a monarchy than the citizens of a democracy � not withstanding all their protestations to the contrary. They look to their leaders as monarchs, rather than as the servants of the people that elected leaders in a democracy are supposed to be. Consequently, they have little or no understanding of the concept that our leaders are subject to the law. Altemeyer explains the psychodynamics:

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.

When this type of attitude prevails, the result is a climate in which elected leaders can pursue their own personal interests to the detriment of the nation, ignoring their nation�s laws with impunity. Altemeyer explains how RWAs feel about this:

If some day George W. Bush is indicted for authorizing torture, you can bet your bottom dollar the high RWAs will howl to the heavens in protest. It won�t matter how extensive the torture was, how cruel and sickening it was, how many years it went on, how many prisoners died, how devious Bush was in trying to evade America�s laws and traditional stand against torture, or how many treaties the U.S. broke. Such an indictment would grind right up against the core of authoritarian followers, and they won�t have it�

The role of religion
I don�t have anything against religion in general. I believe that religion has helped a great many people. And many beneficial social movements, such as the slavery abolition movement in the United States, have been strongly supported by religious organizations. But to the extent that religion is contaminated with authoritarianism it ceases to be a force for good and becomes instead a source for evil. Altemeyer describes the role of religion in the RWA mindset:

Authoritarians get a lot of their ideas about how people ought to act from their religion� and they tend to belong to fundamentalist religions� These churches strongly advocate a traditional family structure of father-as-head, mother as subservient to her husband and kids as subservient, period�. And they want everybody�s family to be like that�.

The key is that last sentence: �And they want everybody�s family to be like that�. Anyone who has studied much world history knows that it is filled to the brim with religion-motivated wars � that is, wars whose express purpose was to kill or convert people who don�t adhere to the aggressor�s religion. It is often difficult to tell when religion actually fueled these wars, or when it merely provided a convenient excuse for them. Sometimes the line is so thin and blurry that it is impossible to tell the difference: The authoritarian leaders use religion as an excuse for wars, and the authoritarian followers are motivated by their religious fervor to follow along.

Conformity

The tendency to conform is used by authoritarian leaders to push their followers into war. That�s what right wing �patriotism� is all about. In the right wing authoritarian mind, �patriotism� is difficult to distinguish from conformism. That was the kind of thinking behind the ludicrous question to presidential candidate Obama at the April 17, 2009 Democratic Primary debate concerning why he doesn�t wear an American flag label more often. Altemeyer describes the importance of conformism to the RWA mind:

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.

Need for approval
What is the source of the importance of conformity in the lives of RWAs? One is the need for approval. I don�t fault anyone for wanting the approval of other people. I want it myself. Barack Obama acknowledged his desire for the approval of other people in one of his books, �The Audacity of Hope�. The difference is that RWAs tend to need approval so much that they�re willing to deny who they are in order to get it.

Altemeyer makes this point from an experiment that he conducted. He asked a group of subjects to fill out the RWA survey. Then, after they completed it, he asked them to fill it out a second time, but with a twist:

I simply tell a group who earlier had filled out a scale for me what the average response had been to each item� Then I ask the sample to answer the scale again, with the average-answers-from-before staring them right in the face� High RWAs shift their answers toward the middle about twice as much as lows do. This even works on hard-core authoritarian beliefs�

Lack of independent thought
The other major source of the RWA propensity for conformity is their inability (or refusal) to think for themselves. Again, this personality characteristic provides fertile ground for nationalistic leaders who wish to drive their country into war. If a person lacks the ability or inclination to think independently, then what other choice does he have but to accept what he�s told by authority figures?

Altemeyer describes an experiment in his book that sheds light on how RWAs helped to perpetuate the Cold War, greatly facilitated by their aversion to independent thought. The experiment involved asking citizens of both the United States and the Soviet Union their thoughts about the Cold War, their own country, and the other country:

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�

Hatred and cruelty

Finally, it is the fact that RWAs tend to be filled with hatred that enables RWA leaders to spur them on to go to great lengths to support or fight for the causes that the leaders cherish. Altemeyer describes that aspect of RWAs:

They find �common criminals� highly repulsive and disgusting, and they admit it feels personally good, it makes them glad, to be able to punish a perpetrator. They get off smiting the sinner; they relish being �the arm of the Lord.�� which suggests authoritarian followers have a little volcano of hostility bubbling away inside them looking for a (safe, approved) way to erupt�.

The torture of many hundreds or thousands of our prisoners in George Bush�s �War on Terror� provides a good example of RWA hatred and cruelty in action. I�ve read myriad accounts of that torture. The more I read about it the more I became convinced that the torture of our prisoners had a lot more to do with hatred and cruelty than it did with any desire to obtain information. Two examples stand out more than the others in confirming that belief:

Torturing our prisoners to death
A 2005 analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities, exposes the claim that �We don�t torture� for the lie that it is. That study found 21 of the 44 deaths evaluated by autopsy to be homicides:

The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.

This kind of thing is not done for the purpose of obtaining information.

And keep in mind that that study involved only a small fraction of the total number of detainees dying in the largely secret U.S. prison system since September 11, 2001. We will probably never know for sure the full extent of these barbaric homicides.

Testimony of a Muslin chaplain at Guantanamo Bay
Captain James Yee was a former U.S. Army Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay for several months. He wrote a detailed account of his observations in his book, �For God and Country�, which I summarized in a DU post. Yee�s many observations of what went on at Guantanamo Bay paint a clear picture of hatred and cruelty. Here is Yee�s account of a common practice encouraged by the camp Commander, Major General Jeoffrey Miller:

General Miller had a saying�. �The fight is on!� This was a subtle way of saying that rules regarding the treatment of detainees were relaxed� Guards retaliated in whatever way was most convenient at the moment�. The troopers called it IRFing�. Carried out by a group of six to eight guards called the Initial Response Force�. put on riot protection gear�. Then they rushed the block, one behind the other, where the offending detainee was�. It sounded like a stampede�. drenched the prisoner with pepper spray and then opened the cell door. The others charged in and rushed the detainee�. tied the detainee�s wrists behind his back and then his ankles�. then dragged the detainee from his cell and down the corridor�. to solitary confinement.

Cowardice

Altemeyer does not mention cowardice as a primary feature of RWAs. However, he does describe this characteristic in his book:

They usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. �Right� for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is (in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. �Might� means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob. 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�

So many of our wars have been characterized by massive numbers of civilian deaths. We killed about 200 thousand civilians in our war against the Philippines. From several hundred thousand to two million Vietnamese civilians died in our Vietnam War. And more than a million Iraqi civilians have died so far in our current Iraq War and occupation.

The term �Chicken hawk� has been used to denote the general phenomenon described by Altemeyer. Here is a typical definition of a chicken hawk:

A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that person lacks experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person�s youth.

Chalmers Johnson describes the issue in more detail, quoting historian Alfred Vagts from his book, �The Sorrows of Empire � Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic�:

In general, civilian militarism leads �to an intensification of the horrors of warfare�� Civilians are driven more by ideology than professionals, and when working with the military, they often feel the need to display a warrior�s culture, which they take to mean iron-fisted ruthlessness, since they are innocent of genuine combat. This effect was particularly marked in the second Iraq War of 2003, when many ideologically committed civilians staffing the Department of Defense, without the experience of military service, no less of warfare, dictated strategies, force levels, and war aims to the generals and admirals. Older, experienced senior officers denigrated them as �chicken hawks�.

The underlying problem is, therefore, that these RWA chicken hawks, in a desperate attempt to make themselves feel better about what they perceive as their own cowardice, overcompensate by putting other peoples� lives at great risk. Somehow they feel that this portrays an image of bravery (and unfortunately, to a large extent this does fool a substantial portion of the gullible public).

CONCLUSIONS

In the last chapter of Altemeyer�s book he emphasizes the threat that RWAs pose to our society and to the world, what most of us have in common with RWAs, and some possible solutions to the problem.

A brief summary of the dangers of right wing authoritarianism

Altemeyer writes of RWA leaders:

They want democracy to fail, they want your freedoms stricken, they want equality destroyed as a value, they want to control everything and everybody, they want it all. And they have an army of authoritarian followers marching with the militancy of �that old-time religion� on a crusade that will make it happen, if you let them�.

If being prejudiced makes it easier to commit atrocities� If obedience to malevolent authority makes one more likely to persecute others� If a tendency to conform plays a role in attacks on others� If illogical thinking, highly compartmentalized ideas, double standards, and hypocrisy help one to be brutally unfair to others� If being fearful makes one likely to aggress in the name of authority� If being self righteous permits one to think that attacks against helpless victims are justified�

If all those things are true � and they are � then right wing authoritarians pose a great danger to our society.

Altemeyer notes how impossibly difficult it is to change the opinion of a RWA:

You�re not likely to get anywhere arguing with authoritarians. If you won every round of a 15 round heavyweight debate with a Double High (RWA) leader over history, logic, scientific evidence, the Constitution, you name it, in an auditorium filled with high RWAs, the audience probably would not change its beliefs one tiny bit. Authoritarian followers might even cling to their beliefs more tightly, the wronger they turned out to be. Trying to change highly dogmatic, evidence-immune, groupgripping people in such a setting is like pissing into the wind.

The thin line between RWAs and most of the rest of us

Altemeyer warns us not to be so smug in our thinking about RWAs. There is some of that trait in most of us, maybe even all of us. He goes into great detail on the experiments of Stanley Milgram (much more than I�ve read previously) and concludes the following about those experiments:

Milgram has shown us how hard it is to say no to malevolent authority, how easy it is to follow the crowd, and how very difficult it is to resist when the crowd is doing the bidding of malevolent authority� Situational pressures, often quite unnoticed, temporarily strike the word (�No�) from our vocabulary�.

Research shows it takes more pressure to get low RWAs to behave shamefully in situations like the Milgram experiment than it takes for highs. But the difference between low and high authoritarians is one of degree, I repeat, not kind�With enough direct pressure from above and subtle pressure from around us, Milgram has shown, most of us cave in�.

Solutions

Lastly, Altemeyer discusses solutions to the problem. The hope that we will some day be able to defeat this problem was his main reason for writing his book. That is why he put his book on-line, making it available to us for free.

Before getting into possible solutions, he makes one thing very clear: Adopting the methods of RWAs to combat them is definitely NOT the solution. In fact, by making us more like them, it would be counterproductive.

There is one thing I noticed that all his proposed solutions have in common: Education � Shining the disinfecting light of truth on the subject:

Somehow get them to see that they�re not normal
Recall that it is very important for RWA followers to be seen as being normal. Of course getting them to understand this fact is extremely difficult, since they are generally so immune to logical arguments. Altemeyer leaves it to his readers to figure out exactly how to do this. But nevertheless he does give us something to work with:

Studies show they will moderate their attitudes and beliefs just from finding out that they�re different from most people. They don�t usually realize how extreme they are because they stick so closely with their own kind. They need to get out more.

More visibility for minorities
Toxic stereotypes of minorities flourish in an atmosphere of ignorance. I have personally seen throughout my life that prejudice tends to dissolve through familiarity with the objects of the prejudice. But I had no knowledge of scientific evidence to that effect until I read Altemeyer�s book (I haven�t finished it yet). He concludes on this subject:

Recall the evidence that nothing improves authoritarians� attitudes toward homosexuals as much as getting to know a homosexual � or learning that they�ve known one for years.

Education
We know from exit polls that voters with a post-graduate education were far more likely to vote for Al Gore and John Kerry than for George W. Bush. Again, Altemeyer describes the research that makes this point:

Higher education can have a significant beneficial impact upon authoritarian followers that lasts a lifetime. It doesn�t usually turn them into anti-matter versions of their former selves. But four years of undergraduate experience knocks their RWA scale scores down about 15-20%. That�s a lot when you�re talking about very dogmatic people.

Legislation
In the same way that familiarity with minorities tends to dissolve prejudices, so do laws that give minorities equal rights. That is a major reason why prejudice against minorities in our country, though we still have a long way to go, has decreased quite a bit over the course of our nation�s history. Altemeyer explains:

Anti-discrimination laws, designed to make sure everyone has the rights she is entitled to, can lead many prejudiced people to equal-footing contact with minorities. It�s vital that the authoritarians believe the law will be enforced, but if they think it will be, that contact can help break down stereotypes.

Speak out against the RWA mindset
Altemeyer explains that it can be extremely difficult to speak out against injustices or the tragic mistakes that our country is about to make when to do so would go against prevailing opinion. Yet it can be very important to do so. Thank you to Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney for their impeachment resolutions against George W. Bush. Thank you to Russ Feingold for being the only U.S. Senator to vote against the original PATRIOT Act. Thank you to Barbara Boxer for being the only U.S. Senator to officially question the results of the 2004 presidential election. And thank you to many of our other elected representative for their efforts to get our Congress and our country back on the right track. Altemeyer notes the potential importance of this kind of courageous action:

You don�t have to form a majority to have an effect. Two or three people speaking out can sometimes get a school board, a church board, a board of aldermen to reconsider authoritarian actions. Lack of any opposition teaches bullies simply to go for more. But it takes one person, an individual, to start the opposition.