. . . as well as the classic variable in political/social psychology that we usually think. Did you know that the right has been psychologically profiled, empirically, for decades? If you don't understand the mind of the chud, you are flailing in the dark as you attempt to defeat them. We are, after all, in an overlapping system of wars.
All leftists should be familiar with Right-wing Authoritarianism (RWA), so that we can better combat them, from a position of scientific understanding. Here are some really brief highlights, starting with 'what is RWA', before getting a little more... interesting:
- Authoritarian submission (hawt) — submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate
- Authoritarian aggression — aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, etc.
- Conventionalism (not hawt) — adherence to traditions and social norms, and a belief that others should also be required to adhere to these norms
Them's the basics. Now this is where it gets really, really interesting:
- Right-wing authoritarians tend to exhibit cognitive errors and symptoms of faulty reasoning.
-- Specifically, they are more likely to make incorrect inferences from evidence and to hold contradictory ideas that result from compartmentalized thinking.
-- They are also more likely to uncritically accept insufficient evidence that supports their beliefs and they are less likely to acknowledge their own limitations. - Authoritarians generally score lower on openness to experience and slightly higher on conscientiousness.
That last one is interesting, because they're more conscientious than 'normal'/'healthy'/(leftist) people. This means that they are generally more polite, and also neater/tidier/interested in order v. chaos kinda thing (Jordan Peterson much?). It's likely why they are more often bald and more likely to be germaphobes (lol Trump doesn't sleep and lives off of cheeseburgers but is also a germaphobe).
Anyway, just a couple more highlights:
- Authoritarians are generally more favorable to punishment and control than personal freedom and diversity.
- They are more likely to advocate strict, punitive sentences for criminals and report that punishing such people is satisfying for them. (ew)
- In roleplaying situations, authoritarians tend to seek dominance over others by being competitive and destructive instead of cooperative.
-- 68 authoritarians played a three-hour simulation of the Earth's future entitled the Global Change Game. Unlike a comparison game played by individuals with low RWA scores which resulted in world peace and widespread international cooperation, the simulation by authoritarians became highly militarized and eventually entered the stage of nuclear war. By the end of the high RWA game, the entire population of the earth was declared dead.
And here's perhaps the most interesting part, for right at the end:
- Right-wing authoritarianism has been found to correlate only slightly with social dominance orientation (SDO). The two measures can be thought of as two sides of the same coin as RWA provides submissive followers and SDO provides power-seeking leaders.
Basically, RWAs are the subs of the much rarer SDOs. Did you know that your average chud is actually... a sub?
Makes sense: authoritarians don't care so much about being on top, as they do about living inside a rigidly enforced social hierarchy, where they know neat and simply where they are, and who they get to shit on, and what they need to do to avoid getting shit on. They all just want Jordan Peterson to be their daddy.
It's a psychological orientation borne out of trauma, imo, and it's... dominant on earth today.
We need not always be these fragile, shattered husks of human beings. But, for now, many of us are.
Luckily, like all dimensions of intergenerational personality psychology... we are malleable, changeable, and can heal.
Until then, know you enemy. Familiarize yourself with the psychological profiles of the right, so we can better understand how to dismantle their movements and heal their minds.
We are the same old animal as we've ever been, and we can be good again. Solidarity forever! :af-heart:
I still don't understand how Altmeyer did all this research and can still be a shitlib.
He even tried to both sides it by talking about hypothetical "left wing authoritarians" but the research was dogshit so he didn't include it.
Still, it's worth reading The Authoritarians. It is a short read and highly informative. It and The Reactionary Mind should form the foundation of how you psychologically understand the right. They're really reliable.
Gawd, Altemeyer would be a fuckin' lib. Trying to both-sides it. If anything, tho, the fact that these truths were uncovered by a lib who also tried, and failed, to prod the left grants more validity to the ultimate findings.
Just for interest's sake, here's what the wikipedia article had to say about the 'both sides' element:
There have been a number of other attempts to identify "left-wing authoritarians" in the United States and Canada. These would be people who submit to leftist authorities, are highly conventional to liberal viewpoints and are aggressive to people who oppose left-wing ideology. These attempts have failed because measures of authoritarianism always correlate at least slightly with the right. However, left-wing authoritarians were found in Eastern Europe. There are certainly extremists across the political spectrum, but most psychologists now believe that authoritarianism is a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.
It looks like under the Soviet Union, authoritarians were more likely to be anti-capitalists, because they simply resist social change. Which means, someday, the 'rigid' personality types will be useful in defending leftism, which is an intuition I've often had. It's just that, until then, they are a barrier to progress. And, they always bias 'right-wing' in the sense of 'rigidly enforcing social norms and punishing deviants'. There is new evidence coming out of a kind of left-wing authoritarianism, which makes sense frankly when you consider ML-style thinking, but it pales in comparison to the mountains of evidence around right-wing authoritarianism, which is objectively worse hahaha
Thank you for the reading recommendations, comrade :af-heart:
The way I see it, from this research, the right wing mind is oriented around domination, hierarchy, and sadism.
So it isn't surprising that a right winger placed in the Soviet Union would be a dogmatic party liner, and see hierarchy in the party as crucial.
It also explains how easily all the former "Communists" became chuds after the fall. Capitalism is just a more appealing ideology to the right, with some form of mystic Feudalism being their ideal, hence why liberalism tends to decay into fascism.
Those are really great points. Really, when I think of Stalin and after, there truly is a 'chuddy' element to the USSR. That would likely be, in part, personality profiles holding sway in the party, and partly that it was just a really nascent socialist project that still hadn't shook off a lot of capitalist-dominance ideology. I'm thinking about the illegalization of homosexuality, and the treatment of Jews in particular.
That chuddiness was always bubbling under the surface, because it takes many generations to heal from that kind of stuff, and post-collapse Russia was basically the perfect environment for those tendencies to become dominant again.
I tend to think that RWA is mostly socially reproduced, rather than biologically, but in either case, you're right; different personality profiles prefer different social systems.
You gotta decolonize your mind first, like they say :red-fist:
Lots of people are really gross. But, like, think of the best person you've ever met. They are pretty incredible, right?
I imagine that a future is possible where that person is normal. And there are lots of even better people.
Healing and growth are possible individually, and culturally. I really, truly believe that. And I'm really excited for that future .
