What is a Psychological Authoritarian?
As we get into chapter one of Bob Altemeyer’s book ‘The Authoritarians’, we get the necessary explanation of what a Psychological Authoritarian is.
As noted at the end of the last post, when we talk about Authoritarians in the psychological sense, we’re looking at Authoritarian followers. We have plenty of well-known names (of varying psychological relevance) for their leaders: megalomaniacs, Macchiavellians, malignant narcissists, and sociopaths. The followers are the individuals that interest us.
“Psychologically these followers have personalities featuring:
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- a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in their society;
- high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
- a high level of conventionalism.” p. 9
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I think Altemeyer’s definition could use a little polishing. For example, many non-Authoritarians would suggest that there is nothing “legitimate” about the authorities that modern Authoritarians are bowing and scraping before. ‘Traditional’ is, I think, clearer than ‘established, legitimate’.
Authoritarians are so desperate to have their beliefs validated, that once someone does so from a position of traditional authority (church leader, business leader, etc.), it takes a lot to convince them that they’re being used.
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
Authoritarians take this to ridiculous degrees. Authoritarians, as defined by Altemeyer, tend to be conservative and fundamentalist Christian, and such people are most commonly (but by no means exclusively) found in the South. So, while it’s not certain that the people being spoken about in the following quote were necessarily authoritarians just because they were in Tennessee, the refusal to accept reality is illustrative of the Authoritarian mindset:
“Dr Brett Campbell, a physician in a dedicated Covid intensive care unit at Ascension St Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, says that the Delta variant has made the situation worse, and that he has witnessed increasing antagonism directed at the staff, sometimes because the patients deny that Covid exists or resent being advised on the disease by the medics. He says he has seen cases where unvaccinated patients, many of them close to death, still cannot accept that the virus is real.” BBC
We have certainly seen aggression in the name of Authoritarians’ chosen authority. And that may be the key word, “chosen”. While Authoritarian thinking is grounded in the traditional and conventional, they still choose their authorities to some extent.
In the next post we’ll dive a little deeper into the first of these three elements of the definition of Authoritarian and see whether ‘established’ and ‘legitimate’ stand up, after all.
Note: The quote above often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain. Unlike a lot of misattributions, Twain did express this sentiment, albeit slightly less pithily:
“How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”