{"id":56,"date":"2025-03-13T21:00:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-13T21:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/?p=56"},"modified":"2025-04-18T12:05:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T12:05:48","slug":"what-is-authoritarian-aggression","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/2025\/03\/13\/what-is-authoritarian-aggression\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Authoritarian Aggression?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Authoritarian followers are aggressive, but only when they believe that they are punishing a wrong-doer and only when they believe that the risk to them is minimal. Wrong-doers can include wives and children who fail to live up to the rules of these authoritarian followers (who get to be authoritarian leaders in their own homes). The people that authoritarians attack are frequently defenseless, or at least at a significant disadvantage. And when the would-be target of this morally righteous authoritarian aggression is too powerful to take on, one-on-one, then it\u2019s time to call out the posse.<\/p>\n

Indeed, Authoritarians seek to punish law-breakers to a ludicrous extent. They probably think the crimes are more serious than they are because they have so little experience in the world. The high saliency of a crime that they\u2019re thinking about is likely to make them feel personally unsafe. Their delight in punishing others probably stems from the fact that they harbour desires that they don\u2019t act on, and that they would expect to be punished for if they did. As such, they get the vicarious thrill of knowing about the person\u2019s \u201ccrime\u201d and the direct pleasure of enacting righteous punishment.<\/p>\n

Wrong-doers don\u2019t just include people who break the law, but also people who aren\u2019t behaving in socially appropriate ways; hence why the right wing media in the US has been successfully pointing the authoritarian portion of their audience at homosexuals and transgender people. It\u2019s red meat to a crowd who like to get self-righteously riled up. The increase in hate crime just from Trump being on the campaign trail, let alone president, is well attested<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If a person that the Authoritarian follower looks up to tells them to go out and attack people whose description matches that of authoritarian followers, they would do just that. This is the product of two things about authoritarians; they are so self-blind that they wouldn\u2019t recognise themselves in the description of authoritarians (because they see themselves as good people, so a description of a bad person can\u2019t possibly be describing them) and, relatedly, they are monumentally hypocritical, decrying behaviour in others that they themselves would engage in. If they \u2013 as good people \u2013 do it, then it\u2019s good, but if others do the same thing, it\u2019s bad, even if they do it for the same reasons (see also Cognitive Dissonance [1], [2], [3]).<\/p>\n

Many people would recognise this sort of behaviour as pretty far from righteous or even moral, but it is both of these things if your morality is more along the lines of \u2018might makes right\u2019. While not covered in Bob Altemeyer\u2019s \u2018The Authoritarians<\/a>\u2019, it is maybe worth doing a brief aside on Lawrence Kohlberg\u2019s ‘Stages of Moral Development’.<\/p>\n

Kohlberg\u2019s model (see image below) is frequently presented with age-ranges alongside each of the stages, mostly as a reflection of its genesis in the developmental psychological work of Jean Piaget. Children are typically shown as passing through Level 1 up to the age of seven or eight, and through Level 2 by the time of their early teenage years, and thus potentially moving into Stage 5 in their late teens and, maybe, eventually reaching Stage 6.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Image from: oneworldhousenet.net<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Authoritarian morality, or at least their orientation toward doling out punishment to transgressors, is driven by Stage 4 thinking, at most. However, their preference for overwhelming odds and vulnerable targets is redolent of Stage 1. This is their hypocrisy again: I can act like a toddler (Stage 1), but I can punish you for failing to accept the same authorities as me (Stage 4). Their behaviour seems to suggest that they couldn\u2019t even conceive of Stages 5 or 6 as existing. Indeed, in later writing on the theory, Kohlberg suggested that only around 15% of people engage in Stage 5 & 6 moral reasoning. This is to say that engaging in Stage 4-type moral reasoning would see Authoritarians mixed in with the majority of people, but their being anchored down at Stage 1 for some of their behaviours, sees them far behind their peers.<\/p>\n

Notice that Stages 3 and 4 appear in what Kohlberg called Level 2 or \u2018Conventional Morality\u2019. This conventionality, not just in moral reasoning, but in everything else, is the third key aspect of Altemeyer\u2019s definition of an Authoritarian. As such, the next instalment will be a brief discussion of Authoritarian conventionality.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Further reading on Cognitive Dissonance<\/strong>
\n[1] Internet Archive of Leon Festinger\u2019s 312-page book<\/a> on Cognitive Dissonance (1957; 1968 reprint)
\n[2] A thorough summary (11-page PDF<\/a>, but only about six pages of reading)
\n[3] An introduction to a modern analysis of the theory (22-page PDF<\/a>, around 17 pages of reading).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 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 … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authoritarianism","category-bob-altemeyer","category-learning-out-loud","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coexistential.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}