The Origins of Authoritarianism

01:08 Hello.

Was that a section in a newsletter, or what was it?

Academically there has been a study now for I guess about 50 years, Bob Altemeyer’s loading Altemeyer, Robert Anthony... book The Authoritarians loading The Authoritarians... , which came out— I guess he put it on the internet maybe five or ten years ago, and John Dean loading Dean III, John Wesley... Editor’s note: Ray said “Bob Dean”, which I’ve ammended to John Dean loading Dean III, John Wesley... , who I believe was the watergate lawyer he was referring to. the Watergate lawyer became a fan of it and helped to publicize it because it was about the psychology of political authoritarianism, primarily. And his main focus is on what he calls the right-wing authoritarians.

And in my understanding of it, which started long before that, it was the intuitive thing of seeing that in the culture there is a unreasoning submission to the ideas of anyone in power, and conformism around what is taken to be the power enforced authoritative doctrine.

In reacting to Bob Altemeyer’s loading Altemeyer, Robert Anthony... version of it I have seen that, in some ways, publicizing these traits of the right-wing authoritarian, you might be adding to the confusion somewhat.

One of Altemeyer’s loading Altemeyer, Robert Anthony... images for how this can be conceptualized comes from Theodor Adorno loading Adorno, Theodor W.... , a group at Berkeley, who made the subject popular, I think was in the 60s, when they were getting famous for it. Adorno's loading Adorno, Theodor W.... image was that it’s the posture for riding a bicycle: bowing from waist up and kicking from the waist down. In other words submission to Authority of the power of those above you, knocking down anyone that’s below you to keep them below you. Bob Altemeyer loading Altemeyer, Robert Anthony... says that it isn’t a very good image.

He used questionnaires and got really clear results, but then other people using a scale of social prestige seeking, power seeking, identified people rather than conforming and fitting in to wherever they find themselves on scale they are only driven towards rising. You can think of the sociopath or the psychopath who cares about nothing but winning and isn’t satisfied until they come out owning everything and controlling everyone.

Over the last 50 or 60 years there have been various sociologists who look at different parts of psychology of politics and society. And ideas like inner-directed and other-directed, that was popular in the 50s, that you can fit into the the idea of submission to Authority and aggression against those below you in power, but the other-directed doesn’t necessarily limit itself to this authoritarian scheme. People can be other-directed while they’re trying to achieve something.

Like the people voting for Bernie loading Sanders, Bernie... can look to the movement to try to integrate themselves into a movement to see what can be optimized. So they’re being told that if they blend themselves in to the Democratic Party they can improve it. That idea is depending on other-directedness.

And the inner-directed idea is that you’re sort of spring-loaded in childhood to go in a certain direction. And so the people who say ‘if I can’t have Bernie loading Sanders, Bernie... winning the election’ will maybe go off and find something just as good or better and vote for Jill Stein loading Stein, Jill Ellen... or the Greens loading Green Party of the United States... or such.

So inner-direction can push you forward on a consistent line, where the other-direction can be looking for compromise and such. So it can be either forward-directed or simply authoritarian. And throughout the twentieth century, for example, Freud loading Sigmund, Freud... said repression is a good thing, fitting into the system.

And from the time I was, I guess, in high school people were saying ‘you have to work within the system.’ And my first thoughts on that were imagining what they were saying, that if you cooperate in system for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, look at the pile of criminal activities you could have participated in. Then you’ll have the power to do something. And first thing you do, you’re out of the system!

So you have a huge accumulated pile of bad stuff and then the first chance you have to do good stuff you might get a sizable, noticeable achievement, but it’s always going to be smaller than what you did in the opposite direction getting there.

So I wasn’t sold on the idea that you have to work within the system, because it’s really just a way of buying people into the system. Telling them that maybe someday you would be able to do some good.

08:04 Freud loading Sigmund, Freud... really allied with the oppressive class when he created his idea of the Ego mediating between the Id and the Super-Ego. It has to balance these forces. But he really came down on the side of the Super-Ego smashing the Id when necessary.

And around 1929 or 30 Wilhelm Reich loading Reich, Wilhelm... realized what Freud loading Sigmund, Freud... was doing. And he believed that Freud loading Sigmund, Freud... was very conscious of the rightness of Reich's loading Reich, Wilhelm... position, that you’re never going to have a healthy individual as long as they’re being oppressed. He believed that Freud loading Sigmund, Freud... simply wanted to save his movement from Nazism and they [were] able to survive by giving in to the oppression.

From the 1920s Reich loading Reich, Wilhelm... was saying that there’s an emotional plague all through the world, not just Fascism, but it’s the plague of authoritarianism. And at first he said education and medicine—psychiatry—can cure people of this, but then next thing he realised was that first you have to cure the doctors and the teachers of the emotional plague.

I think Reich loading Reich, Wilhelm... was essentially right, but I think it really is more than just an emotional plague, that I think it’s something like a historical, intellectual, epistemological plague built into the way we believe knowledge works.

Yeah. As soon as I started looking into encyclopaedias, and such, trying to find explanations, I think it goes even before Plato loading Plato... : Parmenides loading Parmenides... and Zeno loading Zeno of Elea... , they were the Greek school located in southern Italy—The Eleatics loading Eleatics, The... —and they argued that there is only one reality and it doesn’t change, doesn’t do anything, there is no movement!

And someone as smart as Bertrand Russell loading Russell, Bertrand Arthur William... praised the subtlety of Zeno's loading Zeno of Elea... paradoxes and such, but Russell loading Russell, Bertrand Arthur William... struggled for years in what seems like very stupid arguments. But he was smart enough to work himself out of that set of paradoxical mental activities that Western Philosophy had been trapped in for 2,500 years.

And Plato loading Plato... essentially gave in to the Parmenides loading Parmenides... school of thinking, that at least the knowledge part of existence, which is the real part of existence, is unchanging, eternal and perfect, and really was making worse of the crude ideas of Parmenides loading Parmenides... .

And Aristotle loading Aristotle... really acknowledged some of the reality of Heraclitus loading Heraclitus... . Heraclitus loading Heraclitus... said ‘everything flows’, exactly polar opposite of Plato loading Plato... and Parmenides loading Parmenides... that nothing moves. Heraclitus loading Heraclitus... said ‘that’s what it is, everything is moving’ and reason, meaning, steers everything through everything. So it wasn’t a jumbled random movement it was a developmental process which, as a whole, is steered by meaning.

Aristotle loading Aristotle... tried to formalize this using some of the concepts of Plato loading Plato... by putting it into a sensible scheme in which he had different kinds of causality including the ‘final cause principle’ which is that things are moved according to meaning, or intention. The universality of motion has no randomness and everything is meaningful, everything can be seen in terms of the first cause and the final cause and the various causes, consisting of their nature. So that for Aristotle loading Aristotle... laws were derived from the nature of things they weren’t in some other eternal world like for Plato loading Plato... .

Oh, oh yeah. The Platonic loading Plato... idea is creating a false reality for everything that we have in our memory. Seeing everything in terms of the past—something we have at one time generalized—and then saying that’s absolute and unchanging. And what it does is to say that all of these current events are random happenings, they don’t contain the meaning in themselves, they only get the meaning from these generalizations, and those are all eternal, out of time.

And this was taken up into physics with the idea of randomness, the assumption of randomness, which could then be treated statistically. But it’s a belief about current events and the nature of substance and experience, that it’s proclaimed to be of a lower order and essentially lacking meaning or purpose, and so the mathematical statistics is needed to make sense of it. And Parmenides loading Parmenides... doctrine was that you had to be indoctrinated into his school loading Eleatics, The... and learn his language of mathematics before you really were a citizen or a human being, using knowledge in this frozen abstracted sense to identify the value of a person.

And so Plato loading Plato... argued for tyranny, that the people who know would have the power and the power would be logic and mathematics. When this was put into action by the physicists they proclaimed themselves— those who did physics were those who knew the ultimate fundamental truths. And when biology wanted to gain status they said they would model themselves on the true basic science of physics.

And so to find the eternal ruling class elements of the world, the physicists looked for timeless, unchanging atoms. The individual atom had no unique features, no history, and was an absolute and pure Platonic loading Plato... thing. But the only way they can be treated, is by assuming that all of their later developments—their movements—all of these are meaningless and random and have to be described only statistically.

And in modelling biology on physics the equivalent of the timeless unchanging atom was the timeless unchanging gene. Again, the Soma, the body that we experience, was said to be basically just mortal junk that would be cast aside every generation while the immortal germline collection of genes was what was really important.

And this was developed very closely with people like Herbert Spencer loading Spencer, Herbert... who identified that even Darwin loading Darwin, Charles... was a racist that believed that English loading United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... science, and animals, and people were the best in the world.

Well 20th century history pretty much involved the Dulles brothers. They were working with Hitler loading Hitler, Adolf... with the fascist Germans loading German Reich... right from the beginning. And one of them was declared to be an enemy agent, and the German Government loading German Reich... had put their American loading United States of America... properties in his name, and so the US Government loading United States of America... , to confiscate the U.S. loading United States of America... properties, identified him as an illegal foreign agent. But that didn’t take away from their prestige or power, because— you know Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... himself was a great admirer of Mussolini loading Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea... , even after he took office he was saying what a great statesman Mussolini loading Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea... was. And so fascism wasn’t a bad word until they needed to go to war on the side of England loading United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... to save the British loading United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... Empire because Hitler loading Hitler, Adolf... had double-crossed the West and he wanted to knock out England loading United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland... and take their empire, where the West had figured that he would take over the Soviet Union loading Union of Soviet Socialist Republics... and then they would—the British loading Union of Soviet Socialist Republics... Empire and the American loading United States of America... Empire—could expand.

Yeah, in a sense. A philosopher, I think, would say it’s a sickness of method or of conclusions. But if you look at it historically Parmenides loading Parmenides... , and Plato loading Plato... , and Hegel loading Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich... , all of these people were part of the ruling class and it was the purpose of there thinking that way—even though that probably seemed spontaneous and truthful to them—it happened to be that it was a way of defining who deserves power. And defining their class as an eternal justified controller of property and power.

The idea of class was very conscious in most of history. And the 20th century— one of the tricks of the ruling class has been to teach the public that there are no classes in America loading United States of America... . I had a professor in graduate school when I was, in 1959 or 60, talking about the effect of class in literature, he interrupted me to say ‘in America we have no classes.’

It’s truly either a mental disease or defect of some sort for people to grow up and study and be able to say something like that. And it’s because the ruling class learned to manipulate language and control the people that they need to be controlled. They don’t want to necessarily define them as useless rubbish—which they believe they are—unless they can get away with it. But if they can make the people feel that they are equals with the royalty and keep them happy while they’re living like garbage, that’s the best thing for them. And so they have taught people that in America loading United States of America... there are no classes.

People who are really in the bottom thirty or forty percent of income call themselves middle class, and people who are more or less in the middle income range think of themselves as being in the upper five percent or such. Everyone seems to have this sort of escalated delusion of where they are in the social hierarchy.

Yeah, environment in every sentence. There are penalties of many sorts for getting out of it, and rewards of various kinds for reinforcing it.

No, there’ll be a rejection, or loss, of much of the trashy part of our culture but there’s no need to go as far as she suggests, going back to isolated tribalism.

But what’s unifying, what’s creating the one-world-ism at present, is a really degraded, sort of, concept of human interaction and interaction between people and their environment. And it’s all based on this polluted kind of philosophy or religion. It’s a religion of emptiness and abstraction that is telling people that this is all there is.

But leaving out all of these promotional, consumerist, economic functions, if you simply stop having wars and stop crooked advertising and stop promoting consumerism through schools and the way university research is directed and funded. If you simply stop the craziest practices what will be left will still be international but without suppressing the individual flavour of ethnicities and so on.

The natural interactions and trade I think will keep a unified world economy existing without, even if Foss loading Foss, Nicole M.... is right about the peak oil— my opinion is that the world is creating petroleum about as fast as it’s being used. And it just takes a while to refill the wells after they’re pumped out. But even if she was right there are alternative sources of power that can keep a really high-level culture going more or less permanently.

At present I think it’s something, about a dozen species, being extinct-ed every day. That’s an idea of what progress means in this this current period. And if you stop that kind of progress it’s like you stop falling into a hole. And as soon as you stop falling then then you can see what kind of possibility is really there.

Yeah. Making people conscious of the lies that they’re having imposed on them. And that involves things as drastic as saying that most of the theoretical physics that we’re taught to admire has been very, very clever technical adaptations with a gigantic fraudulent hierarchy of mathematical theories built on that. A little bit of empirical technical stuff has been given a mythic, sort of, importance because it’s used economically and in war.But the implications in theory I don’t think are at all what we’re being told by the theoretical physicists in Europe loading Europe... and America loading United States of America... .

Yeah, first a person who is chronically sick and malnourished just doesn’t have much energy or stamina to study and be critical, so first you just have to stop poisoning yourself by eating what the government and dietitians are selling as a healthful diet. And once you have the strength to read and think, then you realize who is doing what to you, and you start investigating the food industry the agricultural production industry, the science industry that supports the agricultural imposition, and the political system that justifies the medical, and agricultural, economic imposition. All of these are very clearly wound together in a system to maintain class dominance.

It’s very helpful to eat lobster once in a while, but you don’t see dietitians or the government recommending that. It started in the 1930s depression with the government having a three-tiered diet: one to prevent starvation in the very poor, one an economical diet to get along on very little and then, at the top a healthy diet. And if you look at the bare-survival and economic-minimal diet of the Great Depression, the dietitians in the 1960s and 70s adopted those survival diets as the healthy diet: lots of beans and grains as the basic diet.

Yeah, part of it was that the government loading United States of America... had been buying milk, dehydrating it, making cheese and butter to keep American loading United States of America... farmers working [inaudible] the prices. So that they were warehousing huge amounts of powdered milk, cheese, and butter, and giving them away, first as foreign aid and then to— the precursor to food stamps was to have, I think, every month, a giveaway to poor people: cheese, eggs, powdered milk, and so on. And in the 70s there was a big movement to stop helping the poor people in other countries as well as the poor at home. And one of the arguments that came up in the pseudo scientific Dietetic community was that people outside the United States hardly ever can tolerate lactose. So you should stop giving them powdered milk. And that argument against people—only certain white people can tolerate lactose—that was heavily promoted as a racist change of foreign policy against foreign aid and food aid in general. Sending them beans was okay, except we didn’t need to support the price of American beans that way.

A lot of it is the specific policy choices of the government, and corporations indoctrinating Americans loading United States of America... in a certain way. And one of my main criticisms of Bob Altemeyer loading Altemeyer, Robert Anthony... is that he has focused on the right-wing authoritarianism. And it would be okay to call it right-wing if you define ‘right’ in the sense of the fascism that Winston Churchill loading Churchill, Winston Leonard Spencer... and FDR loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... subscribed to. Americans loading United States of America... generally think of FDR loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... as an extreme leftist president. But definitely his admiration for Mussolini loading Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea... says there was no leftism at all.

What he was doing— he said what he was doing was saving his class. Saving the ruling class because there was such a threat of revolution in the United States loading United States of America... . So he was saving capitalism. And that would, I think, fit in as, you could say, modified fascism. It was an inventive way of keeping the corporation’s slightly out of sight. Letting them buy the various regulatory agencies, but keeping them out of the executive for their own good.

He was fixing the economy with Keynesian loading Keynes, John Maynard... economics. Which the people who organized a coup in 1933 to get him out, they considered even the borrowing and spending to be a Communist plot of governments. They wanted to get Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... out. But what he was doing was using finance to prevent revolution.

And immediately the Dulles’, when it came out that Allen Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... was working closely with the Nazis loading National Socialist German Workers' Party... at the end of World War II, Stalin loading Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich... informed Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... that his spies were aware that Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... was collaborating with the Nazis loading National Socialist German Workers' Party... .

And Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... — his comments suggested that he thought, maybe, Stalin loading Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich... had gone crazy to tell him such a thing. But within 2 or 3 days Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... surely would have found out that Stalin was right. And that would have put Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... in line for the the war crimes trials. But luckily for Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... , right at that moment Roosevelt loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... chose to die, saving Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... from criminal treason prosecution.

And the powers in the Democratic Party loading United States of America Democratic Party... who had connections both with Adolf Hitler loading Hitler, Adolf... and with the DuPont gang that had organized the 1933 coup attempt, they were in charge of the Big City Democratic loading United States of America Democratic Party... power party machine, and they knew that Harry Truman loading Truman, Harry S.... had expressed himself many times as wanting Hitler loading Hitler, Adolf... to go fight the Soviets loading Union of Soviet Socialist Republics... . And since that was the preferred American loading United States of America... policy, they had installed him as vice president in 1944.

And so Roosevelt's loading Roosevelt, Franklin Delano... death in forty-five not only saved Dulles loading Dulles, Allen... , but it put Truman loading Truman, Harry S.... in position to continue the pro-Nazi loading National Socialist German Workers' Party... policy. The Project Paperclip where the top Germans loading German Reich... were not only helped moved to Argentina loading Argentine Republic... and adjoining countries, but a lot of them were brought to the U.S. loading United States of America... , the scientists in particular.

Oh, oh for sure! One of the people who invented the idea of communist brainwashing: saying that when prisoners of war had confessed their crimes and wanted to stay with the enemy, he said ‘that proves that they’ve got amazing powers of brainwashing.’ And I think it was two or three days after a big speech on that, he approved the MK ULTRA project for testing LSD and other drugs to see if they could wipe out a person’s moral restrictions and give complete power over them.

Yeah, yeah. For example you could still have very strong government control, but if it was rationalized so that, for example, a person had to pass a test, had to know certain empirical facts before they could get a license, you know they would have to know something about blood circulation and how respiration works and such things, so that you wouldn’t inject things into the wrong part of the patient. But with just a reasonable control you could open up the whole field so that you would have, not only more accessible medicine, but also better medicine. It would give people a choice between rational and the irrational treatments.

Tolstoy loading Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich... and Kropotkin loading Kropotkin, Pyotr Alexeyevich... are my oldest political influences, I think. People who had explicit ideas. And one of Tolstoy’s loading Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich... lines was that a person should be ashamed to use government power.

If you have an organization that has deleted, for maybe five years or ten years, if you have simply deleted the threats and the craziness that presently is saturating our culture, I think you would very easily have a powerless society that would function without visible power.

There’s a town in Andalusia, Spainwhich, I think it was 1989, they elected an Anarchist mayor, and it’s just an amazing town. Editor’s note: Marinaleda may be the Andalusian town. Sánchez Gordillo loading Gordillo, Juan Manuel Sánchez... became mayor on May 6, 1979. They’ve re-elected him ever since, and they gradually, piece-by-piece, expropriated unused land. And within just a very few years of his first election they had eliminated poverty, eliminated the town police, and had everything cleaned up. And that’s still going now 25 to 30 years later. I think that’s an example of how any place can work if you just remove the most horrible, oppressive parts of the system.

Oh yeah, there’s— I don’t think he ever finished the mural in San Miguel. I’ve always wanted to see that. I heard about the process of starting it and the conflicts that interrupted it.