A possibly important question is what happened after the findings were reported and the “diagnosis” was applied—did anyone propose for the high-RWA scorers a direction of treatment? Did this personality type make it into the DSM? Because I don’t think we can talk about medicalizing a worldview as long as the medical establishment does not take any action against it whatsoever. Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Left-wing bias isn’t necessarily evident in this. From the Wikipedia article:
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. [19] There are certainly extremists across the political spectrum, but most psychologists now believe that authoritarianism is a predominantly right-wing phenomenon.[20]
Furthermore, while this tidbit indicates that researchers believe high-RWA scorers are more biased (which is the closest to condemnation I could find in the article):
According to research by Altemeyer, 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.[14] Whether right-wing authoritarians are less intelligent than average is disputed, with Stenner arguing that variables such as high verbal ability (indicative of high cognitive capacity) have a very substantial ameliorative effect in diminishing authoritarian tendencies.
… it doesn’t follow that this springs from an equal and opposite bias against RWAs. Who knows, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe high-RWA scorers do exhibit these biases more than the rest. (At least it can be agreed on that either they do or they don’t. The position that everyone across the political spectrum is equally wrong doesn’t seem likely.)
Also, it might be worth asking whether high-RWA scorers don’t necessarily identify with the label of “authoritarian” because the researchers made their result sound like a slur, or because the testers have internalized the widespread societal attitude that authoritarianism is bad and reminiscent of murderous regimes. It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I suspect that the problem with identifying “left-wing authoritarians” could be that when someone becomes too obviously authoritarian, left-wing people who don’t agree with them re-classify them as right-wing.
That is, the real problem is not defining “authoritarian personality”. I believe such personality type exists empirically, and can hold many kinds of political beliefs (even libertarian beliefs). The real problem is defining “right-wing” and “left-wing” meaningfully, without sneaking in something about authority.
It’s not that “authoritarian” is silently re-defined as “not left-wing”, but rather that “left-wing” is silently re-defined as “not authoritarian”. So when you have a situation where left-wing people come to power and their corrupted human hardware becomes obvious, for example in Soviet Russia, a few decades later you will find people who are telling you with straight face that “actually, Stalinists were right-wing”.
What they mean by saying that, in my opinion, is something like: “I admit that these people were horrible, which means I have to deny that they belonged to my tribe”. (People who think that Stalinists were the good guys usually don’t feel the need to re-classify them as right-wing.) In tribal thinking, my tribe is defined as “the good people”, so if someone was a member of my tribe, they couldn’t be evil, and if someone was evil, then by definition they were not really members of my tribe. (Analogically, religious people who disapprove of Inquisition say that the inquisitors were not true Christians, etc.)
(There is also the recently popular tendency to re-define words to mean “X, except when our tribe is doing that”. Which means you cannot be sexist against men, racist against white people, and if you blindly believe and worship someone left-wing on tumblr it does not make you an authoritarian personality. But to me it seems that most people understand this as a dishonest move, and perhaps only the true believers really buy it. On the other hand most people are unable to define “left-wing” and “right-wing” other than saying how the common consensus already classifies the existing political parties.)
Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Please be aware of how it all comes from the Frankfurter School, Freudo-Marxism. When someone like Adorno defines an Authoritarian Personality and actually does it to explain nazism around 1950, the amount of condemnation in it s rather huge and really obvious. Altmeyer may be different, but the “tradition”, the central point was already set and Altmeyer could only deviate with relative to that.
I mean, if you work from a biological angle, such as studying rhesus monkeys or an anthropological angle, a dominance and hierarchy driven personality is simply normal. It is also normal from the historical angle, such as describing the Roman pater familas or any random medieval lord. From all these angles, you would not put a special name on it, such as RWA or authoritarian personality, as they would be pretty normal. The angle from which it looks special, weird, unusual is precisely that one angle that also condemns it hard, namely modern, liberal, Western civilization. I think the huge connotations of condemnation really cannot be unnoticed here. Either you find it normal in which case it hardly has a name, or you condemn it.
It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I consider this fairly impossible. One thing is clear all over the political spectrum, freedom, democracy and rights and suchlike are at least preferable to modern, demotic, populist dictatorships of the Saddam type. Nobody ever came up with a serious recipe how to violate these principles in a way that it results in some kind of an nice premodern monarchy and not Saddam. From this angle, NRx is pretty much a doomed idea. It seems in the modern world you can only choose from modern systems, such as democracy or modern, demotic, populist tyranny. Anything seriously premodern would require changing the era, not the system, changing the whole culture and perhaps even technology. Within, strictly within modern alternatives, freedom, democracy and rights are preferable, thus they will continue to stay popular. And this is why any model about behavior that seems to be rather clearly opposed to it cannot help but be condemnative.
This is basically a challenge. It is probably possible to live closer to biological / anthropological norms i.e. being “dominance-positive” while still accepting the general outlines of freedom, equality and rights, but how this is possible needs to be worked out, currently it is not at all obvious.
A possibly important question is what happened after the findings were reported and the “diagnosis” was applied—did anyone propose for the high-RWA scorers a direction of treatment? Did this personality type make it into the DSM? Because I don’t think we can talk about medicalizing a worldview as long as the medical establishment does not take any action against it whatsoever. Rather, the fact that groups of researchers in psychology wanted to see whether there was such a thing as a dominance-, hierarchy-driven personality—and then stick a name on it—does not necessarily mean they were condemning it. Just taking note of it as a phenomenon.
Left-wing bias isn’t necessarily evident in this. From the Wikipedia article:
Furthermore, while this tidbit indicates that researchers believe high-RWA scorers are more biased (which is the closest to condemnation I could find in the article):
… it doesn’t follow that this springs from an equal and opposite bias against RWAs. Who knows, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe high-RWA scorers do exhibit these biases more than the rest. (At least it can be agreed on that either they do or they don’t. The position that everyone across the political spectrum is equally wrong doesn’t seem likely.)
Also, it might be worth asking whether high-RWA scorers don’t necessarily identify with the label of “authoritarian” because the researchers made their result sound like a slur, or because the testers have internalized the widespread societal attitude that authoritarianism is bad and reminiscent of murderous regimes. It takes a step further towards NRx for right-wing authoritarians to remove the last vestiges of lip-service to liberally-slanted feel-good words in Western society of all persuasions (freedom, democracy, rights and so on), which most aren’t going to make. (At least not until Moldbug & co. have claimed a larger share of society as their political allies.)
I suspect that the problem with identifying “left-wing authoritarians” could be that when someone becomes too obviously authoritarian, left-wing people who don’t agree with them re-classify them as right-wing.
That is, the real problem is not defining “authoritarian personality”. I believe such personality type exists empirically, and can hold many kinds of political beliefs (even libertarian beliefs). The real problem is defining “right-wing” and “left-wing” meaningfully, without sneaking in something about authority.
It’s not that “authoritarian” is silently re-defined as “not left-wing”, but rather that “left-wing” is silently re-defined as “not authoritarian”. So when you have a situation where left-wing people come to power and their corrupted human hardware becomes obvious, for example in Soviet Russia, a few decades later you will find people who are telling you with straight face that “actually, Stalinists were right-wing”.
What they mean by saying that, in my opinion, is something like: “I admit that these people were horrible, which means I have to deny that they belonged to my tribe”. (People who think that Stalinists were the good guys usually don’t feel the need to re-classify them as right-wing.) In tribal thinking, my tribe is defined as “the good people”, so if someone was a member of my tribe, they couldn’t be evil, and if someone was evil, then by definition they were not really members of my tribe. (Analogically, religious people who disapprove of Inquisition say that the inquisitors were not true Christians, etc.)
(There is also the recently popular tendency to re-define words to mean “X, except when our tribe is doing that”. Which means you cannot be sexist against men, racist against white people, and if you blindly believe and worship someone left-wing on tumblr it does not make you an authoritarian personality. But to me it seems that most people understand this as a dishonest move, and perhaps only the true believers really buy it. On the other hand most people are unable to define “left-wing” and “right-wing” other than saying how the common consensus already classifies the existing political parties.)
Please be aware of how it all comes from the Frankfurter School, Freudo-Marxism. When someone like Adorno defines an Authoritarian Personality and actually does it to explain nazism around 1950, the amount of condemnation in it s rather huge and really obvious. Altmeyer may be different, but the “tradition”, the central point was already set and Altmeyer could only deviate with relative to that.
I mean, if you work from a biological angle, such as studying rhesus monkeys or an anthropological angle, a dominance and hierarchy driven personality is simply normal. It is also normal from the historical angle, such as describing the Roman pater familas or any random medieval lord. From all these angles, you would not put a special name on it, such as RWA or authoritarian personality, as they would be pretty normal. The angle from which it looks special, weird, unusual is precisely that one angle that also condemns it hard, namely modern, liberal, Western civilization. I think the huge connotations of condemnation really cannot be unnoticed here. Either you find it normal in which case it hardly has a name, or you condemn it.
I consider this fairly impossible. One thing is clear all over the political spectrum, freedom, democracy and rights and suchlike are at least preferable to modern, demotic, populist dictatorships of the Saddam type. Nobody ever came up with a serious recipe how to violate these principles in a way that it results in some kind of an nice premodern monarchy and not Saddam. From this angle, NRx is pretty much a doomed idea. It seems in the modern world you can only choose from modern systems, such as democracy or modern, demotic, populist tyranny. Anything seriously premodern would require changing the era, not the system, changing the whole culture and perhaps even technology. Within, strictly within modern alternatives, freedom, democracy and rights are preferable, thus they will continue to stay popular. And this is why any model about behavior that seems to be rather clearly opposed to it cannot help but be condemnative.
This is basically a challenge. It is probably possible to live closer to biological / anthropological norms i.e. being “dominance-positive” while still accepting the general outlines of freedom, equality and rights, but how this is possible needs to be worked out, currently it is not at all obvious.