"A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth." -- Albert Einstein,
letter to a friend, 1901d by Altemeyer: are
“especially submissive to established authority;" show
“general aggressiveness” toward others when such behavior “is perceived to be
sanctioned” by established authorities; are highly
compliant with “social conventions” endorsed by society and established
authorities. In Pharma land these can be
[25% of the population, according to
Bob Altemeyer
are authoritarian followers, more or less impervious to reasoned arguments (1
in 4 East Germans were found to be Stasi informers). They must tally with the Stage
1 and 2 spirituality. They follow without thinking the
Authoritarians.
The Followers, as characterize found among
the Quackbusters
(eg HealthFraud posse) who are organised and lead by Authoritarian
leaders (eg Smith).
These are the people who vote in the Social dominators
and support their wars, and if you wondered who buys Tony Blair's
autobiography here is the answer!]
Quotes Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult
American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so
self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do
will change their minds. They would march America into a dictatorship and
probably feel that things had improved as a result. … And they are so submissive
to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told.
They are not going to let up and they are not going away.Bob Altemeyer
I am convinced that at least a third of the population is what
Eric Hoffer calls "true believers." They are joiners and
followers . . . people who want to give away their power. They look for answers, meaning,
and enlightenment outside themselves. ....They are followers, not because of a desire for
self-advancement, but because it can satisfy their passion for self-renunciation!" Hoffer also says that true believers "are eternally incomplete and eternally
insecure"! ......The Moral Majority is made up of
true believers. All cults are composed of true believers. You'll find them in
politics, churches, businesses, and social cause groups. They are the fanatics
in these organizations. The
Battle for Your Mind: Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The Public By Dick
Sutphen
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring
liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the
truth.” Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956),
American humorous journalist
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with
illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is
always their victim.” Gustave Le Bon, “The Crowd”
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that
is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities,
and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them;
and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank
God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque
self-deception.” Mark Twain, “The Mysterious
Stranger” (1910)
"They must find it difficult...those who have taken
authority as the truth, rather than truth as the
authority."---Gerald Massey
Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without
knowing what he is hollering about.---Mark
Twain
"The men the American people admire most
extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are
those who try to tell them the truth."-H. L. Mencken
"It is more than just gullibility that explains the
phenomenon of the authoritarian follower. Can you imagine John Yoo, Alberto
Gonzales, or David Petraeus going against the will of George W. Bush on any
matter when he was in power? That would be highly unlikely because their
positions of high power depended entirely on putting all their energy into
anticipating the needs of and pleasing their “leader”. George Bush started out
the same way. As governor of Texas, all his efforts went into pleasing his
corporate cronies. In return, they rewarded him handsomely by ensuring his
material wealth and serving as a power base for his climb to the presidency.
Lobaczewski describes the process as one of sycophancy:
"They initially perform subordinate functions in such a movement and
execute the leaders’ orders, especially whenever something needs to be done
which inspires revulsion in others. Their evident zealotry and cynicism gives
rise to criticism on the part of the more reasonable members, but it also earns
the respect of some its more extreme revolutionaries. They thus find protection
among those people who earlier played a role in the movement’s ponerization, and
repay the favor with compliments or by making things easier for them. Thus they
climb up the organizational ladder, gain influence, and almost involuntarily
bend the contents of the entire group to their own way of experiencing reality
and to the goals derived from their deviant nature."
[2010August ] Time for Change: Why the Corrupt
Few Wreak So Much Death, Destruction, and Suffering on the Rest of us
Experiments show that high RWAs are so defensive and so
unaware of themselves that when you tell them what high RWAs are like, they
almost always think you're talking about somebody else. So I predict most
authoritarian followers would sail right through this book and compartmentalize,
misinterpret, rationalize, and dogmatically deny it had anything to do with them
personally. If you tried to force this self-awareness on them, they would
probably run away, run away, as fast as they could. So good luck if you passed
on this URL to your fascist Uncle George.
.......I similarly think you'll likely be wasting your time trying to convince
authoritarian followers that they are being systematically misinformed and
played for dopes by their leaders. It's too important to them to believe
otherwise, and just your raising the question will likely put you into their
huge out-group and make them suspicious of you. p.239
[2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
They (religious fundamentalists) are highly likely to be authoritarian
followers. They are highly submissive to established authority aggressive in the
name of that authority and conventional to the point of insisting everyone
should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous
and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various
out-groups They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for
themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social
support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups.
have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards
in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often
hypocrites.
But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They
are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as
they are narrow-minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they
oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as
they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they
believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts
about their core belief. But they are very happy, highly giving, and quite
zealous. In fact, they are about the only zealous people around nowadays in
North America which explains a lot of their success in their endless (and
necessary) pursuit of converts.
I want to emphasize also that all of the above is based on
studies in which, if the opposite were true instead, that would have been shown.
This is not just "somebody's opinion." It's what the fundamentalists themselves
said and did. And it adds up to a truly depressing bottom line. Read the
two paragraphs above again and consider how much of it would also apply to the
people who filled the stadium at the Nuremberg Rallies. I know this comparison
will strike some as outrageous, and I'm NOT saying religion turns people into
Nazis. But does anybody believe the ardent Nazi followers in Germany or
Mussolini's faithful in Italy or Franco's legions in Spain were a bunch of
atheists? Being' religious" does not automatically build a firewall against
accepting totalitarianism, and when fundamentalist religions teach authoritarian
submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism, they help create the
problem. Can we not see how easily religious fundamentalists would lift a
would-be dictator aloft as part of a "great movement," and give it their all?
[Book 2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
When bad news spills out about things that high RWAs support, they want to be
told it isn't true. So some governments have gotten used to issuing "non-denial
denials" and flimsy counter-arguments, because that's all it takes and it's so
effortless. If a well-researched paper by a prestigious scientific body
concludes that human activity is seriously increasing the amount of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, culprit governments will say "the evidence is
incomplete" and they will find someone, somewhere, with some sort of
credentials, who will dismiss a great number of studies with a wave of the hand
and give them the sound-bite they want.
When someone responds to evidence with "a wave of the hand"
or a bland dismissal like "It's just nonsense," they're usually revealing they
can't say anything more specific because they're whupped. But the government's
supporters will be reassured. For them, one sound bite cancels the other, and
there really is no difference between a widely-confirmed fact and a speculation,
between fifty studies and one.
To take a non-political example of walking extra miles for
authorities, when people first began to reveal they had been sexually assaulted
as children by priests and ministers, bishops often issued statements saying
they had thoroughly investigated the charge and found it had no merit. That was
good enough for the authoritarian followers. .....If it eventually became known
that the bishops' own inquiries had discovered that Father X was indeed a
pedophile, but the bishops still denied he was and sometimes even quietly
transferred Father X to another parish, where he sexually assaulted still more
children, do you think the high RWAs learned anything from this? How many
"disconnects" do you think they have at hand to avoid realizing they allowed
themselves to be deceived?
[Book 2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
Once someone becomes a leader of the high RWAs' in-group, he can lie with
impunity about the out-groups, himself, whatever, because he knows the followers
will seldom check on what he says, nor will they expose themselves to people who
set the record straight. Furthermore they will not believe the truth if they
somehow get exposed to it, and if the distortions become absolutely undeniable,
they will rationalize it away and put it in a box. If the scoundrel's duplicity
and hypocrisy lands him on the front page of every daily in the country, the
followers will still forgive him if he just says the right things.
[Book 2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
p.100
And while most Americans came to realize what a mistake the war in Iraq has
turned out to be, high RWAs lagged far behind. They listen to the news they want
to hear. They surround themselves with people who think like they do. They
believe the leaders who tell them what they want to be told. They make about as
much effort to get both sides of an issue as the Bush administration does to
foster different points of view within the White House. And if six high RWAs are
sitting in a room talking about the war, and all six now have misgivings, it
will still be hard for any of them to say so because the ethic of group
solidarity is so strong in the authoritarian mind.
Is there any conceivable evidence or revelation that will
lead them to admit the war was a mistake? I suspect some of them will
eventually, begrudgingly reach that point, and others will rewrite their
personal histories and say they had their doubts from the start. But others,
petrified by their dogmatism, will never admit the undeniable.
[Book 2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
p.99
It's easy to see why authoritarian followers would be dogmatic, isn't it?
When you haven't figured out your beliefs, but instead absorbed them from other
people, you're really in no position to defend them from attack. Simply put. you
don 't know why the things you believe are true. Somebody else decided they
were, and you're taking their word for it. So what do you do when challenged?
Well first of all you avoid challenges by sticking with your
own kind as much as possible, because they're hardly likely to ask pointed
questions about your beliefs. But if you meet someone who does, you'll probably
defend your ideas as best you can, parrying thrusts with whatever answers your
authorities have pre-loaded into your head. If these defenses crumble, you may
go back to the trusted sources. They probably don't have to give you a
convincing refutation of the anxiety-producing argument that breached your
defenses, just the assurance that you nonetheless are right. But if the
arguments against you become overwhelming and persistent, you either concede the
point—which may put the whole lot at risk—or you simply insist you are right and
walk away, clutching your beliefs more tightly than ever.
That's what authoritarian followers tend to do. And let's
face it, it's an awfully easy stand to take. You have to know a lot nowadays to
stake out an intelligent, defendable position on many issues. But you don't have
to know anything to insist you're right, no matter what. Dogmatism is by far the
best fall-back defense, the most impregnable castle, that ignorance can find.
It's also a dead give-away that the person doesn't know why he believes what he
believes.
[Book 2006] The Authoritarians” by Bob Altemeyer
p.93
There are people who talk about God but are not the least bit religious or
spiritual. These are people who may appear to be in Stage Four, who can wear
Stage Four veneer— like certain cult leaders—but who, in fact, are Stage One
criminals.-----THE STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH
By M. Scott Peck, M.D.
Stage One, which I label "chaotic/antisocial." This stage probably
encompasses about twenty percent of the population, including those whom I call
people of the lie. In general, this is a stage of absent spirituality and the
people at this stage are utterly unprincipled. I call it antisocial because
while they are capable of pretending to be loving, actually all of their
relationships with their fellow human beings are self-serving and covertly, if
not overtly, manipulative.-----THE STAGES OF SPIRITUAL GROWTH
By M. Scott Peck, M.D.
[25% of the population, according to
Bob Altemeyer
are authoritarian followers, more or less impervious to reasoned arguments (1
in 4 East Germans were found to be Stasi informers). They must tally with the Stage
1 and 2 spirituality. They follow without thinking the
Authoritarians.
The Followers, as characterize found among
the
Quackbusters
(eg
HealthFraud posse)
who are organised and lead by
Authoritarian
leaders (eg Smith).
These are the people who vote in the
Social dominators
and support their wars, and if you wondered who buys Tony
Blair's
autobiography here is the answer!]
