The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
How Authoritarian Leaders Get Away With It

How Authoritarian Leaders Get Away With It

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Experimental psychologist Bob Altemeyer spent his entire career studying authoritarians, both the leaders and the followers. In 1998, he wrote:

“Wanna-be tyrants in a democracy are just comical figures on soapboxes when they have no following. So the real…threat lay coiled in parts of the population itself…ready someday to catapult the next Hitler to power with their votes.”

His and other’s research yields this list of conclusions about authoritarian followers whether they follow tyrants on the left, right, religious, spiritual, whatever:

  1. They are highly ethnocentric, highly inclined to see the world as their in-group versus everyone else. Because they are so committed to their in-group, they are very zealous in its cause.
  2. They are highly fearful of a dangerous world. Their parents taught them, more than parents usually do, that the world is dangerous. They may also be genetically predisposed to experiencing stronger fear than most people do.
  3. They are highly self-righteous. They believe they are the “good people” and this unlocks a lot of hostile impulses against those they consider bad.
  4. They are aggressive. Given the chance to attack someone with the approval of an authority, they will lower the boom.
  5. Their beliefs are a mass of contradictions. They have highly compartmentalized minds, in which opposite beliefs exist side-by-side in adjacent boxes. As a result, their thinking is full of double-standards.
  6. They reason poorly. If they like the conclusion of an argument, they don’t pay much attention to whether the evidence is valid or the argument is consistent.
  7. They are highly dogmatic. Because they have gotten their beliefs mainly from the authorities in their lives, rather than think things out for themselves, they have no real defense when facts or events indicate they are wrong. So they just dig in their heels and refuse to change.
  8. They are very dependent on social reinforcement of their beliefs. They think they are right because almost everyone they know, almost every news broadcast they see, almost every radio commentator they listen to, tells them they are. That is, they screen out the sources that will suggest that they are wrong.
  9. Because they severely limit their exposure to different people and ideas, they vastly overestimate the extent to which other people agree with them. And thinking they are “the moral majority” supports their attacks on the “evil minorities” they see in the country.
  10. They are easily duped by manipulators who pretend to espouse their causes when all the con-artists really want is personal gain.
  11. They are largely blind to themselves. They have little self-understanding and insight into why they think and do what they do.

Why would people be like this? Lots of reasons that are hard to distinguish. There are probably evolutionary origins beta males subordinating themselves in species with alpha males. Upbringing and social context play a role.  We could list benefits of being a follower, for example, that self-certainty is fun. We could also list the costs of the alternatives, for example, that self-doubt, changing one’s mind, or admitting you’re wrong is uncomfortable.

Then there are those who aren’t choosing to be followers but can’t help it because they actually can’t think hard enough to make their own big choices. And then there’s an often overlooked factor: The more complicated the world becomes the more appealing it is to give up on thinking and put trust in an authority who speaks with confidence.

We need to know what motivates authoritarian followers in order to figure out how to deal with them. Demanding that someone think harder will backfire with people who can’t. Calling them con-artists when they’re simpletons or simpletons when they’re con-artists will backfire too. Still, it’s hard to discern true motives, especially with authoritarian-followers, people who don’t know their own motives and so couldn’t or wouldn’t report them.

Here then, rather than focusing on what motivates them, I’ll focus on how they can justify and rationalize believing anything their leaders say and do. I’ll call their approach “machine envy.” They act like they think life’s questions can be answered by a machine that they have discovered and become. Input anything into the machine, you get the one reliable true output.

An algorithm is basically a reliable machine made of numbers, for example, 1+X=Y. Whatever you put into X, you’ll get a reliable output for Y.

Authoritarian followers pretend life is reducible to machine-like cause and effect algorithms. It is the alternative to thinking, defined as doubting, wondering, struggling with ambiguity and ambivalence. Computers may be “intelligent” by some definitions of the term, but they do not think as defined here. They don’t strive to discern differences as though their lives depended on it. Humans think, not that we love having to do it. Still, our lives depend on it.

With authoritarian followers, the thinking is already over. They’re not guessing at what’s true. There’s no interpretation left to do. They and their leaders have already done all the interpretation necessary. They discovered the truth, embraced it, internalized it, and now only have to act on it like machines. They see reality clearly, truly and purely through their unambiguous mechanistic world view.

This is as true of soft spiritual followers as it is of techno-authoritarian nerd followers. Their theory could be warm and fuzzy or hardline firm. Either way, they have stripped the ambiguity from life. There are no tough judgment calls left anymore. Life can be managed with absolute rule-based discipline. Their absolute rules don’t always work, but they won’t admit it. They’ll say “sure there are exceptions, but still, it’s an absolutely universal rule.”

What they’re doing can be seen in their treatment of the variables in their mechanistic algorithmic equations. X is a variable, a placeholder, an input in 1+X=Y. Still, it looks as rock solid as that “1.” Authoritarian followers treat the variable as rock solid when it suits them and variable when it suits them. Take a libertarian authoritarian (despite their professed love of liberty most are decidedly authoritarian in their approach). They pretend that to know exactly what a variable like “freedom” means, even while they change the meaning from moment to moment. Authoritarian followers aren’t curious about the terms they use. They don’t recognize themselves as interpreting any more than an ATM machine interprets.

On the right, for example, they know that they hate PC and they know exactly what PC means. It means indulging in hypersensitivity. When they get huffy about someone insulting them, is that PC? Of course not. Ask them why and it’s clear that they don’t know and they don’t care. They’re sure that PC is a rock-solid concept. They use the term as though they’re calling a spade a spade. But they exploit the variable nature of the term PC to basically gerrymander the definition so they never have to doubt. Are they gullible or manipulative? Again, that’s not the question here. Setting aside motives they’re treating life like a simple puzzle they’ve already solved.

Clinton was a traitor for using a private server. What is a traitor? Someone who puts the country at risk by weakening it with respect to other countries. Is Trump a traitor for using a private cell phone or protecting his staff from accusations of collaborating with the Russians? Of course not. They know what a traitor is and he’s not one.

On the left, people sometimes say that love, kindness or mindfulness is always the answer. They talk as though they know exactly what those terms mean, but ask them to define them and you’ll get a muddle. Ask them whether it’s possible to love the wrong thing or person, and they’ll say yes. Ask them whether the exception means that love is not always the answer and they’ll insist it still is always the answer.

Their basic algorithm can be as simple as this: If the leader (guru, teacher, God, Buddha, Jesus) says it’s true, it’s true. Trump becomes their algorithm. Just run inputs through him and output the definite true answer, plain, simple and always right. They can’t, won’t, or assume they shouldn’t ever have to question their assumptions.

I could say more—about how Socrates decried exactly this problem, and struggled to the death against it, challenging people to define their highfalutin terms. Or about how science today feeds this oversimplification, by treating minds as like machines or computers, and languages as codes, words flipping switches in our machine minds, or how psychology too has yet to explain how synapses and neurochemicals could ever yield interpretative guesses about reality. I address some of that in the videos below. Here I’ll just end with a poem I wrote the other day in taking notes toward this article, a poem about machine envy, the mechanistic mode of thinking.

The Mechanistic Mode

Minds are not computers
Language is not code.
Thinking that they are
I’ll call the “mechanistic mode”.

In it, folks pretend
that life is an equation
that they alone have solved and then
defend with slick evasion.

They posture pure precision
crunching notions like they’re numbers.,
all the while they’re juggling books in
in vague seductive slumbers.

Enchanted by their algebra
they see the X and Y’s
As firm defined, not variables.
No “why’s?” since they’re so wise.

Lining up deductive ducks
All neatly in a row
They treat your challenges to them
as evidence you’re slow.

They spout about the grandest things
freedom, truth, and kindness,
sure they know just what they mean
by revelatory blindness.

Socrates was the first to note
the mode’s a social curse.
Still, wondering what we really mean
feels costlier and worse.

At first, of course, to wonder
removes our firm foundation,
Yet struggling with semantics
is how we’ll save our nation.

Three videos on the question of interpretation and the solutions to the mystery of just how we are not machines.

What is valuing? (7 minutes)

What is mind? (11 minutes)

What is trying? (20 minutes)

Jeremy E. Sherman, a contributor to Psychology Today, is an evolutionary epistemologist studying the natural history and practical realities of decision-making. 

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Stop Calling It The ‘Alt-Right’ – It’s The Brat Right

Stop Calling It The ‘Alt-Right’ – It’s The Brat Right

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet. 

What does alt-right mean? Literally, it means an alternative version of right-wing politics; can’t get blander than that. The movement doesn’t deserve such a neutral description.

So should we call it a Nazi, fascist or extreme faction of the GOP? That may feel right and there’s nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade. Still I don’t think that nails it, and it’s not a strategically smart choice. Breitbart fans like it when we call it that. Name calling is useful but only when it lands and sticks, a bullseye at the target.

Breitbart, however fascist or Nazi, is not really about politics, morals, principles or beliefs. It’s about the fun of being naughty, the kind of puerile fun little bullies have. Our indignation at their naughtiness fills them with “we glee,” the glee of being part of their naughty little gang.

My guess is we should call them the brat-right and bratbart news.

Linguist and political analyst Geoffrey Nunberg nails a point that’s often overlooked by those I call the left’s “backfirebrands”—the leftist firebrands whose understandably passionate indignation backfires. This is from Nunberg’s Fresh Air commentary in 2006 about Ann Coulter’s comment that 9/11 widows were enjoying their husband’s deaths.

Coulter’s celebrity is a good measure of what has become of political discussion. You’d scarcely describe her as a political thinker, no more than you’d describe Simon Cowell as a critic of the arts. But like Cowell, she has an unerring gift for media theatrics. It isn’t just her penchant for making snarky or outrageous remarks. Plenty of people do that without being invited onto the Today Show, and in fact Coulter doesn’t get a lot of national attention for her run-of-the-mill ruminations about giving rat poison to Justice Stevens or fragging John Murtha. But the remark about the 9/11 widows was irresistible for its brazen tastelessness and the obvious pleasure Coulter took in the consternation she created.

Is Coulter sincere about the things she says? That’s a silly question, like asking whether schoolchildren are sincere in the taunts they throw at each other across the school yard. But that doesn’t make her a satirist, as her defenders like to claim, usually with the implication that her literal-minded liberal critics don’t get the joke.

It’s a formula: Say outrageously heartless things with the gleeful attitude that you’re “telling it like it is.” Don’t worry if you don’t mean what you say or haven’t even thought about whether you do. The point is to entertain enough to gain audience.

Audience will come for the entertainment but stay for the smugness. They won’t know that’s why they stayed. They’ll say “I thought it was entertaining but the more I listened to it, the more I realized that it what they were speaking truth.” They think they were drawn in by the content, but they may not have thought about the content any more than Coulter thinks about it. The audience really stays because they learned a new formula for feeling invincible. That’s what Coulter, Limbaugh, Trump and Bratbart really sell.

It’s a simple formula. Any idiot can use it:

  1. Dismiss and ignore any truth, facts, evidence and reality that challenge your confidence.
  2. Turn any challenge back on the challenger using a handful of rhetorical tricks for saying “I know you are but what am I?”
  3. Treat your confidence as evidence that you have graduated from debater to supreme judge presiding over all debates you enter.

The know-it-all formula is a drug. You come for the high; you stay for the addiction. The drug is deliverable wrapped in beliefs of any stripe. You can buy the drug from self-help, spiritual or religious gurus, from pundits on the right and on the left. The beliefs on the right happen to be a perfect wrapper for the drug since the right prides itself on faith in moral absolutism. But there are plenty of people on the right who aren’t addicted to the drug.

Many of us were addicted to the know-it-all formula in our teens or earlier as elementary school bullies back when we had little impulse control and little conscience, guilt or critical thinking skills that would make us nauseous when we used the drug. When conscience, guilt and critical thinking eventually kicked in, many of us kicked the habit. We sobered up out of childish self-certainty.

Some never kicked it. Some kicked it but returned to it as adults when life got too uncertain. Trump may have won because white middle-class Midwesterners feel trapped, frustrated and alienated. That’s true, but an incomplete account without noticing their solution. They bought the drug. For them, expedient self-certainty trumped thought.

Trump is the most successful drug-pusher of our age. Bannon is his enabler. He’s been made head of strategy as his reward for goading Trump to push the drug harder instead of softening toward electable sobriety. Bannon said in effect, When you’re in a hole, keep digging, and helped with the shoveling.

Our best strategy is to focus on their addiction to the bratty know-it-all formula. Bratbart supporters think they’re rebels with a cause but their cause isn’t the cause of their rebellion. The cause is the self-satisfaction of giving offense and dismissing the offense taken by others as a result, feeling like they’re standing up for what’s true, even though they’ve given what’s true as little thought as possible.

The know-it-all formula is the shortest, cheapest path to feeling like the expert, much shorter than actually gaining any expertise. It winds people up like a watch’s self-winding movement. No matter how the addict is shaken, their confidence gets wound up tighter and tighter. If people agree with them, it confirms them. If people disagree with them, it confirms them. They’re like drug addicts who take interventions as evidence that they should double down on their addiction. That’s why it’s useless or counterproductive to call them fascists. It’s not just that they have no shame, they take pride in having no shame. It’s all part of the know-it-all game.

Recognizing and understanding the know-it-all formula puts the right’s attacks on “political correctness” in context. What is it really? I’d define “political correctness as taking offense not because you’re really offended but because it’s fun to act offended. And “political incorrectness” is the reverse—giving offense not because the situation demands it, but because it’s naughty fun, an indulgence.

Among the rhetorical tricks for saying “I know you are but what am I,” one of the easiest is ambiguous name-calling you apply to others and not yourself. Political correctness is just that, an accusation that the right levels exclusively at the left. How is #boycottHamilton not an example of political correctness, taking easy, proud, indulgent offense? The left has had its share of indulgent punks over the decades, folks who gave offense for the glee of it like little brats. These days, the right is out-punking the leftist punks. Bratbart is just that. Punks without a cause pretending they have the cause that trumps reason once and for all.

Yes, what they’re doing is dangerous. Brats can gain enough power that you can no longer afford to call them brats. But we’re not there yet and to keep from getting there we’re best calling them names that are more likely to land and stick, getting them where they live, in their little fantasy of superiority, infallibility and invincibility.

Jeremy Sherman is an evolutionary epistemologist studying the natural history and practical realities of decision making. Read his work at Psychology Today.

How Trump Won — and How Candidates Will Win From Now On

How Trump Won — and How Candidates Will Win From Now On

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet. 

Caveat: Trump’s win was no landslide. There are many plausible explanations for it, including that it was a fluke. Here is one among many speculations I think is worth considering about why he won and what it means for future elections.

Consider the possibility that the election was not decided on issues, values, character, scandal or national direction, but on confidence. Trump postured as the infinitely confident candidate. Though most of us thought he would lose, he campaigned throughout as though he were infallible.

He never once broke character. Not once during the campaign did he change his mind. Of course, he changed his positions like a chameleon. Still, he was able to sustain an uninterrupted impression that he thought he had the “best mind” already, nothing to change, learn or correct about it. He gave the impression of someone who never needed to make the case for anything. We never saw him wondering or defending or really apologizing. He acted as though he believed in his own supreme power to interpret reality correctly and to do whatever it takes to bring reality to heel under his command.

Trump employed a formula for giving the impression of absolute invincibility. It’s not a complicated formula. It simply requires an unfailing ability to treat truth and reality as trivial, an ability to play presiding judge over every decision, and a handful of rhetorical tricks for turning the table on everything and everyone in his way, retaliating against all challenges with counter challenges tenfold.

Voters were split in response. To those of us who value reasons, respectful engagement and debate grounded in evidence, his formula made him seem ridiculous, dumb, psychopathic, immoral and criminal. We focused on reasoning with voters to get them to see that supporting him was all of those things.

Consciously or unconsciously, half of the voters fell for his formula. They faced a choice. Either heed our warnings and doubt about his character and theirs for being drawn to him, or just go with the candidate who acted convincingly invincible. The solution for many was to act like they doubted his character (distorting poll results) and still vote for him.

By the end, no quantity of facts, scandals or counter-arguments would sway these voters. That’s crucial to understand. The points and positions that people claim swayed them toward Trump are not strongly held. They’re expedient rationalizations for their inability to resist the appeal of his posture of invincibility. The appeal of his undauntable authority was his trump card. And it’s not hard to see why.

People have always gravitated toward the charismatic appearance of invincibility. Life is an anxious, uncertain affair. We dream of a superhuman power to escape self-doubt, indecision, and confusion. You hear it in the spiritual quest to discover the infallible path to eternal success on earth or in the afterlife.

We’re none of us viscerally enthusiastic about being challenged and doubted. Though people claim that they welcome critical feedback because they can learn from it, it’s inherently discouraging. Confidence is smooth sailing; doubt is choppy waters. Confidence is what all advertisers sell; doubt is an unwelcome punch to the gut.

Our reasonable challenges to Trump supporters backfired. We tried to stir doubt in them. Doubt is the last thing they wanted especially when demonstrated invincibility, however unrealistic, was on offer.

We all learn from successes but also from mistakes, and not just that we should avoid them. When devil’s bargains work in the short run, we employ them more, not less.

It’s likely that the U.S. has just made a devil’s bargain. Our founding fathers would certainly argue that we have. Time will tell, but in the meantime, people can’t resist learning from Trump’s win that feigned invincibility pays. People never forget strategies that work expediently.

Feigned invincibility is not a new strategy. Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist, discovered ways to win through unbridled self-confidence that have been exploited ever since. Reagan was known as the Teflon president.

Reporter Ron Suskind recounts a conversation with Bush’s campaign manager, Karl Rove:

[Rove] said guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He continued “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Trump’s formula simply takes the art of feigned invincibility to its logical conclusion and just in time to thrive in a new era in media, an era in which everything candidates have ever said or done is on record and repeatedly exposed. Feigned purity can’t thrive, let alone survive in this era of hyper-exposure. Feigned invincibility can. Trump rode undaunted above his many scandals. That’s how one wins in this new era.

Principle and policy were not the source of Trump’s success. Christian fundamentalists supported him despite his behavior. Women supported him (2% less than Romney) and Hispanics supported him (2% more than Romney). That’s good news for the nation. To the extent that voters even think and care about policy, we may not be that divided.

The big divide today is between those who find feigned invincibility irresistible regardless of how realistic it is, and those who can’t help but doubt their own impulse toward unrealistic confidence.

That point is easily lost in the days after the election because those of us who can’t live in unrealistic confidence appear unrealistically confident in three ways. We appear wrong about the direction of the country, since the GOP won every seat of power. We were wrong about what the people wanted and we were wrong to think we would win.

In us, this mistake-trifecta breeds doubt. In those who find feigned invincibility irresistible, the equivalent comeuppance would make them double down on their posture of invincibility. As Trump did throughout and as the GOP has now done for decades.

Still, Rove is wrong in the long run. Reality ultimately prevails over whatever “reality” you create even if you run an empire. Denying climate change won’t convince the climate not to change.

There’s a possibility that as reality comes home to roost with Republicans in complete control of all branches of government, more people will sober up and demand realism. It didn’t come home to roost during the Bush era, but rather just as Obama was assuming power. Feigning invincibility, the GOP pinned the blame on Obama. This time the timing could be different.

Going forward, the question is what could ever trump feigned invincibility? I’ll argue that the only thing that can is hyper-confident exposure of the formula for feigned invincibility. In other words, with relentless unshakable confidence, drawing attention to the opposition’s realism-be-damned confidence formula. To name it is to tame it. Expose how simple the formula is. Play the judge of the self-appointed judge.

Ignore the issues, since with those who feign invincibility, the issues are never the point. Do not engage in debate, since those who feign invincibility will turn your willingness to debate into evidence that you aren’t as invincible as they are. Ignore calls for engagement, harmony, collaboration and civility, since those who feign invincibility will use both your willingness and unwillingness to engage to raise doubts about you.

Stay on message, hammering away unflinchingly to expose the formula. The formula for beating it is pretty simple too, since with every denial that one feigns invincibility can be exposed as further evidence of feigned invincibility.

Power through with brazenly, though realistically confident, absolutist rejection of feigned invincibility. None of us are invincible. Reality wins in the end. Make unflinchingly confident heroes of those of us who earn their confidence with realism. Pick candidates who with silver tongue can expose the peril of feigned invincibility as the pivotal campaign issue that it has become.

This election was a referendum on feigned invincibility and it won. There will be more referendums on it in years to come.

IMAGE: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump pumps his fist as he arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Sacramento. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson.