Over the course of my master’s program, I’ve had some tortured conversations with my dean over the direction my research is taking. He’s been poking at me (and, being an atheist who was raised by Jesuits, he’s one of those gentle souls who knows how to poke sharp and hard, with a positively angelic smile that only barely conceals his demonic glee) about what on earth the study of authoritarian religious and political movements has to do with the future.
And sometimes, overwhelmed by the size of the argument and not always clear on where to start, all I can say is: Everything. Where we fall on the authoritarian spectrum has every damned thing in the world to do with how well we identify looming issues, which options we’re willing to consider, how far we can adapt, and whether or not we’re likely to succeed. Authoritarianism is dangerous not just because it’s hostile to individual liberty, but also because it poisons every step of the process of social change. And societies that succumb to it are, in a very real sense, setting themselves up for failure.
In this essay, I’m going look at a few reasons why this is so.
Ignoble Savages
Conservatism begins with the foundational assumption that humans are inherently evil, selfish, greedy and lustful, and that the vast majority of us are not remotely capable of any kind of reliable self-discipline. Of course, this is a personal projection so big you’d need an IMAX theater to capture the full sweep of it all: Conservatives believe this because they know how they like to act when nobody’s around to hold them accountable — and they expect others to be no different, and certainly no better.
This is why the GOP’s recent pervert parade hardly fazes them, and also why they accept their own side’s contrite confessions so quickly. They’re quite sure all humans are natural hypocrites and liars. Furthermore, because the flesh is so weak and our reason so fallible, they believe that, ignoble savages that we are, we really don’t have any business trying to control what happens next. This rejection of human agency can go one of two ways.
One school of thought holds that Someone In Charge has already decided what our future will be, and we have no right and no power to interfere with those plans. God has pre-ordained it. The President knows what he’s doing. The CEO has the whole thing thought through. Daddy knows best.
The other version says that we’re plenty capable of taking charge and shaping the future to suit ourselves — but, given our basic vileness and stupidity, we’re almost certain to screw it up and make a far bigger hash of the situation than it already is.
The first view says we can’t control the future. The second view says we can — but it’s always wrong to try.
If you’re coming from either of these assumptions, authoritarianism’s ripe appeal becomes obvious. The only rational way to deal with humanity’s essential perfidy is to put people firmly under the control of strong external authority, safely surrounded by hard-and-fast rules that are swiftly enforced with draconian punishments. As long as everyone understands and accepts that falling in behind Our Leaders and following their rules is the only way to secure a stable society and a predictable future for the whole group, peace and good order will be assured. If you’re a political authoritarian, you fall in behind the President. If you’re religious, it’s God and the leaders of your church. If you’re an economic conservative, you obey the dictates of the market, and the CEOs who lead it. (And if you’re any one of these, liberals are dangerous apostates, who by their very questioning and refusal to obey are a threat to that good order the leaders are trying to achieve.)
This is why right-wing authoritarian followers (RWAs) unquestioningly surrender their will to their leaders. They hope and expect that that leader will decide for them what their future will be. It’s a job they’re all too happy to give up, because they’re roundly convinced they can’t or shouldn’t do it for themselves.
Unfortunately, when it comes to exercising good foresight, formulating options and making the right choices — especially under stressful conditions when we need to implement big changes fast, like global warming — authoritarians can be counted on make the wrong decisions with astonishing regularity.
The Real Enemy Is Change
The biggest problem with rigid authoritarian systems is that they inevitably come to view change itself as a mortal enemy — the prime antagonist that threatens the order and stability of the highly-structured system the followers have entrusted their futures to. And, unfortunately, when you start looking at change as your existential foe, you put serious limits around your ability to envision, prepare for, and adapt to it.
Change comes in two forms. First, there’s endogenous change — the kind we create for ourselves through the decisions and plans we make. In times and places where a negative view of human agency has taken root (the Middle Ages would be Exhibit A; the last few hundred years of Chinese history might be Exhibit B; and, more generally, agrarian societies in all times and places have been drawn to this view), planning beyond the next year or three simply doesn’t happen much. Strict and punitive societies actively discourage innovation and invention. Authoritarians tend to shun people who dare to dream up original ideas and new ways of solving problems as a threat to the established order. Questioning the leaders’ decisions is a good way to get yourself tossed off the ramparts forthwith. You don’t need to lose too many creative thinkers this way before general curiosity about the rest of the world vanishes. Needless to say, strangers — potential bringers of change — also become feared as a source of danger.
Over time, progress slows to a crawl, which creates dangers of its own. Through lack of exercise, authoritarian societies become stiff and inflexible, gradually losing the personal and cultural resilience required to survive and adapt to anything but the smallest changes. Increasingly, people become convinced that the only possible future is the one that looks exactly like the past. They get complacent. In a few generations, they may forget how to cope with change entirely.
Because of this, they’re more likely to miss — or see, but simply not know how to seize — opportunities that rise up in their path. Worse: They are far more likely to be completely swept away on the inevitable day that the second kind of change arrives.
That would be exogenous change — the kind that the world inflicts on us, whether we’re ready for it or not. No matter how strong and safe your leaders make you feel, or how well you follow the rules they’ve set down, acts of God will happen. The barbarians will arrive at the gates. Locusts, plagues and floods will sweep through town. Someone will fly airplanes into your iconic buildings.
In that moment, the world ends. There is no plan. There’s no capacity to weigh options or take individual action. Standing there flat-footed, waiting for a signal or an order from on high that often comes tragically too late, people in authoritarian cultures often find themselves totally swept away in these kinds of events. When the external boundaries they depended on are breached, the loss of life and property can be horrific, because individuals don’t know how to make good decisions on their own authority.
But even worse, for those who survive, is the loss of all the cultural and social touchstones that organized their reality into coherence, and enabled them to make sense and meaning out of their lives. Those who’ve been through it will tell you that the existential crisis that follows is like nothing so much as being dead alive.
Trouble With The Vision Thing
Another problem is that RWAs are prone to choose the worst possible leaders: specifically, amoral and manipulative high-social-dominance (high-SDO) men who can always be counted on to put their own personal interests ahead of the good of the whole. These are the guys who are putting the phrase “disaster capitalism” into the lexicon: in their worldview, millions may die — but hey, as long as I’m getting rich, it’s all good.
High-SDO leaders throughout history have notoriously built only three things: 1) armies (to take other people’s stuff); 2) walls (to protect their own stuff); and 3) monuments to their own glory. This, in itself, is a testament to the limits of their vision: most of them literally couldn’t imagine a way to invest the money that didn’t involve putting the spotlight on themselves. In a time of major change, when a nation needs to make large-scale investments in its own commons to ensure its future success, the last thing you need is someone in charge who can’t see past his own bling.
Historically, authoritarian regimes entrusted with the job of setting the future agenda have usually started out with a uniquely brash utopian boldness (examples include the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and our own religious right). Their energy is high, and they’ve got a very specific plan in mind. But over time, as they settle into power, their thinking becomes narrow and stunted. Groupthink sets in, yes-men abound, and xenophobia keeps new people and new ideas from circulating. Starved of information inputs, and confronted by no one willing to challenge their thinking, these leaders eventually just run out of ideas — and their regimes succumb to inertia.
When that happens, thinking about the future simply stops. People who think this way end up hunkered down so tightly behind their ideological walls that they don’t even dare peek their heads over to look at the far horizon. They don’t need to: They’re not interested in any reality that exists outside the confines of their familiar world — and will often deny such alternate realities even exist. Besides, if they look, what will they see? There may be hordes coming. There may be plague and pestilence and Paris Hilton. If that’s the case, they count on their trusted authorities to protect them — as long they don’t make the fatal mistake of venturing beyond the confines of the castle yard.
When you draw that much emotional comfort from the secure assumption that the future will continue to be exactly like the past, there’s zero incentive to spend your time dreaming up and preparing for possible alternative futures, either good or bad.
We Will Always Be At War With Oceania
Authoritarians also tend to be ideologues — and that toxic combo makes it virtually impossible for them to envision any alternative future besides the one that fulfills the eschatology of the ideology they’ve chosen. There will always be oil. There will always be glaciers. Jesus is coming Real Soon Now. And we will always be at war with Oceania. Ideologies are boxes; and once you’re stuck in one, no other reality is possible.
People who think this way often regard any suggestion that things might play out in other ways as a deep existential threat. What we consider a reasonable evaluation of plausible alternative scenarios, they view as a terrifying line of inquiry that calls into question all their basic assumptions about how reality is organized. There is one past, one present, one future (or, perhaps more aptly — one people, one Reich, one Fuhrer). To suggest something else might happen — something not in the script the leaders handed them — is to suggest that their leaders might be wrong. Since faith in their leaders is their primary source of meaning and safety, this is a prospect that shakes their world to its very core.
Stealing The Future
Futurists are big believers that people have the right, the power, and the duty to determine their own futures. Most of us would agree that democratic government is the best system ever devised to ensure that people have that right, and the entire Bill of Rights is designed to ensure that we as individuals are free to pursue the future of our choice.
Authoritarians, on the other hand, are the sworn enemies of that right. Their high-social dominance leaders lay claim to other people’s futures, and colonize them for their own enrichment and other personal purposes. The religious ones are determined to bring about the Second Coming, or the return of the hidden Imam or the reign of the Messiah. The economic ones (as Naomi Wolf suggests) want to disrupt so many lives and create so much chaos that they’ll be able to take control of vast stretches of the globe — and profit handsomely from the aftermath. The political ones want to seize our democratically-controlled futures, and put them back in the hands of a king.
And that’s why I consider the study of authoritarian movements critical to understanding the future. Anybody who is willing to manipulate others for profit, to dehumanize them and use them as objects of their own gratification, is literally making a business out of stealing other people’s futures — the very stuff of their lives.
Dealing With the Resistance
According to Dr. Robert Altemeyer and other social psychologists who study authoritarian behavior, roughly a quarter of Americans organize their lives around authoritarian thought patterns. That’s a lot of potential resistance to change. But at this moment in history — when we are faced with the epic task of renewing America and re-structuring the very economic and technological foundations of our civilization, both of which will require rapid, large-scale change efforts — we need to take those people’s deep suspicion of democratic process and knee-jerk resistance to change into serious account. If we’re not factoring their inevitable fear and fury into our strategic plans, we will very likely doom ourselves to failure. If these people get frightened enough, they can make the changes we seek impossible.
This isn’t just idle conjecture. The far right has already made it frighteningly clear that they intend to meet an Obama win in November with a storm of domestic terrorism. (It’s not a coincidence that the last wave of extreme right-wing violence peaked in 1993, the year after Bill Clinton was elected.) We shouldn’t underestimate just what a politically dangerous act it will be for us to overthrow a right-wing regime that they accepted as legitimate authority, and replace it with a more liberal one headed by a black man (no less!). Leaders on the far right are already using language that’s designed to prime their followers for violence when the time comes. Let’s not be surprised when it comes to pass.
And all this is just the response to a single election that doesn’t go their way.
All political movements are, at heart, collaborative efforts between people working together to manifest their shared vision of a desirable future. On the left, we’re looking ahead to reaffirming the Constitution, re-establishing a solid middle class, healing the planet, and restoring America as a force for good in the world. On the right, they’re looking behind, seeking to hold onto a passing future with everything they have, even if they have to shred the Constitution, wreck the middle class, conquer the planet, and make America the enemy of the world to do it.
Understanding the role authoritarian thought patterns play in cementing people’s resistance to necessary change is absolutely critical to meeting and managing the backlash. Those of us who’ve been watching our right-wing authoritarians through their years in power won’t be out of a job after January 20. Quite to the contrary, in fact: After their leaders are put out of power, they’ll become a different and perhaps more overtly dangerous kind of threat to the future we have in mind. Off to the sidelines and out of view, they will bear even more watching. If anything, that’s when the real job will begin.
