RIGHT-WING AUTHORITARIANS’ OBEDIANCE TO AUTHORITY

…The actual site of the worst-ever political scandal, the Watergate Office Building in Washington

 

Over twenty percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, and so ill-informed, and that nothing will ever change their minds.

 

Once again, the article I did about being a liberal or a conservative has spawned a lot of interest in my readers.  It has also sent me to looking deeper into the consciousness of those people that will be so obedient to a higher authority, that even doing so, people would actually violate their own standards.  This is a classic example of what has been happening within the Republican party, going back to before the Watergate scandal.

 

As one of my readers had stated why he had left the Republican party to become an Independent, this was just another example of what can happen when a party goes from being a cautious and prudent political party to becoming more authoritative and radical. 

I will reference both examples of, what happened during Watergate, and what happened during the Bush/Cheney administration. 

 

In the days of Watergate, you had individuals such as Chuck Colson and Gordon Liddy that would blindly follow the directions of their superiors, regardless of whether it was against their standards or if it was legal or ethical.  And that’s as it was during the Bush/Chaney era, when they did not hesitate to take the country into an unnecessary foreign war under false pretenses.  And when they had plenty of subordinates that would do whatever it took to follow the miss-directions of their superiors.

 

You may recall that it was under the direction of the Bush/Cheney authorities that for the first time, a presidential administration had developed bogus legal explanations for using illegal torture techniques against our enemies.  They were also able to direct the National Security Agency (NSA) to turn its powerful surveillance equipment on to other innocent Americans without receiving any objections from superiors.

 

Today, with the Trump administration, we are seeing some classic examples of those that will blindly follow the directions from their superiors.  That is according to reputable Fact Checkers that say that the White House continues to offer up false statements on an average of five times a day.  Yes, our fearless leader, or his administration, gives us false info such as the one stating that the Republican House’ Health Care Bill is a great replacement for Obamacare.  This is even though the CBO has said that the House bill will remove 23 million people from having health care coverage.  And that‘s just one example of what we Americans are fed daily.

 

The point here s that there are many of those that work for the new president that obviously know that he is stating falsehoods, but they still fall in line and do his bidding.

 

There was a social psychologist, Stanley Milgram, that did a study of those individuals that will follow the direction of superiors, even when they are told to do things that are against their standards or beliefs.  Mr. Milgram’s pioneering efforts in his study of obedience to authority led to these statements about that subject.

 

Per Milgram: “Obedience to authority is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose.  It is the cement that binds men and women to systems of pure authority.  Without this cement, many organizations simply would not function, but that does not mean that it always works or that those that follow that path, won’t still run amuck.”

Of course, Watergate is the perfect example.  From the beginning of those that attempted to break into the Watergate office building, to all the lies that were used to protect the highest authority in the land, that of the then US president. That was the perfect example of misdirected actions for achieving a political purpose.

 

Even before Watergate, with Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra debacle, that was also a case of subordinates following the directions of their superiors that was against most standards and it was totally illegal.

 

But why does this issue occur this way?

 

If you go back to the trial of the Nazi military officer, Adolf Eichman, who was responsible for the killing of scores of Jews in WWII.  The prosecutors during the trial tried to depict Eichmann as a sadistic monster.  But the reality is, that Eichmann was just a highly un-inspired bureaucrat who had sat at his desk and done the job that he was assigned by his superiors.  It was the perfect case of a “compliant, ordinary individual that just put aside his conscience so he could do his job.”  He was eventually captured, taken to Israel, and put on trial so that everyone could hear about what he did, how he did it, and he was found guilty and sentenced accordingly.

But I ask again, why does this psychology continue to work this way?

 

Mr. Milgram explains it this way: “Because of conscience, most individuals as civilians will not hurt, maim, or kill others in the normal course of time.  Our conscience changes however, when an individual becomes part of a group.  Many times the individual’s conscience becomes subordinate to that of the group, or as in politics, subordinated to the group’s leader.  In these organizational settings, very few people will assess their own moral judgement, against the directions that are given by the group’s leaders.  In other words, an individual may say, “I don’t personally agree with the direction I was given, but he’s the boss!”  Therefore, a person who is usually a decent, courteous individual may be directed to act with severity against someone else.  Our conscience usually regulates our aggressive impulses.  But because of the hierarchical structure within most groups, especially political groups, the conscience is many times diminished and is forced to adopt the conscience of the authoritarian figure of the group.  This is called the “agentic state of consciences,” where the individual virtually becomes an agent of the authority figure.”

 

This concept was demonstrated by a study where an authority figure in a testing lab was supposedly testing a system of learning via the use of electric shocks.  Subordinate individuals were instructed by the authority figure to send an electric shock to an individual in another room if they gave the wrong answer to a verbal question.  The stated idea was to test if a person would learn or memorize word pairings better if they were shocked when they gave a wrong answer.  The subordinates were also told the shock voltages would increase every time they were required to administer the shock.  (Sounds pretty gruesome doesn’t it?)

 

It was amazing how many of the subordinates did as they were told throughout the whole test, knowing that the electric voltage was increased with every wrong answer.

 

The reality is that no one was actually shocked, it was all a fake experiment.  The yells in the other room were all staged and they got louder every time a light went off for their wrong answer in the next room.  But 65% of those subordinates that were told by the authority figure did continue to “shock” the victims until the end of the fake test.  Only 35% of the subordinates stopped and quickly refused to continue “shocking” the victim.

 

Yes, 65% of those instructed, who thought there were sending actual shocks, they had of course, gone into an “agentic state” and had assumed the supposed conscience of the authority figure giving the orders.

 

There is a retired University of Manitoba, Professor of Psychology, Robert Altemeyer that was the developer of the RWA scale.  That refers to the “Right-Wing Authoritarianism Test & Scale”

 

The professor has written that, “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.  The problem is that the authoritarian followers are much more active than the rest of the country.  They have the mentality of ‘old-time-religion’ on a crusade, and they generously give money, time and effort to “the cause”.  They attempt to convert others by putting pressure on their loved ones to be loyal to their groups of like thinkers.  And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and will do virtually anything they are told.  They are not going to let up and they are not going away.”

I believe that Professor Altemeyer is correct and that is exactly why we have a President Trump and what we are dealing with in his very poor authoritarian leadership.  It is also why it will take years for the United States to regain its leadership position of the free world.

 

To illustrate how far down the chain we have already come under the Trump administration:  “If the president does remove the United States from the Paris Climate Change Agreement, the communist nation of China is expected to take over as the chief administrator of the 195 nation Paris agreement.”  The United States will then join with only two other countries.  Syria, that is in the middle of a Civil War, and Nicaragua, who thinks that the Paris Agreement doesn't go far enough.

 

Nuff said.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017