Authoritarian personality types

[Dimentio]

In this post (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1123153&postcount=101), Unicorn (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=16120) claims that Cmde. Slavyanski (http://www.revleft.com/vb/member.php?u=14750) is an inherently authoritarian personality type because he is an ex-member of a North American white supremacist organisation, and that "only people with authoritarian personality traits" are susceptible for nazi propaganda.

Ignoring the thread in question (http://www.revleft.com/vb/cmde-slavyanski-t75734/index.html), I will now start a new thread to discuss about Adorno's (I guess it's Adorno's) theories about authoritarian personality types, and why it is considered a mental illness to be an authoritarian personality type according to Unicorn's theory.

How is an authoritarian personality type?

Is it a person who feels a lot of angst against society and is anti-social against conventions and values of her culture?

Is it a person who likes to dominate others or wants to lead?

Is it a person who appreciate militarism and totalitarian aesthetics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9_biM0qFQE)?

Is it related to psychopathy?

Is it a person with more vaguely defined characteristics?

And...

Why are authoritarian personality types inherently "bad" or "tainted"?

Could they not offer their abilities in the service of progressive causes? Clearly, many of those who created the progressive ideologies had authoritarian and intolerant traits towards others (just look at Marx vs Bakunin).

And, who is behind this theory?

And why is it impossible for a person with authoritarian personality traits to change? I mean, when I was 15, I was one of the brains behind some form of demented quasi-ideology (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1120391&postcount=107) which sorta resembled nazism and other brands of totalitarianism. Only that we hated the local hiphoppers at our primary school, not Jews or immigrants. We even had established some form of bizarre reactionary state (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1120985&postcount=113) at the village.

Well, clearly I did at that point represent some form of authoritarian character.

I do not know if this is a genuine theory which you are presenting, Unicorn, or something which you just fished from your ass in order to motivate why you, despite being the more ideologically sympathetic user, has managed to draw fire from political camps which do agree with your ideology. I am merely curious.

[Dean]

In this post, Unicorn claims that Cmde. Slavyanski is an inherently authoritarian personality type because he is an ex-member of a North American white supremacist organisation, and that "only people with authoritarian personality traits" are susceptible for nazi propaganda.

I won't tackle this because I think its very condescending and useless to psychoanalyse a person we know little of and have never met in real life. I do agree that in Nazism there is a predisposition for authoritarianism, however I will also point out that we don't know a lot about the popularity of fascism in russia and yugoslavia, that is what compels peopel to it and what characterizes the movement.


Ignoring the thread in question, I will now start a new thread to discuss about Adorno's (I guess it's Adorno's) theories about authoritarian personality types, and why it is considered a mental illness to be an authoritarian personality type according to Unicorn's theory.

It is Adornos, kind've. It was mostly Fromm who did the research and laid the theoretical foundation for the work, but he is rarely given credit for it.

Consider the following:

Fromm’s major project with the Institute had began a year earlier with a study on the social psychology of German workers, a piece of research that played a major role in Fromm’s bitter break with his colleagues (Bonss, 1984). In 1929 Fromm began research on German Workers 1929 — A Survey, Its Methods and Results. The theory of the authoritarian character that Theodor Adorno would make famous with The Authoritarian Personality (1950) came directly out of this empirical research (Adorno et al, 1950). Fromm’s contribution to the genesis of the authoritarian personality research was widely known in the 1950s and 1960s (Christie and Jahoda, 1954) although Adorno and Horkheimer would later obfuscate Fromm’s pivotal role (Funk, 1982; Burston, 1994).

Source: http://www.ualberta.ca/~cjscopy/arti...aughlin.html#3


How is an authoritarian personality type?

Is it a person who feels a lot of angst against society and is anti-social against conventions and values of her culture?

Is it a person who likes to dominate others or wants to lead?

Is it a person who appreciate militarism and totalitarian aesthetics?

Is it related to psychopathy?

Is it a person with more vaguely defined characteristics?

And...

Authoritarian characters seek to subsume the faculties of another human being into their own. Sometimes this means control, sometimes it means coercion or manipulation, and sometimes this means killing.


Why are authoritarian personality types inherently "bad" or "tainted"?

Its hard to say that anything is inherently bad or tainted. But judged from fairly basic norms and principles, it is clear that authoritarianism is unhealthy and dangerous for society.


Could they not offer their abilities in the service of progressive causes? Clearly, many of those who created the progressive ideologies had authoritarian and intolerant traits towards others (just look at Marx vs Bakunin).

A revolution cannot be forced upon people. A revolution must be characterized by a wide-scale paradigm shift, and an aspect of socialist / communist revolution is that it must be anti-authoritarian. If it is not, it is not revolutionary and will fail.


And, who is behind this theory?

The Frankfurt school, Marx, Freud but primarily Fromm. Read the above link.


And why is it impossible for a person with authoritarian personality traits to change? I mean, when I was 15, I was one of the brains behind some form of demented quasi-ideology which sorta resembled nazism and other brands of totalitarianism. Only that we hated the local hiphoppers at our primary school, not Jews or immigrants. We even had established some form of bizarre reactionary state at the village.

It is not impossible. That is a myth perpetuated by our medical institutions. Personality traits are considered static, while other mental traits change - that is the only reason the term is considered static.


Well, clearly I did at that point represent some form of authoritarian character.

Authoritarianism isn't somethign you have off and on. It is a measure of your personality. Nobody here demonstrates a complete lack of authoritarianism. The difference is that some are distinctly authoritarian, and some have authoritarian complexes and pathologies.


I do not know if this is a genuine theory which you are presenting, Unicorn, or something which you just fished from your ass in order to motivate why you, despite being the more ideologically sympathetic user, has managed to draw fire from political camps which do agree with your ideology. I am merely curious.

I don't know about the thread in question, but yes, Slavyanski is authoritarian. But only in what I have seen of his ideology; he could be one of the least authoritarian character types in the forum for all we know. I think its very rash and unfair to judge somebody and invoke these theories and legitimate practices without the proper evidence or setting. If Slavyanski is indeed an authoritarian personality type, he will not be discouraged from that road by such attacks.

Another semi-relevant quote from the text:

A key element of Fromm’s argument was that some workers who voted for left parties had authoritarian characters, a position that Edward Shils would later articulate (without reference to Fromm) as a conservative critique of left-wing authoritarianism (Shils, 1954). Fromm, in contrast, was motivated by a left-wing concern with understanding the factors that might attract workers to fascism. Yet for those who argued that there were no enemies on the left, the lower middle and elites were the source of authoritarianism not workers and left parties — Fromm had challenged an important part of left-wing ideology

[Dean]

I felt he should be able to defend himself, despite the DB deleting his post (I still had it pulled up on my computer). Slavyanski, If you want me to delete this or modify it, just reply.

CMDE Slavyanski's response:

I realize you mean well, but this thread, started in part because of Unicorn(who still refuses to account for his actions), doesn't really warrant much attention. You have to take into account people's personal experiences for getting into certain movements. To say that someone just has an "authoritarian personality" is a lot like claiming someone in genetically predisposed to doing something, and we all know where that leads.

We can see how Unicorn cares little for what I volunteer about my personal experiences; in other words, he does not believe in independent thought, and prefers to tell people what they believe and why they believe it.

I want to volunteer some personal information about what got me involved, in relation to this concept of authority and worship of historical figures, to show how the aforementioned user prefers to label people without giving them a chance to explain their own reasons for doing things. Hopefully this will prove useful to some anti-Fascists who want to understand the dynamics and contradictions that characterize reactionary movements. The key to disrupting these movements is the contradictions and general incoherency of the ideology expressed- it is a house on a foundation of sand.

I have no attraction to authority. Had that been the case, I might have spent more than a year and a half in the military. Hitler had always been an uneasy issue with me back in the day, because of my Slavic heritage. I was mainly duped by the writings of Otto Skorzeny and Leon DeGrelle on this matter. They made it seem as though Hitler was not anti-Slavic, that it was mainly Keitel, Himmler(who later supposedly relented), and Bormann.

In terms of my personal experience with the movemen, I was never a "yes man". I frequently voiced dissent and when I disagreed with what was going on with the organization my activity dropped off for periods of time. I was out of the Alliance in about the middle of 2004 and basically did nothing shortly after that. I criticized virtually EVERY leader of the movement, including some sacred cows like David Lane and William Pierce. The effects of this led to masses of online net-Nazis insisting that I was Jewish, or some kind of infiltrator.

In the months leading up to my total ideological break with the movement, I deliberately tried to get myself banned from VNN by directly insulting the owner Alex Linder(not even trying to argue with him, just insulting him for the LULZ), mainly because VNN is very hard to get banned from if you are a senior member.

It is hard to mark the exact point of my true disillusionment with the movement(probably around early 2004), but what is for sure is that what I posted online or what I might have said in person differed greatly from what I personally believed, or what I would discuss with trusted people. Eventually we began to find the antics and mishaps of the movement entertaining, to the point where in the past couple years I have been religiously reading the SPLC's Intelligence Report to hear about the latest LULZ from the movement. Honestly, it's REALLY funny to see how these fuck-ups go at each others' throats, get in arrested for sex crimes, and so on.


Moving on from that, my path into Marxism-Leninism, again the result of personal reevaluation, and great struggle against a bad social environment(which I escaped physically), was not simply trading Hitler for Stalin, as Unicorn would like everyone to believe. At first I would say that my sympathy was to SFRY(Yugoslavia) and the revisionist Soviet Union/China. I always had an affinity for China and Vietnam as well as DPRK(now THERE'S a real cult of personality) from my movement days. More importantly, I bought into all the propaganda about the Soviet Union being more liberal post-Stalin, as well as the propaganda that Tito's Yugoslavia was a paradise in Eastern Europe(actually in many ways Albania was the leader). I had a lot of ties to my home city's Yugoslav community, and I have always had a fascination with Yugoslav culture because of this, so naturally I was drawn to Tito. My interest in Hoxha actually had more to do with a casual side-interest I have always had for obscure political figures.


Why did I come to embrace Hoxha? Well from a Communist standpoint, one always faces the question: "If it was so great, why did it collapse?" Titoite and Soviet revisionist literature, and even Maoism, cannot provide a coherent argument to this question(though Maoism gets the closest). While the West promotes the idea that the Soviet Union was in some ways "more liberal" post-Stalin(which is technically true but for certain reasons that are often unmentioned), the Soviet Union's economic policies and social system were basically more or less constant. In other words, the myth is that socialism was in place and more or less static, and that this system simply failed.

As I started to read the Chinese and Albanian analysis, and then started reading the works of Hoxha, suddenly there was a viewpoint that is totally ignored and even suppressed in the Cold War narrative. And without this viewpoint, it is impossible to understand what happened to real world socialism in the 20th century.

That is a basic run down of my "journey" from right to left, and liberation from reactionary ideas(which are largely the product of the rapidly degenerating mainstream political discourse in America).

From this you can see that there is no fascination with authority(a difficult concept to quantify), no militarism(last year I posted some stuff in a thread here about the military, and you will see that my views are very radical on this matter), or anything that suggests some kind of predisposition to certain ideologies.

Unicorn simply wants to label people without knowing anything about them or their personal experiences, and seems to reject the basic Marxist philosophical concept of materialism- that our environment and experiences, in short the material world around us, shape our views. He rejects this in favor of Frankfurt school blather; and yet we might consider that folks like Adorno and certainly Arendt would see him as being no less Totalitarian than someone like me, if not more so given his propensity for judging people so quickly.