When I was a kid, I got the greatest pleasure from doing what other people expected of me. Still, there were glitches. My friend L—‘s dad taught our Deacon’s Quorum class in church (Sunday School for 12 and 13-year-old boys) a few times and seemed to be annoyed with me when I didn’t like his lesson on “attitude is everything.” “What about when things just suck?” I asked. It seemed self evident. L— later told me he had rarely seen his dad so upset. But this was an aberration; I was generally pretty quick to toe the line
Years later, I was visiting New York and went to the public swimming pool in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with the Twitchells. The pool has crazy strict rules — you can’t wear a t-shirt with logos on it, you have to wear shoes, not sandals (or maybe the reverse) — aimed, I guess, at reducing what is perceived as gang activity. Who knows. And we all complied because we had to. As we splashed around in the vast, free public pool that sweltering summer day, I mentioned to Lane that I was too quick to follow authority. “I would have totally gone in with the Nazis if I’d been German back then,” I said.
But Lane turned me around. “What do you mean? You got out of Mormonism.” And it’s true. For every story I can tell on myself of happily acquiescing to authority, I have five or ten tales of evading expectations, telling off people who were of higher status, disbelieving dogmas, and flat out walking away from what I still consider illegitimate, bullshit hierarchies. It seems I can put up with authority for a little while before I get really pissed off and leave.
Most of us have a pretty healthy sense of autonomy and self-respect and don’t like obeying arbitrary commands. Some people go further, natural-born anarchists and wild children. But plenty of people — not a majority, but a large minority — find comfort in being told what to do. In my experience, most orthodox Mormons value the being directed by church authority figures more than they value the content of the direction. Just tell me what to do, I don’t really care what it is.
What distinguishes Mormons from regular Christian fundamentalists, in my view, is that regular fundamentalists are fundamentalists about a text — the Bible — while Mormons are fundamentalists about the pronouncements of whoever is currently in charge. But Christian fundamentalists and evangelicals (related but not coextensive sets) also have strong authoritarian tendencies. And as we’ve seen since at least the 1980s, the authoritarianism and anti-democratic passions of American Christian Evangelicalism have led to serious problems in American politics.
Bob Altemeyer, a social psychologist at the University of Manitoba, spent most of his career trying to figure out why people became “authoritarian followers.” In the course of his research, he also learned a lot about the other side of the coin, the authoritarian leaders who exploit those who are eager to be led. Altemeyer has written a book summarizing decades of research, and he’s written it for a lay audience. He thinks his findings are crucial to understanding and combating a tendency in our political life that threatens to undermine our republican form of government. And he has made the book available for free online here.
I read Altemeyer’s book a few weeks ago, and I’ve been wanting to discuss it with people. So I’m proposing the first Great Whatsit book club. It’s a short book. Download it or buy it. Read it. In four weeks, let’s talk about it. Some questions I’m interested in: How close is the connection between authoritarianism (what Altemeyer calls “high RWAs”) and religion? Do authoritarian followers stay that way throughout their lives, or do events and social contexts trigger high-RWA attitudes and behaviors? Is the fearful, aggressive response of the authoritarian follower an unavoidable response to stressful social upheavals (such as what we’re likely to experience with oil shocks, environmental disasters, etc.)? Are there methods of building community that can reduce authoritarian reaction in community members?
And in general, I’d like to know what you think about the book. So go read it. It’s short, and it’s one of the most interesting things I’ve read recently.
In the meantime, any good stories of being an authoritarian follower or the opposite?
UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I heard about Altemeyer’s book from commenter Tripp on Unfogged.
If you haven’t read The Conformist by Alberto Moravia, it’s a great novel, which explores the same subject. The story follows a young boy who grows up to become a fascist follower of Mussolini.
If memory serves, one of the points of the book is that people become fascists because they seek masochistic control, but also because they wish to flex their own power through sadistic acts aimed at those they perceive as weaker than themselves.
It’s worth noting that Moravia was influenced by the Critical Theorists, who were trying to explain the rise of the Nazis in the capitalist framework, and that Moravia seems to be seeking the same treatment regarding the rise of Italian fascism. In other words, people become fascist because capitalism strips them of communal identity, and therefore sends them on a radical path for communal control.
Similarly great, Grass’s The Tin Drum and Schlöndorff’s movie of same; and Michael Verhöven’s movie Das Schreckliche Mädchen. The Tin Drum is a Peter Pan-analogue in which the narrator (Oskar) dives into Nazism as a way of refusing to grow up. (Well this is a gross oversimplification — it’s an extremely complex novel and film — read it already!) The Nasty Girl is the story of a young woman born (IIRC) a few decades after the war ended, like probably in my own generation, attempting to document her village’s history during the Nazi time, find out how her elders had responded to the authoritarian regime and to Anti-semitism.
Thanks for the book club idea, it looks like a good read.
how about these rule followers?
bonus: they are german.
er, i mean finnish.
My moves finally revealed — thanks Trixie for blowing my cover.
Has anyone read The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder yet? I got it yesterday, and it’s a little hackish, but I can’t put the fucking thing down; goodness I’m enraged at our commander in chief. (even more so than usual)
Sweet. This post needed a YouTube link.
probably in my own generation
A little further research shows that The Nasty Girl is based on a true story, and that the woman whose story it is, Anna Rosmus, is ten years my senior. So her parents would probably have been children or teenagers duing the war. She wrote a book Resistance and Persecution — The Case of Passau 1933-1939 (1983), which I’m betting is a good one. (I think I knew all this at some point in the past.)
which I’m betting is a good one.
And which whaddaya know, does not appear to have been translated. The German title is Widerstand und Verfolgung Am Beispiel Passaus 1933-1939 — if it has appeared in English it has left no trace.
Exhibit A: Record Club rules.
Exhibit B: sushi-eating rules (i.e., family style always, with everyone eating the same thing at the same time).
Sometimes rules should just be followed, no questions asked. (No matter what LT says!)
Jeremy, you might want to take The Triumph of the Will off your Netflix queue.
You gotta love Americans who can spell “queue.” Just one more reason swells rules.
Anyone else watch Kucinich read the 35 Articles of Impeachment against Bush last night?
One more book that’s useful in understanding the authoritarian dynamic: William Allen’s The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922 – 1945 (1966). Allen documents the social changes taking place in Northeim, Lower Saxony, during the period when the Nazi party was rising to power and during the war.
One of my favorite abuses of authority: My mission president had the sister missionaries leave the room, then said to a room of fifty celibate 19 to 21-year olds, “The spirit has impressed upon my mind that a number of you are struggling with the sin of masturbation… The power of the Holy Ghost can not work through an impure vessel…” You could have heard a pin drop in the room that day!
3. I love the Finnish disco! But this seems more like an example of structure serving improvisation rather than authoritarianism. I wish I could dance like the Finns.
my obligatory 70’s movie reference, “rules? in a knife fight?”
scott, what do you make of bertolucci’s film?
and now a quick glimpse into my divided soul.
i’m reading this while listening to high voltage and really feeling the lyrics about rules:
Well you can stick your nine to five livin’
And your collar and your tie
You can stick your moral standards
‘Cause it’s all a dirty lie
You can stick your golden handshake
And you can stick your silly rules
And all the other shit
That you teach to kids in school
(‘Cause I ain’t no fool)
But since I am The Man teaching kids in school maybe i will read the book after all.
“The spirit has impressed upon my mind that…” is a great turn of phrase. I am going to try and remember to drop it in to conversation now and then, where appropriate.
I thought the film was a relatively poor adaptation. His use of light (and shadow) and shape when depicting the fascitsts was great (all sharp edges and symmetry), but the rest is pretty weak. He changes the ending, I think to reflect the mood of the post-1968 revolution, and I like the novel’s ending better. SPOILER ALERT BELOW:
The proatgonist (I forget his name)finding community is the fall of fascism, as he and his wife swim through a river of people that acts as a cleansing flood.
One of my favorite self-abuses of authority
Wow, that’s a fascinating book. Ultimately it felt very “us against them” to me, which in retrospect isn’t surprising–he DOES view it as us against them–but the tone bothered me slightly while I was reading it.
I am very low-authoritarian now, but I’m certain I would have scored much, much higher back when I was Mormon–and been proud of it. Ugh.
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother stars a non-authoritarian subversive fighting back against the right-wing-authoritarian Man after terrorists blow up San Francisco’s Bay Bridge. Creepy, scary and fun.
19: I know this is a dead comment section but, well, so what.
I’d say this book is not us against them. It is them against us. Yeah, we are all really fair people and like to see things both ways but the truth is this situation is not symmetrical and don’t fall for that line of BS.
Put another way, is someone says “I thought Liberals were supposed to be nice” then I say “Up your’s wanker. Christ was no wimp.”
But really I wanted to give fair warning that Dave asked and I sent a short item about the book from my perspective. This was before I read any of the comments here so the tone probably doesn’t match the blog well but, you know, buzz off wankers.