Did Erich Fromm See Trump And His Followers In A Crystal Ball?

 Perhaps the best description of Trump and his followers, the Trumpublicans, comes from Erich Fromm (click here for a bio) as he wrote about the authoritarian personality. That article is the subject of today's review (click here for the article). The trouble with the above claim is that Fromm's article was written in 1957. So how could he  describe Trump and his followers so well? He had experience with others who had similar enough personalities. In particular, he had Hitler and Stalin to observe.

When Fromm talks about authoritarians, he is not talking about rational authority based on the competence of a given authority figure. Rather, he is dealing with irrational authority where the appeal is based on immaturity and the meeting of emotional needs caused by immaturity. And though when dealing with the authoritarian personality Fromm differentiates between the active authoritarian from the passive authoritarian, the emotional needs being met for both of these authoritarian personality types are very similar: people from both types must cling to each other because they lack the maturity to be independent. They lack a certain love that connects them to the world and they lack reason to break through the surface and learn to understand the 'core of things.' That leaves such people lonely and in fear.

Thus, opposite of the authoritarian is the mature person, according to Fromm, who is a 'loving and reasoning' person. Those with an authoritarian personality lack the maturity to love and to reason through things. In contrast to being loving and reasoning, authoritarians use each other to affirm themselves and to overcome their fear and loneliness. The active authoritarian, or the leader finds significance in receiving applause from the crowd and in being able to manipulate their followers to do all sorts of things some of which are harmful to themselves. The passive authoritarian, or the follower, finds their significance in being joined to a great leader despite the costs to their own personhood. Thus, both the active and passive authoritarians are meeting problematic emotional needs in each other in unhealthy ways.

Fromm better describes the authoritarian personality types than I do and so please read the article. It provides a 1957 crystal ball look into what we experienced during Trump's presidential campaigns and his tenure as President. The irrational, or I should say mindless, allegiance to Trump was demonstrated by people who were happy to let Trump serve as their nanny thinker. They easily found significance in their association with him and his cause. On the other hand, Trump often appeared to feel threatened when not praised sufficiently. His focus was always about how he looked to others regardless of the important issues at hand and bragging about how he was the best anyone has ever seen.

For us Christians, there is a concern about whether Fromm is criticizing our relationship with Christ as we praise Him and try to serve Him as God. But if we limit Fromm's article to how we relate to people, then we can greatly benefit from learning Fromm's take on the authoritarian personality types.

Week #13 Of The New Life

With some of the Covid-19 related restrictions lifted for our area, it would be natural to blog about the changes in the new life. But as with last week's Tuesday post, parts of the old life are still too haunting to ignore. The post last week was about racism and anger. This week's post is about something, like racism, we have had to suffer through from when settlers came from Europe to live here and even before that. This week's post is about authoritarianism.

To be specific, this article will be talking about the authoritarian personality type or authoritarian personalities. When discussing authoritarianism in that way, one is discussing not the mere disagreement with another person or with "conventional" beliefs, noting here that the term conventional is relative to a person's background, but how one reacts to dissent and disagreement (click here for traits of the authoritarian personality type).

To give a brief example, I remember being stopped because of an accident involving other people. I was there offering help to anyone who needed it. The police were already there trying to handle the situation. Then the son of one of the people who was in the accident parked too close to the accident for one police officer's comfort. The officer politely told the person to move their vehicle. The person ignored the officer's order not because he was defiant, but because he was preoccupied with the welfare of his parent. So the officer immediately switched gears into authoritarian mode by raising his voice and repeating the order to which the son ignored because, again, he was too preoccupied. The officer began to threaten, not physically, while raising his voice again. At that point, a neighbor told the person and the officer that the son could park his car on his property thus satisfying the order made by the police officer and the need of the son.

When we read about the traits of the authoritarian personality type, what becomes clear is that this personality type is driven by the fear of losing control over a situation or people.  The authoritarian personality type is a driven by fear. Thus, when we read the traits, we see that hostility and aggression are immediate responses to challenges either to the orders of people in authority or to "conventional" beliefs.

It is important to note that what is called "conventional" beliefs be recognized as being relative to a person's background. That is because initially, the study of authoritarian personality type focused on conservatives because of the loyalty to Hitler and the Nazis demonstrated by many German civilians even during some of their worst times of the war. To know what drives people to be so loyal to leaders like Hitler would be important if we care about avoiding or minimizing the same support for such dictators in the future.

Later, because of the kind of loyalty given to Hitler was now being given to other tyrants, like Stalin, the study of the authoritarian personality type broadened its scope. Thus we should realize that no group or ideology has a monopoly on having this personality type.

We should also note the distinction made by Erich Fromm on the two kinds of the authoritarian personality. The active authoritarian is exhibited by the one who seeks to control others while the passive authoritarian unthinkingly supports the control of the right active authoritarians (click here).

What does all of this talk about authoritarianism and authoritarian personalities have to do with our current crisis in America? Authoritarianism is on immediate display in a area or nation where there is a societal hierarchy based on some perceived superiority. Such hierarchical structures rely on authoritarianism to keep those portrayed as being inferior in line. And since this nation was founded on white supremacy and still remains that way to a significant extent, there is a societal embracing of authoritarianism by enough people in order to maintain the status quo.

But there is another group that, because of their job responsibilities, is given to authoritarianism: the job of the police officer. One of their responsibilities is to take control over certain situations. So authoritarianism can be exhibited by police officers when civilians do not immediately comply with laws and police orders. But here we must also understand that the job of a police officer can be extremely difficult.

There are at least two less desirable ways by which those in authority could respond to the fear of losing control: intimidation and punishment. Those in authority who fear losing control use intimidation to preemptively prevent dissent or resistance. The fear of punishment is also meant to prevent dissent or resistance, but it is also used as a consequence for continued dissent and resistance. In the latter case, that punishment could be called revenge.

And isn't it those two responses to the fear of losing control what we most often see when the police abuse their positions? The police are suppose to be there to protect and to serve. But when we look at how the police dress and even how their vehicles designed to appear, we see that the appearance of the police is designed to intimidate from the beginning. And though appearance of some power to intimidate might be necessary for the police to gain a certain respect from those who would wantonly harm others, it appears that that appearance of power is all too often overdone.

I remember being at one anti-war protest a while back where the average age of the protesters was in the mid 50s if not older while the police, who were monitoring our protest, were dressed in riot gear. How does such intimidation invite us to ask for police assistance in case one needs help? And how does such intimidation invite the protesters to see the police as anything but an enemy? The next year, the police officers monitoring the protest were not arrayed battle gear and it helped facilitate a mutual cooperation with them.

Also, we need to talk about the punishment response to the fear of losing control. Unlike intimidation, the overuse of punishment is used by the police by how they physically interact with those they view as resisting and by lawmakers who seek to keep society in line while often excusing themselves from accountability. We need to talk about punishment because our nation has a mass incarceration problem. For not only does the US incarcerate more of its citizens than any other nation, it incarcerates a higher percentage of its own citizens than any other nation. And here we must remember the literal HELL that incarceration involves. For there is little if any protection for the inmates from violence and abuse from either other inmates or from the guards. And the attitude of some authoritarians on the outside to that HELL is to repeat a famous line from an old TV show: 'if you can't do the time, don't do the crime.'

In addition, we need to discuss the self-limited thinking of those with authoritarian personalities whether they be active authoritarians or passive ones. The tendency is for authoritarians to have a black-white worldview. There are good guys and there are bad guys and there is no one in between. Because there is no one in between, there is no identifying with those struggling to keep the law through life's trials. With the inability to identify with those who make legal mistakes, comes the tendency to externalize evil.  And we should also note that this black-white worldview with all of its effects is held by conservative authoritarians, liberal authoritarians, and leftist authoritarians. But externalizing evil is not exclusively used for lawbreakers, it is often used, even by some police officers on those with different political views and ideologies. I have witnessed that from overhearing conversations that some officers had with each other.

But even without that black-white worldview, authoritarianism persuades people by relying on orders or the credentials of the source. Authoritarianism does not ask us to rationally think through a problem or viewpoint.

Thus, it is authoritarianism that most often divides us, not our ideologies or other differences.

Finally, we religiously conservative Christians need to take much of the blame for our nation's authoritarian culture. That isn't because most people in our nation are religiously conservative Christians,  it is because the authoritarianism we Christians have practiced for so long has become a model for others to imitate or a reason to respond in kind.

Because our faith has put so much emphasis on how to respond to authority figures in many of our relationships, we have never learned how and when to turn that authority switch off. Because we tend to be authoritarians, we see the need for hierarchies where there should be equality. And we have misinterpreted Romans 13 on purpose of government and how it is there to punish the evildoer and reward the good person. The result is that too many of us believe that the government is only there to punish others and to give us a recognized position of privilege in society.

What we are seeing in our nation today are the chickens coming home to roost. And those chickens don't just represent the horrible white supremacy on which this nation has been based even to this day, they also represent our love affair with authoritarianism as a way to respond to our fear of losing control over those who are different from and who disagree with us.

Why America Is Without Hope

Our nation is in a downward spiral. Though the economy is doing well, the rest of the nation isn't. We have a President who continually searches for more power in ways that are similar to how dictators use power. The price of some of our economic success will incur future bills, not just one bill, that will be too high to pay. And like  our nation's wealth disparity, the divisions between the highly politically partisan population continues to grow. And though all of those problems are reversible, the most important group of Americans show that there is no will to change course.

Before going on, we should remember that after WW II, leading academics studied the most important question: Why did most Germans remain so loyal to Hitler? One of the factors that came from their study was writings on the observation of an authoritarian personality type (discussed here and signs of the personality there). The passive form of that personality type is marked by blind loyalty to selected authority figures, showing hostility toward those who disagree with selected authority figures, 'negative view of people,' an attraction to 'strong leaders' and power,  the tendency to overly simplify reality, a black-white view of reality, a penchant for projecting one's anger on others, and being too focused on power and sex.

Obviously one does not have to have all of those traits to have an authoritarian personality type, but we should note that the reasons why, when enough of the people exhibit having an authoritarian personality type, those traits led Germans to stay loyal to Hitler and why those traits could drive us Americans to hang on and submit too much to our own leaders.

Though initial studies in the authoritarian personality type singled out conservatives, later studies adjusted for the acknowledgement that people on the left could also display this type of personality.

Why we Americans have no hope is that too many of us, from libertarians to conservatives to liberals to leftists, not only display this personality type, we embrace it and some of us have adopted it as our preferred form of spirituality. It isn't just Trump supporters who cling to an authoritarian personality type, it can be seen among liberals especially those who supported, and still do, Hillary Clinton. And last but not least, neither libertarians nor leftists have escaped this scourge of a personality type.

Besides the links this personality had to those Germans who clung to Hitler during WW II,  we should note from the description and list of traits of this personality type how those with this personality type would be hard pressed to be able to adequately adapt to the changing conditions of what we call life in a nation.

And though we can easily see a growing authoritarianism in both our leaders and those from many other parts of the world, that is not the red flag that signals our ominous end. That red flag is flown when too many everyday people succumb to the siren call of an authoritarian personality type. And how ironic it is that in the 'land of the free and home of the brave,' we find ourselves to be unable to adequately adjust to our nation's everyday changes.

Understanding Ourselves For Religiously Conservative Christians, Part 1

Usually the Friday blogpost covers some article that directly deals with Christianity. This week will be different. It isn't that the articles being reviewed today have no bearing on Christians, especially religiously conservative ones, it is that the articles being reviewed today have have an indirect bearing on Christianity. For these articles deal with a problem that has existed for centuries in the Conservative Church. That problem is our penchant to embrace authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism became a hot topic after much reflection on the European theater of WW II.  Why did Germans stay so loyal to Hitler despite the evidence that was so apparent at the end of the war? The answer that I have seen is because of authoritarianism. Germans clung to authoritarianism.
 
Authoritarianism has two sides to it: the ruling side and the submitting side (click here). The ruling side explains those who take control over others. The submitting side describes those who voluntarily submit to that control. And understanding the difference between the two will be helpful in understanding the review of the 3 articles on authoritarianism by Psychotherapist Eric Maisel (click here for a bio).

At the beginning of the first of his three articles (click here for article #1, click there for article #2, and click there again for article #3),  Maisel correctly states how important it is for us to understand authoritarianism in today's world. Why? Because more and more people are being ruled over authoritarians today. But we find authoritarianism in other places other than government. We can find authoritarianism at work, at home, at places of worship, and in other groups of people.

Maisel claims that authoritarianism comes from a hatred of others. I would not want to describe authoritarians in such a monolithic manner. While some authoritarians are governed by pure hatred, I believe that authoritarianism mostly comes from fear; it is a fear of one's preferred group losing control over a given population whether that population consists of those in a small group like a church or similar group, or the population of a nation. I concluded that because of my own observations of people and reading the smaller list of traits of authoritarianism found in an article about the authoritarian personality type (click here for the reference). It isn't that the reference I am using explicitly states that fear is the main reason for authoritarian personality types. But fear being the driving factor in most authoritarianism seems to  be the case. The difference between the two views might best be explained by whether we are talking about ruling authoritarians or those who submit to them.

In addition, there is another trait of the authoritarian personality that I suggest is there from the combination of observing others and reflecting on the previously cited article on the authoritarian personality type. That trait is that for authoritarians, truth is more determined by the credentials of the source than by the facts and logic used by the source. I've added that because authoritarians want us to obey only their favorite authority figures and traditions. And those who challenge what those sources say will be subject to attacks and discredidation.

In his three articles, Maisel lists 30 traits of authoritarians. Some of them include:

1. Hatred
2. The need to punish others including the shaming and ridiculing of others
3. Aggression and assaultive behavior
4. Threats
5. Paranoia
6. The need to control and dominate others
7. Religious fervor and cover
8. Anti-Rationalism
9. Coercing people to obey
10.  Lacking guilt for what one does
11. Lacking empathy
12. Concerns with social status
13. Exploitation
14. Narcissism

We should note that when the subjects of authoritarianism and authoritarian personality types were first studied, the conclusions were skewed against conservatives. Why? One reason is that the reason for the study itself came from the actions of the radical conservative, Adolf Hitler. As time went on, it was rightfully recognized that non-conservatives are capable of embracing authoritarianism as well.

We see the embracing of authoritarianism has spread throughout our political landscape. It is more than obvious that Donald Trump and his Republicans have passionately embraced authoritarianism. But the 2016 campaigns showed that establishment Democrats have also passionately embraced authoritarianism as seen by how Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee for President. And I greatly lament over the fact that my activism has exposed me to a great deal of authoritarianism that exists in many, if not most, on the Left. A Leftist doesn't have to be a member of Antifa to be an authoritarian.

For my fellow religiously conservative Christians,  our biggest problem with authoritarianism is not found in us trying to dominate over others, but rather we strongly tend to embrace a passive authoritarianism so that we strongly support those who would rule over others in our name. That is why we need to be aware of the authoritarianism that exists in ourselves. And what we have embraced is a passive authoritarianism.

Our authoritarianism is demonstrated by our insularity. Insularity here refers to our self limited listening to and reading sources outside of either our faith or our conservative political-economic ideologies. And because we have often been taught that how things use to be done in America in the good old days was the Christian way of doing them, then any challenges to our conservative political-economic ideologies automatically become a challenge to our faith.

For example, how many of us get a significant amount of our believed news from non-conservative channels, from channels other than FOX or news or internet sources that are not conservatively based? How many of us have read liberal sources or leftist political-economic sources? How many of us know the difference between the two? How many of us have actually read Noam Chomskey, Howard Zinn, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, or other real leftists? How many of us know that there are a number of different kinds of socialism? How many of us support some form of socialism? How many of us publicly  challenge patriotism or capitalism?

We could also ask how many of us have read a significant part of the Koran? How many of us have read liberal theologians? How many of us leave the readings of political liberals and leftists and non-Christians and liberal theologians to our ministers for them to interpret for us what these people are saying?

Remembering that authoritarians determine truth more by the credentials of the source rather than the facts and logic involved, we should note that not listening to or reading those outside of our religious or political-economic boxes is done more out of fear than anything else. For the more we tend to agree with a source, the more credentials we assign to them. And thus if we agree with non-Conservative sources too much, we are vulnerable to accessing too many outside sources and then falling away from Conservatism. But that should not frighten us religiously conservative Christians if we have not conflated our faith with our political-economic ideologies. Our insularity that comes from authoritarianism prevents from knowing things about the world that more and more people know. And thus our insularity can cause us to hurt the credibility of the Gospel by making us appear as a 21st century flat-earther.

Why have many of us embraced a passive authoritarianism? Is it because  we are afraid of sharing our culture, society, and the state with unbelievers whose personal values we look down on and see as threatening? Therefore we believe that we must be in a culture war that we must win so we can suppress the cultural influences of non-conservative unbelievers? And in trying to take back our culture, society, and the state, we seem to be blind to how our penchant for control hurts the credibility of our Christian witness because with our attempts to control others, comes the oppression of others.

I hope that more of us religiously conservative Christians see the need to study authoritarianism. For authoritarianism has become a spirituality for many of us religiously conservative Christians. And the harm it is doing to the reputation of our Christian faith is very evident to those whom we should try to reach the most.

As for the 3 articles by Maisel on authoritarianism, I find that fear more than hatred is the driving force behind authoritarianism. Here we should note that fear can lead to anger and hatred. It is wise to review all 30 of the traits of authoritarianism he listed in his articles. The above list is only partial and sometimes combines into one item 2 or more items from his list. Then read the other articles on authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality type to see what you want to accept from Maisel and what you want to reject.


 

The Pharisee Is The Pope Of Tribalism

Some who are concerned about our national unity identify tribalism as a threat. There are several working definitions of tribalism depending on the context in which the term is used. One such definition is based on a post-Cold War observation. What was observed was that a very strong loyalty could extend to any kind of group such that right and wrong depended on what served the welfare of the group. Such a loyalty allows for only moral relativity where what is right and wrong depends more and more on who does what to whom. Such loyalty acts as an inhibitor on people being able to judge their own groups.

For those concerned about our national unity, they are worried about the different groups within the nation where very strong loyalty is evident. They are worried that some groups based on ideology, religion, language, ethnicity, economic class and national identity have too many members who are more loyal to their groups than they are to the nation. Please note that some of these groups that are receiving such loyalty might not be located in our nation. That was the concern of Joe McCarthy and the red scare in the 1950s where those who identified with any kind of Communist ties were then received workplace sanctions.

Here we should note that those who are concerned about our national unity do not regard nationalism as a form of tribalism because nationalism is suppose to be acting as the pie in which different groups of American become its pieces. But all we have to do to show that nationalism can act as a form of tribalism is to change the overall context to something larger than the nation, such as the world. When the pie is globalism and some nations have garnered a great loyalty from enough people, then those people may not care if their actions hurt the world at large, they are only concerned with what is "best" for their nation at the present time.

Of course, we don't need globalism to show how nationalism can act as a form of tribalism. Those who believe in absolute moral values, whether their beliefs have a secular or religious basis, see nationalism act as a form of tribalism. In the context of absolute moral values, tribalism occurs when loyalty to any group, including the nation, trumps commitment to principles and morals. When this occurs, we end up with the rule of force and an ends justify the means ethic.

That ethic was clearly seen in the actions of former Vice President Dick Cheney as he was portrayed in the movie Vice. In that movie, Cheney did not care about what he did to others or whom he hurt if he saw that it protected the people of the United States. In other words, Cheney did not allow any moral standards stand in the way of what he saw was needed to protect America. His loyalty to the United States was so great that he recognized no absolute moral values if they interfered with how he thought things should be done.

We see the same tribalism in the form of nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The siren song of the tribalism trap seduces people to pick a side so that they easily point the finger at the atrocities committed by the other side while whitewashing the atrocities committed by their own side. Regardless of whether we have embraced Israeli or Palestinian nationalism, we end up being willing to do anything to win without recognizing any moral limits for our actions.

Because of the moral relativity that comes from strong loyalty to a group, another way to picture tribalism is to see it as a kind of group authoritarianism where the group becomes the ultimate authority over all. And when one looks at the traits of an authoritarian personality type, it is easy to see the connection. Some of those traits include (click here for the source)

• Respect for submission to acknowledged authority
• Belief in aggression toward those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking, or who are different
• A negative view of people in general - i.e. the belief that people would all lie, cheat or steal if given the opportunity
• A need for strong leadership which displays uncompromising power
• A belief in simple answers and polemics - i.e. The media controls us all or The source of all our problems is the loss of morals these days.
• Resistance to creative, dangerous ideas. A black and white worldview.
• A tendency to project one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group  

It should be easy to see authoritarian personality type characteristics on display in internet discussions. As for nationalism serving as an example of tribalism and thus displaying traits of an authoritarian personality type, we simply insert one's nation and its traditional values as the source of acknowledged authority and we should not have much difficulty in seeing how a nationally based tribalism displays authoritarianism. That tribalism demands that others submit to our nation's authority. Why? It is because a fear-driven aggression and hostility over challenges to an acknowledged authority is a summary definition of an authoritarian personality type. And that's what happens when we see a nation or group of nations bully other nations or following double standards?

Now where does the phariseeism come into play here? It is present in tribalism's moral relativity where what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom. With that comes a sense of superiority that says what others do against us is wrong but what we do to others for our own good is never wrong.  Here, it would be helpful to look at the parable of the two men praying (click here for the source):

 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’

“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’

“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

 As the Pharisee exalted himself and looked down at the tax collector as being below him. And so those who have embraced tribalism exalt their own groups and look down at other groups and assume that their own group is an authority over other groups. And as the Pharisee considered the tax collector his inferior, so too we see with tribalism how those from other groups are considered to be inferior to those who embrace tribalism.

It is the Phariseeism lodged in the authoritarian personality type traits from tribalism that have currently seized the day. These traits play a major role in why we are so divided and so uncivil with fellow citizens let alone the world. And it is not until we see ourselves as fellow sinners regardless of whom we compare ourselves with that things will change. And it isn't until we seek to share power rather than to seek to control others out of fear that we really coexist peacefully. Yes, we have real enemies out there. But to act toward others as if we are superior to them and are entitled to control them and their resources that we can actually start living in peace.



 

Asking The Right Question About Reaction To The Gillette Ad

This time, this blog is not reviewing a Christian article. But it is reviewing an article that should be important to us religiously conservative Christians.

George Monbiot (click here for a bio), who has led as interesting a life as anyone this blog has reviewed, wrote on the negative reaction to Gillette's advertisement that calls on men to change from exhibiting a 'toxic masculinity' (click here for the commercial). That toxic masculinity includes in particular the sexual harassment of and assault on women and bullying. In other words, toxic masculinity includes the idea of using force to dominate others. And after watching the commercial, one would think that the commercial said what is obvious and necessary to say.

But reaction to the commercial by many men, especially conservative ones, came as a shock. Many men vigorously objected to the commercial and became defensive--see Piers Morgan's reaction for example (click here). They used a straw man to claim that all of masculinity, rather than just the toxic parts, was under attack. And in doing so, they showed a great sensitivity and defensiveness that they were trying deny.

This is where Monbiot's article comes into play (click here for the article). For what Monbiot saw in the criticisms of the ad was fear rather than courage, weakness rather than toughness, and powerlessness rather than being in control. In other words, if the men who were protesting the commercial were as strong and tough as they portray themselves to be, why does the commercial cause them to become emotionally disheveled? Is their behavior indicating that the Gillette commercial hit a nerve that their collective self-image denied existed?

And so Monbiot's questioning of the negative reactions to criticizing toxic masculinity hits the nail on the head. Monbiot then goes on to look at how the term used, 'toxic masculinity,' might be a counterproductive one in terms of discouraging those men who need help from getting help. But something else that is both overlooked by Monbiot but indicated by the reaction to the commercial must be looked at. What must be looked at in the strong negative reactions to the commercial is whether we are dealing with toxic masculinity at all when criticizing the destructive ways in which men come across. For when we see hostility shown to people or ideas that challenge conventional ideas and tradition, or that call into question the quest for or exercising of excessive power, we are not necessarily dealing with any form of masculinity. Rather, we are receiving the whip end of the authoritarian personality type in people (click here). And what we must remember is that this personality type comes in two forms: the dominant form of a ruler and the enabling submissive form of the subject (click here). 

And if our problem is with the authoritarian personality type in men, which women could exhibit as well, then our problem is not just with domineering men, it is also with their cheerleader supporters. And we should note here that dominance over others is not just a male trait, it is a trait of a personality type that does not discriminate against either gender.

If we list some of the traits of the authoritarian personality type, what we will see is the reactions to the commercial which Monbiot observed. Those traits include (click here for the source):

• Blind allegiance to conventional beliefs about right and wrong
• Belief in aggression to those who do not subscribe to conventional thinking
• A need for strong leadership that displays uncompromising power
• A belief in simple answers and polemics
• A black and white worldview
• A tendency of projecting one's own feelings of inadequacy, rage and fear onto a scapegoated group

 It isn't just men who can display a toxic persona, it is those who are preoccupied with the right group and traditions having great control over others such that they try to dominate others even if that domination calls for violence. The authoritarian personality type revolves around an irrationally strong fear of a loss of control by desired leaders and ideologies over others. That fear becomes the driver in how people react to others especially if others challenge one's desired leaders and ideologies.

Monbiot's article should be required reading for all. He makes excellent observations. But the real problem we are facing today that we see in men is not about masculinity, it is all about personality type. That such a personality type is strongly associated with one gender or another is culturally determined and can confuse the issue and make us think that only group needs to beware. In reality, all of us should beware of whether we are are embracing either form of the authoritarian personality type.

 



References

1. https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/1016735/
2. https://zcomm.org/author/georgemonbiot/

The State Of The Conservative Church In America

To my longtime friends, Steve and Caroline. You will have to settle for this blogpost since we didn't have time to discuss things in person during our last visit.

Religiously conservative Christianity is roughly facing the same fate that the Republican challengers to Trump's Republican and  Hillary Clinton's campaigns suffered. That fate is failure and the reason will be the same. As guardians for the old status quo, status quo Republicans and Democrats found it too difficult to acknowledge their own failures and sins. That failure to admit their faults was why Mitt Romney's well stated opposition to Trump was translated into 'WAH WA WA WAH WA WA' to Trump's supporters and others who knew that the status quo had failed them. The same occurred for many people when Hillary Clinton campaigned.

Since religiously conservative Christianity has been a strong supporter of the old status quo in the West, especially in America, it is now facing the same challenges that the old status quo is facing. And those who are challenging it, are listening for confessions of wrongdoing before pronouncing their verdict and punitive sentences.

Such has occurred before in Church history. In the pre-revolutionary times of France, Russia, and Spain when the dominant branch of the Church supported those with wealth and power, the Church, and the Gospel itself, was understandably portrayed as the enemy of the people. Thus when those respective revolutions came, the Church and the Gospel unnecessarily suffered for having aligned itself with wealth and power.

Now instead of national revolutions, the Church is being held accountable by Post Modernism. Post Modernism holds to an outcome-based truth system that says if the tenets of a group lead to abuse, those tenets must be false. And since Christianity has so strongly aligned itself with Western Civilization and a dominant part of that civilization visited exploitation and oppression over other peoples via colonialism and imperialism, Christianity is being given one more chance to distance itself from the Western Civilization. But it is not.

In America, religiously conservative Christianity has become strong supporters of patriotism and business--again, power and wealth. We should note that that patriotism expresses great fondness for the past, especially America's founding. But that fondness strongly interferes with people experiencing a full, emotional connection to America's atrocities of ethnically cleansing Native Americans from the land and of teaching and practicing white supremacy as seen in slavery and Jim Crow. Thus, though America's faults are acknowledged, they are not given their full due by those adhering to patriotism. And by not distancing itself from past sins, Christianity's teachings are being heard as 'WAH WA WA WAH WA WA' by more and more people.

In addition, religiously conservative Christianity has not owned up to its history of marginalizing the LGBT community. Unfortunately, too many religiously conservative Christian leaders have conflated correctly promoting Biblical Christian morals on Church members with doing the same on all members of society regardless of their religious beliefs. That caused those leaders to marginalize the LGBT community in society for centuries in our nation's history. For those younger Christians who know decent and trustworthy people from the LGBT community and have them as friends, that marginalization has created so much dissonance that more and more younger Christians feel compelled to believe that homosexuality is an biblically acceptable sexual orientation.

In short, religiously conservative Christianity suffers from misplaced loyalties and a misplaced spirituality. The misplaced loyalties can be ascertained, for the most part, from what was written above. Those misplaced loyalties include patriotism, Capitalism, political conservatism, economic conservatism, social conservatism, and white supremacy. That is not to say that all religiously conservative Christians will hold to all of those loyalties, but they do experience a tendency to hold to the loyalties from that list to varying degrees.

When, for the religiously conservative Christian, those loyalties become strong enough, syncretisms are produced. A syncretism is what we get when we pound a square peg into a round hole as one attempts to merge two or more ideas that do not fit together. Neither the peg nor the the hole escape change from the violence of the pounding. And so as the peg of those loyalties appear, and 'appear' is the operative word here, to come more in line with what the hole of the Scriptures teach, what is often overlooked is that the hole of what the Scriptures teach has also changed and it resembles less and less what they originally taught. In the mean time, the shapes of the peg and the hole develop a closer resemblance. And if we add our natural tendency to want to be flattered, we see a natural tendency to conflate what the Scriptures teach with how we were raised and taught while we were children.




So much for the misplaced loyalties. There is another problem that religiously conservative Christianity faces that has yet to be mentioned. That is the misplaced spirituality found in many  religiously conservative Christian circles. For it seems, at least to me, what has been often identified as the religiously conservative Christian response to changes in the old status quo, in actuality, is evidence of an authoritarian personality type epidemic in the conservative Church.

Now we should note that we religiously conservative Christians are very vulnerable to embracing an authoritarian personality type. Why? It is because of all of the authority structures we are taught to accept. With those multiple structures comes a growing inability to turn off the authority switch as we relate to society. When we can't turn off that authority switch, we look to either rule over others or to submit to them. And since we share society with many unbelievers, many of whom we look at as being a moral threat, we look to rule over society rather than to share society with others as equals.

And so, in line with those who fall prey to an authoritarian personality type, we become hostile and aggressive toward those who challenge the traditions of the old status quo as we expect others to submit to what we submit to. We also hold on to an overly negative of view of those who don't hold to our religious convictions. We also look for strong leaders who can exercise power over those who do not want to conform. We hold to overly simple, black-white views of the world despite the complexities that many issues we face in the world contain. And we generally don't like new lifestyles or creative responses to new situations because we look too much to the past for our understanding of current life and how to solve today's problems.

Simply adhering to and defending Biblical and other familiar traditions and questioning what is new does not mean that we have embraced an authoritarian personality type. Instead, it  is how we respond to challenges and defend Biblical and other traditions. When we respond with hostility and aggression, we are looking to suppress changes practiced by others and thus to rule over them. On he other hand, when we respond to challenges with questions, we are looking to see what in the new can help as well as hurt us. We are not looking to either accept or reject all that is new. Instead, we are often looking to pursue wisdom by combining what is valid from what is new along with what is valid from what is old in terms of how we should navigate an ever changing world. In other words, we are pursuing wisdom.

Our misplaced loyalties as well as misplaced spirituality has hurt our witness before the world. It has understandably caused many outside the faith to not even want to listen to those of us who hold to the faith. Thus, religiously conservative Christianity is going the way of the old status quo simply because it has identified itself with it too strongly. And all of that has contributed significantly to the decline of religiously conservative Christianity in America and in the West.




 

The Growing Authoritarianism Of Some Of Today's Republicans

What seems to be counterintuitive to those who listen to Republicans while they denounce centralized power and a strong Federal government is the notion that Republicans tend to favor authoritarianism. Why is that the case? It has to do with their conservatism and its defense of tradition. An unbridled approach to defending traditions leads to authoritarian personality types (click here for a description). And noting the 'blind allegiance to convention,' the showing of hostility and aggression to those challenge tradition, and the belief in very 'strong leadership' exhibited by those who suffer from such a personality type, it seems natural that such people would embrace authoritarianism (click here for signs of authoritarianism) to either maintain a favored status quo or call for a new preferred one. But we should also note that political conservatives have no monopoly on either people with authoritarian personality types or authoritarianism.

There are at least three examples of current Republican leaders who show that a penchant for authoritarianism is growing among today's Republicans. Here we could note how jokes made about Devin Nunes, a Republican Representative from California, and some of his colleagues from The Late Show's host, Stephen Colbert has prompted Nunes to call those jokes a 'danger' to our nation (click here for source). In his statement, Nunes feels that the "left" has been criticizing those, presumably his fellow Republicans, 'who are trying to get to the truth.' Calling Colbert's jokes a danger and demonizing the left provides the motivation and personal justification for calls for more power for people like Nunes and his Republican colleagues.

Georgia's Lieutenant Governor, Casey Cagle, has threatened to punish Delta Airlines after the airlines withdrew a special discount for NRA members. Cagle threatened to oppose a fuel tax break for the airlines that has been in the pipeline for  a while. Other Republican lawmakers followed Cagle's lead and at least the dispute between those lawmakers and Delta has been criticized by the Governor of Georgia (click here and there). Here we should note that despite Cagle's words and actions, the job of government is not to threaten political retribution for political stands taken by private citizens or businesses; it is the responsibility of government to protect the right of individuals or businesses to take political stands.

Finally, we come to Donald Trump. Not only do we have his past admiration and friendliness for authoritarian leaders like Putin, Erodogan, and Duterte, he recently stated fondly that some day the US could follow China's lead in allowing its leader to become President for life. Of course, other signs of authoritarianism demonstrated by President Trump can be found by checking his words and actions with traits from previously linked article on authoritarianism. Some of those traits as literally described in the article include:

• efforts to intimidate the media
• using state power to reward corporate backers
• fearmongering
• demonizing the opposition

Also consider the actions of the Florida State House following the latest mass shooting that took place in a public high school. After tabling a motion to discuss gun control, instead the House passed a resolution declaring that 'porn was dangerous' (click here for the source). At this point, we should remember the last listed sign of the authoritarian personality type: 'A preoccupation with violence and sex.'