Authoritarians - Current Chaos, Irrationality and Polarization

This episode was first published September 25, 2021 on my YouTube channel (Aquarian Diary). Many millions of people subscribe to worldviews or paradigms that increasingly conflict and collide with objective reality, often drastically. Thus the current highly polarized state of affairs is not surprising.   Here I briefly discuss the Authoritarian personality type and why they appear to frequently think and behave irrationally. Authoritarians are currently more predisposed to subscribe to right wing values.    In his freely available self published book “The Authoritarians” (2006) Psychology Professor Bob Altemeyer writes, referring to religious fundamentalists, who “… are highly likely to be authoritarian followers”, the following:   "They are highly submissive to established authority, aggressive in the name of that authority, and conventional to the point of insisting everyone should behave as their authorities decide. They are fearful and self-righteous and have a lot of hostility in them that they readily direct toward various out-groups. They are easily incited, easily led, rather un-inclined to think for themselves, largely impervious to facts and reason, and rely instead on social support to maintain their beliefs. They bring strong loyalty to their in-groups, have thick-walled, highly compartmentalized minds, use a lot of double standards in their judgments, are surprisingly unprincipled at times, and are often hypocrites.   But they are also Teflon-coated when it comes to guilt. They are blind to themselves, ethnocentric and prejudiced, and as closed-minded as they are narrow- minded. They can be woefully uninformed about things they oppose, but they prefer ignorance and want to make others become as ignorant as they. They are also surprisingly uninformed about the things they say they believe in, and deep, deep, deep down inside many of them have secret doubts about their core belief.”   ---    You can obtain a free copy of "The Authoritarians” here: https://theauthoritarians.org/options-for-getting-the-book/