The neurobiology of authoritarianism

[Raze]

1 hour ago, aurum said:

I've already answered this. There have not been rapid shifts.

Society has always been deeply authoritarian and mostly still is.

If you want to point to cherry-picked examples of rapid changes like Germany, those are still explainable. Conditioning, distribution and unique survival pressures / conditions can account for those within a model where authoritarianism is correlated to brain strucutre.

This is objectively not true. It’s actually normal and common for governments to rapidly shift to and from authoritarian. There are endless examples in history and even recently. I’m not cherry-picking.

The conditions and survival pressures as the reason is true, but that shows how the idea it’s because of neurobiology is nonsense, if that was the case it would be consistent, not shifting rapidly as a result of survival pressures. 

Edited Wednesday at 08:01 PM by Raze

[Joshe]

4 hours ago, aurum said:

You are deeply understating the significance.

No doubt people are more suggestible to certain narratives due to brain, but that still puts the power in the hands of the narrative, not the brain. Obviously. 

So the question is, how much weight does biology actually carry.

I’m open to it being something like 90/10 or 95/5, if not higher, with biology as minor and context, conditioning, and environment primary.

So if that's “deeply understating,”, are you suggesting something like 30%-50%? 

[aurum]

6 minutes ago, Joshe said:

So if that's “deeply understating,”, are you suggesting something like 30%-50%? 

More.

I'll say 80/20 in favor of biology over societal narratives. 

But also, ultimately a distinction between biology and mind has to breakdown. They will feed into each other, without a clear dividing line. Mind and biology are a strange loop. 

[Joshe]

3 hours ago, aurum said:

More.

I'll say 80/20 in favor of biology over societal narratives. 

But also, ultimately a distinction between biology and mind has to breakdown. They will feed into each other, without a clear dividing line. Mind and biology are a strange loop. 

You trolling me? You went from "interesting correlation" to 80/20 biology. lol. 

Brains are predisposed to like sugar. But if they knew nothing about it and were never exposed to it, they’d never crave it, never seek it, and never develop beliefs or behaviors around it. The sugar predisposition would be inert, dormant, unactivated potential, until someone came along and showed them sugar. 

And that’s one of the most biologically hardwired preferences we have. If something that deeply rooted needs activation to become real, it goes without saying a tendency toward something far more abstract, like authoritarianism, needs even more external input to take shape.

Sugar preferences activate instantly after exposure. Belief systems don’t. They take time, reinforcement, and cultural scaffolding. Which makes it clear that environment and external input is the driving force, not the brain’s biology. 

 

 

Edited Thursday at 03:10 AM by Joshe

[aurum]

1 hour ago, Joshe said:

You trolling me? You went from "interesting correlation" to 80/20 biology. lol. 

"Interesting correlation" was never my position.

It feels consistent to me.

1 hour ago, Joshe said:

Brains are predisposed to like sugar. But if they knew nothing about it and were never exposed to it, they’d never crave it, never seek it, and never develop beliefs or behaviors around it. The sugar predisposition would be inert, dormant, unactivated potential, until someone came along and showed them sugar. 

And that’s one of the most biologically hardwired preferences we have. If something that deeply rooted needs activation to become real, it goes without saying a tendency toward something far more abstract, like authoritarianism, needs even more external input to take shape.

Sugar preferences activate instantly after exposure. Belief systems don’t. They take time, reinforcement, and cultural scaffolding. Which makes it clear that environment and external input is the driving force, not the brain’s biology. 

The sugar analogy is faulty since even if you personally had never been exposed to sugar, you would still seek out sources of high glucose like sugar. So you are not waiting around ambivalently. You are completely played by your biology to find and eat sugar before you even know what it is.

The whole thing I'm arguing here is that authoritarianism is not just an abstract belief system you pick up from society. It's more fundamental than that.

[Joshe]

16 hours ago, aurum said:

The sugar analogy is faulty since even if you personally had never been exposed to sugar, you would still seek out sources of high glucose like sugar. So you are not waiting around ambivalently. You are completely played by your biology to find and eat sugar before you even know what it is.

The whole thing I'm arguing here is that authoritarianism is not just an abstract belief system you pick up from society. It's more fundamental than that.

The structure of the analogy is what's important: 

Latent predisposition → exposure → activation → expression

Craving glucose ≠ craving a Snickers.

Drive doesn’t create its own expression. Drive looks for a solution.

The solution it finds depends on:

• What’s available
• How it’s framed
• What gets reinforced

You're kind of proving my point by saying the result of craving a snickers bar is not the same as craving glucose. 

Craving order/certainty ≠ embracing authoritarian ideology.

The mind needs exposure, repetition, framing, and buy-in to embrace an ideology. So, if biology can’t produce authoritarianism on its own, then biology can't be the primary driver. Which means you should, at most, be at 50/50. 

But even that is too high because how do you explain the billions of Christians around the world? Do they all share a specific brain structure that predisposes them to Christianity, or were they born into cultures that taught it to them? 

For the billions of Christians, the same specific brain structures is not a constant, but external influence is. Cause belongs to what can best explain the result across variation. The main constant is the input, not the biology.

Edited Thursday at 10:01 PM by Joshe

[aurum]

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

Drive doesn’t create its own expression. Drive looks for a solution.

The solution it finds depends on:

• What’s available
• How it’s framed
• What gets reinforced

You're kind of proving my point by saying the result of craving a snickers bar is not the same as craving glucose. 

Craving order/certainty ≠ embracing authoritarian ideology.

The point is the drive is more fundamental than any ideology.

I don't see how that helps your position.

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

The mind needs exposure, repetition, framing, and buy-in to embrace an ideology. So, if biology can’t produce authoritarianism on its own, then biology can't be the primary driver. Which means you should, at most, be at 50/50.

No, this is faulty.

Ideology that goes with authoritarianism is the justification for biology and survival.

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

Do they all share a specific brain structure that predisposes them to Christianity

YES

4 hours ago, Joshe said:

or were they born into cultures that taught it to them? 

For the billions of Christians, the same specific brain structures is not a constant, but external influence is. Cause belongs to what can best explain the result across variation. The main constant is the input, not the biology.

External influence is mostly window dressing.

Which is why we have religions across all cultures that are fundamentally so similar, even though their external core can look quite different.

[Joshe]

22 hours ago, aurum said:

External influence is mostly window dressing.

Structured belief systems only exist because of external influence. Which already means external influence is at least 50%. Then, given everything we know about how malleable the human psyche is and the nature of thoughts and beliefs and how they shape perception, it’s obvious that external influence is a major factor in what gets expressed. This bumps it up to at least 70%. Once you factor in everything else we know about conditioning and reinforcement, it probably pushes it to 90%. But don't just take my hunch for it. Here's some science:

Identical Twins Study - Hatemi et al., 2014 — published in Behavioral Genetics.

• They looked at over 12,000 twin pairs across five countries.
• They found that about 40% of political ideology is genetic.
• The other 60% comes from environment — culture, exposure, reinforcement, life experience.
• This is with identical twins. Same DNA. Same basic brain wiring. Usually raised in the same home.
• If biology was the dominant driver, twins raised together would almost always land on the same beliefs.
• But they split all the time, authoritarian vs libertarian, religious vs secular.
• Sixty percent of the difference between them is explained by the environment.
• Even identical wiring cannot duplicate belief systems.
• When you get to non-identical siblings or strangers, the split is even wider.
• Biology biases emotional needs. It does not build political ideologies.
• Belief systems have to be constructed. 

The fact that twins ideologically split 60% of the time proves you're wrong. If they split 60, what do you think the number would be for unrelated people? Maybe something like this: 

Edited yesterday at 01:10 AM by Joshe

[aurum]

41 minutes ago, Joshe said:

Structured belief systems only exist because of external influence. Which already means external influence is at least 50%. Then, given everything we know about how malleable the human psyche is and the nature of thoughts and beliefs and how they shape perception, it’s obvious that external influence is a major factor in what gets expressed. This bumps it up to at least 70%. Once you factor in everything else we know about conditioning and reinforcement, it probably pushes it to 90%. But don't just take my hunch for it. Here's some science:

Identical Twins Study - Hatemi et al., 2014 — published in Behavioral Genetics.

• They looked at over 12,000 twin pairs across five countries.
• They found that about 40% of political ideology is genetic.
• The other 60% comes from environment — culture, exposure, reinforcement, life experience.
• This is with identical twins. Same DNA. Same basic brain wiring. Usually raised in the same home.
• If biology was the dominant driver, twins raised together would almost always land on the same beliefs.
• But they split all the time, authoritarian vs libertarian, religious vs secular.
• Sixty percent of the difference between them is explained by the environment.
• Even identical wiring cannot duplicate belief systems.
• When you get to non-identical siblings or strangers, the split is even wider.
• Biology biases emotional needs. It does not build political ideologies.
• Belief systems have to be constructed. 

The fact that twins ideologically split 60% of the time proves you're wrong. If they split 60, what do you think the number would be for unrelated people? Maybe something like this: 

Clever rebuttal but it still has a lot of problems.

The chart is misleading because you cannot scale biological influence in that way. You are operating on an assumption that "if biology accounted for only 40% of political beliefs in identical twins, then it must be way less for normal people". But that's incorrect.

Twin studies are designed precisely to estimate how much genetics contributes to variance in a trait across everyone, using twin comparisons as a tool. So if we take these studies at face value, you would have to conclude 40% biological influence for everyone, not just identical twins. Which is still a huge effect, and would show that biology has a significant influence on your political positions, even if it's still less causal than environment. 

In fact, the study you actually referenced is extremely clear that there is profound link between biology and political ideology.

A few quotes:

Quote

 

"Almost forty years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30-60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to measurement and sample limitations, as well the relative absence of molecular genetic studies."

"We provide evidence that genetic factors play a role in the formation of political ideology, regardless of how ideology is measured, the era, or the population sampled."

"The combined evidence suggests that political ideology constitutes a fundamental aspect of one’s genetically informed psychological disposition, but as Fisher proposed long ago, genetic influences on complex traits will be composed of thousands of markers of very small effects and it will require extremely large samples to have enough power in order to identify specific polymorphisms related to complex social traits."

"More than half a century of research in genetics, neuroscience and psychology has demonstrated that human behaviors, including social and political attitudes, are influenced by genetic and neurobiological factors"

"Additional twin and extended kinship studies which included parents, non-twin siblings, spouses, and twins reared apart confirmed these earlier results and found that most individual political attitudes were influenced by a combination of genetic effects (which explain between 30 and 60% of variance) and environmental influence . In this way, children resemble their parents because of their genetic relatedness as much as parental upbringing and social environments."

"The notion of a genetically informed model of attitudes and ideology...presented a fundamental challenge to the dominant rational choice and behaviorist social science paradigms...Yet despite the growing body of evidence that genetic factors play an important role in the development and maintenance of political attitudes, the role of genetic influences on individual differences remains largely absent in the greater discourse on political ideology."

"In summary, the findings suggest that while genes undoubtedly matter in the aggregate for the development of political attitudes, individual common variants will have small effects on ideology. Hunting for a single “political gene” is a fruitless endeavor...Future studies, which focus on detecting and understanding the full range of rare and common variants influencing ideology, including examinations of copy number variation, genetic expression and epigenetic pathways, will only serve to further elucidate the genetic influence on ideology and explicate the pathways that account for a substantial portion of how ideologies are formed and maintained in a world where both genes and environment interact and remain in continuous dialogue to guide human behavior.

 

That last quote is particularly significant, because it supports what I have been trying to say from the beginning. There is still much to be understood about how biology influences your political ideology. 

Heritability is likely to be underestimated when it comes to measuring a downstream disposition like authoritarianism. So the full extent of biological influence on political cognition is still being uncovered, and it is likely stronger than early estimates suggest, not weaker.

[Breakingthewall]

Authoritarianism is the natural form of organization of human societies. Democracy and human rights are a very recent evolutionary step that arises due to certain conditions. If these conditions disappear, authoritarianism returns. Furthermore, the democratic system is not as democratic as it seems; the real powers are oligarchic and authoritarian.

[Raze]

1 hour ago, Breakingthewall said:

Authoritarianism is the natural form of organization of human societies. Democracy and human rights are a very recent evolutionary step that arises due to certain conditions. If these conditions disappear, authoritarianism returns. Furthermore, the democratic system is not as democratic as it seems; the real powers are oligarchic and authoritarian.

Wrong, for most of human history we lived in tribal societies, authoritarianism is also a recent phenomenon.

[Breakingthewall]

47 minutes ago, Raze said:

Wrong, for most of human history we lived in tribal societies, authoritarianism is also a recent phenomenon.

Ok, then in the moment when civilization arises. 

[Emerald]

While I'm positive that it's true that some people have a more authoritarian physiology... I don't see that as the primary cause of the current situation we're in.

About 9 years ago, when Trump was elected, a close family member made a sudden and concerning shift in political views. And I would certainly venture to guess that she has an authoritarian physiology... because her personality is just like that.

But this is a person who was the only person in her very white town back in the 60s to befriend a black family... while others were hostile to them and hostile to her about having black friends.

And she was always very environmentally focused and was always thinking very progressively in that way.

She was always very sympathetic to Palestinians even back in the 90s and early 00s when most people were not aware of what was going on.

And several months before Trump was elected, she and I were having a discussion and (despite hating Bill Clinton with a vengeance) she was considering going to vote for Hilary just to keep Donald Trump out of office.

Then, the day came when Trump got elected. And she was over for Thanksgiving. And she admitted to me that she voted for Trump.

And she spent the whole rest of the day ranting about how we should give Muslim's special IDs and keep them all in holding areas "until we know what's going on."

And suddenly, I saw how quickly someone can flip when they are under the influence of a demagogue. And I got the answer to my question of how Nazism took root in Europe during WWII.

And I knew then that she isn't the only one and that we're heading into a Fascist dictatorship.... only I was wrong about how long it would take. I thought it would be the moment Trump took office in his first term... but it's taken a while.

She had found dear leader... and it now didn't matter how cosmopolitan and progressive and Stage Green her views were before. It was whatever Donald Trump says because she needed someone who was confident that she felt would go after the politicians she hates.

I'm 100% positive it was the "Drain the Swamp" rhetoric that drew her in... because she has always hated politicians as a group.

But once she was bought in, it was "Whatever Trump says is correct". And her previous values were tossed out in favor of whatever he thinks.

So, it's not even as to say that an authoritarian thinker can't have progressive values. It's just that, once they find dear leader, all of those values will be tossed in the fire and traded out as admission for follower status.

Edited 3 hours ago by Emerald

[Schizophonia]

On 20/04/2025 at 5:48 AM, Leo Gura said:

With good education we can still steer people away from bad political views.

Of course people of lower intelligence will gravitate towards lower, more violent views.

You can't teach democracy to a chimpanzee.

It takes intelligence to foresee that violence leads to worse outcomes for all involved.

On 20/04/2025 at 10:17 PM, Leo Gura said:

Authoritarianism is a survival strategy responding to a survival landscape. It only works if the landscape is favorable.

This is completely false; There are plenty of simple, hardworking people who are very "liberal," and plenty of wealthy, well-educated people who are authoritarian.

[aurum]

21 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Ok, then in the moment when civilization arises. 

 

1 hour ago, Raze said:

Wrong, for most of human history we lived in tribal societies, authoritarianism is also a recent phenomenon.

Early tribes WERE deeply authoritarian.

They were not a SD Green, egalitarian, liberal democracy.

[Breakingthewall]

1 minute ago, aurum said:

 

Early tribes WERE deeply authoritarian.

They were not a SD Green, egalitarian, liberal democracy.

Well, There was a council of elders, and chiefs changed, even if it was by force. The moment the tribes unite under the command of a king, absolute authoritarianism begins.

[Breakingthewall]

25 minutes ago, Emerald said:

And suddenly, I saw how quickly someone can flip when they are under the influence of a demagogue. And I got the answer to my question of how Nazism took root in Europe during WWII.

When Nazism was in Germany, people were starving, they were subjected to the French, and in neighboring Russia, people were being killed like cattle.

[aurum]

5 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

Well, There was a council of elders, and chiefs changed, even if it was by force. The moment the tribes unite under the command of a king, absolute authoritarianism begins.

That’s not a meaningful distinction.

A king is just authoritarianism scaled up, not the beginning of it.

[Breakingthewall]

20 minutes ago, aurum said:

That’s not a meaningful distinction.

A king is just authoritarianism scaled up, not the beginning of it.

There is a fundamental difference: in a tribe, the chief is the leader by tacit agreement of the members, who can depose him at any time. In a kingdom, the king is an institution; it is not the person who holds the power, but the institution "king," which is why he is lifelong and hereditary.

[Schizophonia]

3 hours ago, Breakingthewall said:

Authoritarianism is the natural form of organization of human societies. Democracy and human rights are a very recent evolutionary step that arises due to certain conditions. If these conditions disappear, authoritarianism returns. Furthermore, the democratic system is not as democratic as it seems; the real powers are oligarchic and authoritarian.

It is anachronistic to speak of authoritarianism for "original" tribal human societies.

What is happening is that with the agrarian revolution and demographic expansion, there is an increase in the production of wealth but also a disorganization of the social body which allows an increase in inequality in the distribution of this same wealth; And by extension psychological problems, libidinal anomalies, due to the consequences of the explosion of the social body (Development of individualistic values and affects by capitalism, compartmentalization at work, the nuclear family, now the internet and various authoritarian structures whose real tacit aim is, always in capitalist logic, to capture your energy).

Deleuze said that there are two great libidinal poles; The "schizo-revolutionary" pole, that is to say, basically the one that tends to create language (in the Lacanian sense) and which is automatically creative, "anti-ego", does not lead to a "territorialization of the libido" in the idea of a body without organs of Deleuze and Guatarri.

The second, so-called paranoid, pole is reactionary and essentially consists of libidinally investing oneself and protecting an external language, even if it means going against one's own fundamental individual tendencies.
In Freud, we could say that it is the id passed through the superego, and the ego is the arbiter between the two.

If people have been brutalized and made dependent on authoritarian libidinal structures, then out of habit, out of self-concept, and unconsciously out of fear of death, of course, they will deprave themselves and graciously give their energy to these structures.

Nazism is a typical case; people are stuck in a morbid linguistic system (starvation, humiliation by the English and French, etc.), and mad demagogues offer them another, more satisfying one in exchange for their sovereignty. But the Nazis did nothing, even though the situation in Germany improved during their term, for whatever reason. They were just a handful of perfectly replaceable men who did nothing to change the economic and social conditions that caused the 1929 crisis. They merely manipulated the Germans libidinously through a intense linguistic that gave them a reason to live and excluded the feeling of guilt and shame and this allowed them to gain power and satisfy their desire for luxury, even for various delusions, often almost psychotic qnd narcissistic, at the expense of the Germans' productive force.

Marxists will criticize Deleuze, Lacan, and psychoanalysis in general for its dualistic nature between the individual and the rest of society.
And they are right; Is the individual even capable of creating anything, or is he, in reality, merely adopting a language, a social identity that is only less evident when one believes oneself to be positioned more in this schizoid-revolutionary pole, in this psychoanalytic split vision of the self and the other?
And this is where Marxists (typically Gramci) will speak of the importance of knowledge.

This is a materialist vision with which i as a good Advaitist dundamentally don't agree at all lol, but it's still very interesting because in all cases, the ego functions in a materialist manner.

Edited 2 hours ago by Schizophonia