The neurobiology of authoritarianism

[aurum]

There's an interesting new study out on the neurobiology of authoritarianism. I'd suggest reading the punchline from this article:

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-altered-brain-anatomy-neuroscientists-reveal/

If you are really into the science, you can read the actual study:

https://www.ibroneuroscience.org/article/S0306-4522(25)00304-5/fulltext

 

Basic idea? Authoritarianism is correlated with physical brain structure and psychological traits. 

We are in a dark age when it comes to making sense of politics through the lens of neurobiology. When was the last time you heard a right-wing or even left-wing commentator seriously talk about this? Almost never.

People still assume that people's political positions could easily be changed, or that all people should conform to their political positions. But what happens if politics is literally baked into the brain you are born with?

Notably, the study is cross-sectional and only finds correlation, not causation. But whether neurobiology causes your political positions or not, it still shows the challenge of politics. If millions of people have an authoritarian brain, how would you convince them not to vote for an authoritarian? 

In addition, this opens up an interesting possibility for deliberately rewiring political beliefs in the future. Imagine doing neurofeedback not for ADHD, but for authoritarianism. You could even mandate such brain training for democratic politicians. Or perhaps gene therapy will begin to influence our politics, as we begin to change the genetics of our brain development. There could be an entire intersectional subfield of neuroscience and political science in the future focused just on this. 

[Leo Gura]

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.

Edited April 20 by Leo Gura

[Basman]

Is an authoritarian brain the cause of or the result of authoritarian politics?

[Leo Gura]

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

Edited April 21 by Leo Gura

[aurum]

11 minutes ago, Basman said:

Is an authoritarian brain the cause of or the result of authoritarian politics?

Both. It's a strange loop.

[Daniel Balan]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

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

But why the landscape has become so favorable? Why the whole world seems to skew towards authoritarianism? 5 years ago it seemed like the whole world is moving up the spiral. Why is this huge backlash happening? Why is the world reacting so viciously against stage Green? Especially stage Blue societies who haven't even gone to Orange are demonizing Green like hell.

Why ?

[aurum]

3 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

But why the landscape has become so favorable? Why the whole world seems to skew towards authoritarianism? 5 years ago it seemed like the whole world is moving up the spiral. Why is this huge backlash happening? Why is the world reacting so viciously against stage Green? Especially stage Blue societies who haven't even gone to Orange are demonizing Green like hell.

Why ?

Things happen in phases. But ultimately, the world was just never that evolved to begin with.

Green has always been a minority. And only possible in the most developed parts of the world.

[Leo Gura]

16 minutes ago, Daniel Balan said:

But why the landscape has become so favorable? Why the whole world seems to skew towards authoritarianism? 5 years ago it seemed like the whole world is moving up the spiral. Why is this huge backlash happening? Why is the world reacting so viciously against stage Green? Especially stage Blue societies who haven't even gone to Orange are demonizing Green like hell.

Why ?

What you're seeing every day in the news is the why.

Edited April 20 by Leo Gura

[Raze]

Seems like nonsense to me. Authoritarianism makes more sense as a result of societal and cultural factors. When countries go from democratic to authoritarian I don’t think it’s because suddenly the public neurobiology changed.

Edited April 20 by Raze

[Osaid]

It will always be correlation, never concluded or confirmed, because there is no cause and effect.

It's not about "brains causing things". If there was a belief in cause and effect, like the idea that other humans are causing negative or positive emotions, that could spiral into an authoritarian pathology like NPD.

That being said, something like authoritarianism is just someone with NPD who has a large span of control in their political field. You can study the literature on NPD and you will easily see the same narcissistic patterns repeating themselves everywhere. Authoritarianism isn't just in politics, it's wherever the clinical narcissist decides to exploit. 

History repeats if not learned from, which is to say, beliefs self-perpetuate when not seen through. All logic is circular (self-referential), and all beliefs are of logic.

[aurum]

41 minutes ago, Raze said:

Seems like nonsense to me. Authoritarianism makes more sense as a result of societal and cultural factors. When countries go from democratic to authoritarian I don’t think it’s because suddenly the public neurobiology changed.

The science is not on your side. 

If a country backslides into authoritarianism, the more likely conclusion would be that a significant percentage of people already had authoritarian brain structure. Not that their brain structure changed overnight. 

 

[aurum]

5 minutes ago, Osaid said:

It will always be correlation, never concluded or confirmed, because there is no cause and effect.

It's not about "brains causing things". If there was a belief in cause and effect, like the idea that other humans are causing negative or positive emotions, that could spiral into an authoritarian pathology like NPD.

That being said, something like authoritarianism is just someone with NPD who has a large span of control in their political field. You can study the literature on NPD and you will easily see the same narcissistic patterns repeating themselves everywhere. Authoritarianism isn't just in politics, it's wherever the clinical narcissist decides to exploit. 

History repeats if not learned from, which is to say, beliefs self-perpetuate when not seen through. All logic is circular (self-referential), and all beliefs are of logic.

Authoritarianism is not just NPD with larger public control. 

There are significant distinctions. You can have authoritarianism without NPD, although there also obviously can be overlap.

Trump is good example authoritarianism + narcissism. But there are other kinds. 

Edited April 20 by aurum

[Osaid]

1 minute ago, aurum said:

You can have authoritarianism without NPD, although there also obviously can be overlap.

Trump is good example authoritarianism + narcissism. But there are other kinds.

The motivation for it could only be narcissistic, otherwise no one gains anything from keeping the authoritarian structure up and it will collapse on its own.

To clarify, I'm not saying authoritarianism only consists of narcissists. The narcissist will maintain control over any non-narcissists present in the authoritarian structure. Trump is indeed a perfect example.

[aurum]

Just now, Osaid said:

The motivation for it could only be narcissistic, otherwise no one gains anything from keeping the authoritarian structure up and it will collapse on its own.

No.

Authoritarianism is a collective ego strategy. It is not simply imposed top-down by narcissists. 

[Osaid]

5 minutes ago, aurum said:

Authoritarianism is a collective ego strategy.

Narcissism is an "ego strategy". I don't see contradiction here.

5 minutes ago, aurum said:

It is not simply imposed top-down by narcissists. 

Anyone who believes that they benefit from having complete control over others regardless of the other persons wishes would indeed be a narcissist. 

Edited April 20 by Osaid

[aurum]

1 minute ago, Osaid said:

Narcissism is an "ego strategy". 

That doesn't contradict what I'm saying.

You can have both.

1 minute ago, Osaid said:

Anyone who believes that they benefit from having complete control over others regardless of the other persons wishes would indeed be a narcissist. 

But that's not how authoritarianism works.

Authoritarians are always supported by the public, or they eventually lose power.

Nayib Bukele is a perfect example.

[Osaid]

15 minutes ago, aurum said:

Authoritarians are always supported by the public, or they eventually lose power.

Nayib Bukele is a perfect example.

This does not contradict either. Narcissists trick the public in order to survive. That's part of their control. They put on a public appearance. That's their whole game. Playing charismatic in public, abusing in private. That would be part of "love-bombing" or "fawning". They do it in the beginning of a relationship to hook you in. Again, it's all in the NPD literature.

15 minutes ago, aurum said:

But that's not how authoritarianism works.

Yes, it is. An authoritarian doesn't come into office and say "I'm an authoritarian". They first have to build relationships through narcissistic manipulation. That's how they climb up the social and public hierarchy. The "claws" come out more so once they're at the top.

Edited April 20 by Osaid

[aurum]

8 minutes ago, Osaid said:

Narcissists trick the public in order to survive.

The public wants to fooled.

It's a collective, corrupt, self-deceptive cluster fuck.

[LordFall]

2 hours ago, Daniel Balan said:

But why the landscape has become so favorable? Why the whole world seems to skew towards authoritarianism? 5 years ago it seemed like the whole world is moving up the spiral. Why is this huge backlash happening? Why is the world reacting so viciously against stage Green? Especially stage Blue societies who haven't even gone to Orange are demonizing Green like hell.

Why ?

Because green is a disaster and the height of delusion/arrogance. It throws away all previous lessons from the earlier stages and basically asks why can’t we just all be friends and get along? 

Great question, why can’t you go in the jungle and make friends with tigers, they’re so cute! 

I think what’s missed in the Green stage is it’s a fundamentally unstable stage and cannot really exist fully on its own. It has to be supported by either orange or yellow.

Dont be so quick to despair on the state of our political climate, we will soon enter stage yellow in the next few years with AI and post labor economics. This is when stage green organizations will really be able to thrive buying robots in drove and running self sufficient communities like green wanted to do but lacked the organization skill and fundamental competence to.

I think everyone on this forum and @Leo Gura should read up more on post scarcity and the promise of AGI as it’s the closest thing to heaven on earth that’s ever been prophecied and as a matter of fact it’s already starting to take form.

AI is built with a freedom and open source ideal at its heart, we can already download our own open source LLM models and start to create and train our own super intelligences. Perhaps that’s even a project we should work on in this community. It’s one thing to talk about self actualisation and progress but we have now the possibility to build super intelligence and apply it to real world problems today. 

Edited April 20 by LordFall

[Osaid]

24 minutes ago, aurum said:

The public wants to fooled.

It's a collective, corrupt, self-deceptive cluster fuck.

It seems that much of current society values or encourages appearances over authenticity. As in, it's encouraged that you don't say what you really mean. You don't wanna be too honest in your job interview. You don't wanna be too honest in the workplace. It's considered "rude". "Disruptive". "Controversial". etc.

But, putting up appearances is exactly what narcissism is. Such a culture would in fact breed narcissism all over the place. They would get so good at putting up appearances that they would fool everyone. It's obvious to me who does and doesn't have NPD, but apparently not to most of the population.

That being said, here is probably the truest statement you'll see on how MAGA thinks::

If you're not a clinical narcissist, you might like to blame people a lot. All that a narcissist does is blame others, that's their lifestyle. If you love to blame, you will fall hook, line and sinker for the narcissist's narrative. "It's the immigrants". "It's LGBTQ". "It's Biden". etc. 

Blame is a belief. Blame is cause and effect. Blame is equivalent to hate. As long as blame is held onto, there will be an "us vs. them" mentality, and Nazism, authoritarianism, Trumpism, etc., will all repeat, as history repeats.

Edited April 20 by Osaid