5 ms·

Thanks, @droithomme's comment put me onto that to, I didn't realise it was classed as a personality type not just a form of government. https://en.m.wikipedia.o

• marcoperaza 7y ago
  >this irritates me even more that its been known since the 50's and we still put up with it. Throwing a label on it doesn’t make it a bad thing. Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. Of course, freedom to choose does a lot of good too. There is a balance to be had.
  • isthis1984 7y ago
    Certainly, but is that discipline you mean? Discipline is a good thing in general, but this isn't discipline - its imposed conformance.
  • JadeNB 7y ago
    > Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. If everyone just let everyone else do whatever they wanted, humans wouldn’t have gotten very far. The first and third quotes sentences are probably true, but how in the world does authority or authoritarianism give people motivation? Or do you mean that it substitutes for internal motivation the motivation of an external threat? This is probably true, but it is rarely in the state's, or the authority's, interest to maximise each person's potential individually; the authority will rather prefer to maximise each person's contribution to the authority's good, which likely involves forcing each person into a channel that (for at least some and probably many) poorly serves him or her as an individual.
  • anigbrowl 7y ago
    Authority can be a gift. It helps people thrive by giving them the motivation to live up to their potential. Potential for what? Pleasing the authoritarian. Authority is about who gets to be the author of a person's life - themselves, or someone else. Authoritarians are people who want to be in charge of other people's lives, but don't like to be accountable to anyone else for their own.
  • Proziam 7y ago
    The issue with authority isn't that it is bad or evil in and of itself. The issue lies in the fact that the people who would seek to have authority are almost universally the worst candidates for such a position. This is a primary driver of people who believe strongly in the minimalism of government or people like myself who believe that processes that bestow authority need to be extremely cautious, and ideally double-blind and short-lived rather than personality-driven.
• lonelappde 7y ago
  The book is pretty well derided as political propaganda masquerading as science. It's the same as the modern day "scientific" view that all Trump voters are mentally ill and Clinton voters are not.
  • claudiawerner 7y ago
    That's not to say it doesn't offer valuable insights, though - nor does it comment on the validity of further empirical and theoretical[0] work on authoritarianism. I've found that many people who make such a comparison both misunderstand Adorno, and many don't understand the context in which the book was written (counting Adorno's experience of the Holocaust) nor the actual content. The nature of authoritarianism, for Arendt and Adorno, goes deeper than personalities in the modern democratic state. For what it's worth, though... >In his “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (a text that was not included in the published 1950 work), Adorno laid out a series of objections that call into question the notion of an underlying personality structure; they suggest that under the modern conditions of the late-capitalist culture industry, the individual as a psychic unity is beginning to dissolve. This dissenting perspective deserves notice, especially in an age that has seen the reemergence of authoritarian politics in the United States. By Adorno's reckoning, we have authoritarianism in both Trump and Clinton.[1] [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443718772147?__cf_chl_captcha_tk__=1e78d45d09be496a63f952e8a890a8df4f22116c-1577324850-0-Ae66NfayzYGT2Xg2WOtDhsmfdqx_dQOE9fWGfWk8v_MLbWUTh5qO2B-RO_qgAql1lueYzawT3s2yuzKR3vMqoPGt_grDlz2BiRedJLQaA26Mi5iuTbvLKXo0OddIeNv1k_coC_2YCQAweJ85_4mL5PD8bThfJDxc8VEvlLj43NWcRi7oGJiFkxq44jdSB8nmGJaclG9PzSvpa1A6BDYg7x_1snFsnw21JZFKw81PeBdeHjx_mwFhIjBTCwjLj27akgPw27jU2GeAuFuoKLak81iA5G_IuMTU5-Ej4Ujvptsx3pRoIxs8IVsDnJAjmkOWW99UeQBAMSFMkV5TuxZolVEIOWYyj3QsknGNzbwMHnQ7UvlyWRTTNU2Ilim197y3w1hg1j2p1AQpmK0thc6pewA https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016344371877214... [1] "After first sketching Adorno’s conception of the “authoritarian personality,” with the help of Sándor Ferenczi’s concept of the “identification with the aggressor,” the article proceeds to examine the exchange of the letters between Adorno and Marcuse, illustrating Adorno’s changed orientation: that “fascism” or “authoritarianism” maybe either left or right. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left."
  • isthis1984 7y ago