Chapter five begins the ultimate horror of this book as Altemeyer's research moves into investigating those high on the SD scale-Social Dominance. All previous studies of the authoritarian personality have investigated the followers. Altemeyer turns his attention to the leaders. The items in the scale are those descriptions of themselves the high SD's use to describe themselves in their own words. They are against equality and have a desire for power.
Hang on in there.
And go to http://www.theauthoritarians.com to read Altemeyer's ebook. It's FREE!
And then comes a new scale digging ever deeper into the mind of high SD's.
The Personal Power, Meanness and Dominance Scale
Here are a few items:
It’s a mistake to interfere with the “law of the jungle.” Some people were meant to dominate others. (Agree)
Would you like to be a kind and helpful person to those in need? (Disagree)
“Winning is not the first thing; it’s the only thing.” (Agree)
The best way to lead a group under your supervision is to show them kindness, consideration,and treat them as fellow workers, not as inferiors. (Disagree)
Altemeyer refers to it as the Power Mad Scale going on to say they exhibit no group cohesiveness as high RWA's do, but they want their followers to have it. Then he correlates it with the SD Scale, followed by The Exploitive Manipulative Amoral Dishonesty Scale and correlates it with the SD and RWA Scales. He teases out the similarities and differences, untangling the roots of hostility and other attributes.
The mental life of the social dominator. Persons who score highly on the Social Dominance scale do not usually have all the nooks and crannies, contradictions and lost files in their mental life that we find in high RWAs. Most of them do not show weak reasoning abilities, highly compartmentalized thinking, and certainly not a tendency to trust people who tell them what they want to hear. They’ve got their head together. Nor are most of them dogmatic or particularly zealous about any cause or philosophy. You have to believe in something to be dogmatic and zealous, and what
social dominators apparently believe in most is not some creed or cause, but gaining power by any means fair or foul.
Altemeyer speculates on how this was learned and touches on its perhaps genetic components. The experiments that follow combine SD's and RWA's in simulated corporate problem solving situations. Experimentally the phenomenon of some high SD's and high RWA's emerge and these are called double highs. This is where you get the personality that is high on Social Dominance and also on Right Wing Authoritarianism, which at first seems contradictory but when analyzed is not at all. So the personality of the high SD and the fanatical RWA combined in one person. Think Hitler. Think George W. Bush. Not Cheney who is a high SD but not a high RWA although he and Rove can use it hypocritically. But the danger of the double high should not be underestimated.
When he tests them individually and then in combination in the Global Change Game we can see Altemeyer's mind moving to the world scene as he projects into the personality of George Bush. The coming signs were there very early on.
Chapter 6 evaluates ordinary people, the people who get elected to state legislatures and he sends questionaires to them. Then he plots the differences between republicans and democrats followed by a quick history as to how all this happened and so quickly, right up to the 2006 election. He ends this chapter with a chilling quote:
With all that happening, only 40% of the eligible voters went to the polls, and 45% of them voted Republican. If the war in Iraq had just taken a few more months to become transparently disastrous, or if there had been just one or two fewer scandals in the last weeks of the campaign, America would still have a monolithic federal government controlled by a pack of Double Highs. Maybe you take some comfort from November 7, 2006. I think the bullet just missed us. A Bit of Modest Speculation. One of the easiest mistakes to make when judging a threatening movement is to perceive it as being more unified and monolithic than it really is. So let’s do a little speculating here. Let’s suppose the Religious Right gains long-term control of the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of the federal government and accomplishes its common agenda. Which is, for starters, to outlaw all abortions, outlaw homosexuality, stomp out feminism, make female subjugation to males the law, keep holy wars going, especially in the Middle East, using nuclear weapons as
needed, withdraw from the United Nations, smack the hell out of France and any other country that isn’t automatically on America’s side, censor virtually every movie, television program, magazine, newspaper and the internet in any way possible, install the teaching of Christian fundamentalism in public schools, forbid the teaching of evolution, make scientific judgments on the basis of conservative Christian ideology, and so on--complete with the death penalty for various violators, possibly by public stoning. (I hope you don’t think I’m making this all up. Google “Religious Right
Agenda,” “Christian Reconstructionists,” and “Dominionists.”)
Well of course this is all wild-eyed speculation, isn’t it, and we’re talking about things that may have occurred elsewhere, but are absolutely unprecedented in American history. So there is little reason to think this would indeed happen. OK, I hear you. Now tell me why all of this will not happen.
The Authoritarians
The bold highlights are mine.