Control vs license

Which you pick is partly down to who you are (sensitivity to disgust positively or negatively) and how the matter is framed (and how it affects you and others). There will always be some people who are very orderly, conscientious and therefore authoritarian (particularly with themselves; that’s their life strategy), and there will always be some who are disorderly, exploratory, unconcerned by disorder, danger, mess, or contagion, who simply want to explore what seems good or useful to them (that’s their life strategy).

There are natural authoritarians and natural libertarians at all times, in all societies, and it’s generally going to be mostly the same people, regardless of how those societies and values differ. If you picked them up and transplanted them as children toa a different culture, they would mostly fill the same roles regardless of the conditional differences. Social structures and the ideologies behind them might vary, actual states might be more or less progressive or conservative, or more of less authoritarian or liberal, they might differ in what their driving values that they conserve are, in what the frontiers of freedom and explorations, and in what seems worth protecting either as a stable strategy or as an area of freedom, but the same people will mostly fall into the same positions simply because of temperament.

You find the same distributions of personality everywhere, to sum up. That’s a stable factor, even as the specific elements of societies change. So a society could change, and a person who is naturally authoritarian might go from being a right wing authoritarian at one point in their life to being a left wing authoritarian at another point. Their moral assumptions might change, the underlying personality profile that predicts authoritarianism or libertarianism does not so easily. This explains some shifts in culture that have occurred recently that may otherwise seem perplexing to outside observers. In past times, those shifts in underlying culture and assumptions happened at a much slower pace, so it wasn’t so easy to observe what had actually changed and what was really stable over time. Now it’s much easier.

What this particularly means, is that you can actually drive that shift and push people from one side to another, if you know what levers to use and how to market your idea. If you want to increase a libertarian attitude toward something, anything, you just need to find a way to portray it as something other than a contagion, as something that needn’t provoke disgust, as something benign and maybe even interesting. But banality and harmlessness is sufficient. You need repeated exposure without emotional or consequential responses, so it becomes mundane. It’s a kind of exposure therapy.

If you want to increase authoritarian resistance to something, anything, you jusy need to take it from being something ordinary and part of the natural and aasumed fabric of life to something invasive and contagious. It needs to become a disease, a mark of contamination, an object of danger and disgust that must be eliminated by the orderly for a safe environment. You need shocking examples, emotional stories of pain and danger, and the suggestion that it is spreading. The sorts of programming you used to see on daytime TV aimed at stay-at-home moms (a bulwark of orderly, pro-social conscientiousness) fairly regularly back in the old days.

And the trickiest thing about both these tactics, making something seem benign and reducing feelings of disgust, or making something seem abberant and infectious and disgusting, is that both will work regardless of the actual, real threat level of the subject. There is no shortage of dangers people have failed to recognize. And there is no shortage of dangers people have imagined. Because social dangers in particular and complex and play out across extended periods of time and over large distances and across multiple dimensions of complexity, it can be very hard to accurately assess causation and threat accurately.

So, to be honest, it’s pretty easy to raise or lower pathogenic disgust sensitivity, and therefore authoritarian or libertarian attitudes. And those conscientious, orderly, pro-social people I mentioned before; they haven’t gone anywhere. They may not be sitting at home watching daytime TV, but they might be sitting at home looking at their phones. Those people may have moved to different positions in society, but they haven’t really gone anywhere. They’re still there, still guarding the nest. Not that they’re all women in the slightest, that’s just one of the major demographics, a significant and perhaps the largest and most powerful demographic within that group (as orderliness weights more heavily on women, but has a substantial representation among men as well). And women being more agreeable are more willing to share their concerns with one another.

From a sociological perspective, these are the people who guard the nest and keep it clean and safe and in order. They keep out the pathogens, they rule the nest like a despot (in fact one old Biblical term for the position of a wife was the despot of the home), and they’re sensitive to contaminants and want things kept clean. Some decent portion of them are also particularly sensitive to the distress of others as a mechanism for altering them to potential pathogens and dangers to the integrity of the nest. They’re tilted toward a sensitivity to distress and negative emotion. That’s what their orderliness is there to protect them from. So they don’t necessarily feel more negative emotion. They’re more sensitive to it, so they do the work to arrange the world so they don’t have to feel it. They bring order to the protected and sanitary space.

The people at the other extreme from conscientiousness and agreeableness, the open, exploratory people and disagreeable people, play a different role in protecting the nest. They’re less concerned about what’s going on inside it, less orderly. They’re more interested in going out and bringing back what might be valuable and helpful, or in subduing the dangers and dangerous conditions outside the sphere of order, and they’re less bothered by the chaos and risks and contaigions they are likely to face. But they might bring back risky elements, so they’re often asked to wipe their feet as they enter the protected space. But their tendency to not be bothered by disorder and contagion, and their willingness to confront it and either subdue it or bring some bit of it back to use is a useful skill. They too are protecting the nest, in their own way, and extending its interests, even if they also seem to be a risk to it.

At the same time, the desire to maintain an ordered and fenced-in and safe environment at home can be a risk for those inside, if they are not sufficiently exploiting the resources outside it that might be valuable for them, and if the risks outside are not sufficiently dealt with or understood and become overwhelming, of if those inside are not sufficiently exposed to them to develop the necessary capacity to deal with them (the necessary immunological strength).

Life is a dance that politics could learn from. Liberalism and authoritarianism are both useful. License and control are both useful. And it takes a robust and continuous dialogue to figure out which is appropriate in which situation and to evaluate how things are going and mitigate the fallout of the strategies we employ. If we can’t learn to see how each might help and how each might go very badly wrong, then we haven’t learned the basic lessons of living with other people yet.

Powered by Journey Diary.