Primer for youth to recognize signs of Authoritarian Personality Disorder in parents, teachers, and bosses

Have you observed warning signs in parents or others of Authoritarian Values?

It is a deadly disease. People are killed because of it. People go to churches for it, and send others to prison for it. People find it where they go to be told how to live their life the right way. And so not only in churches and schools but in the media and in their own work and life experience. This is why it must be vigilantly combatted.

Learn to recognize the warning signs before it is too late:

One is that they start acting like White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (or, in some cases, Black, Asian, or Hispanic Anglo-Saxon Protestants).  

Warning signs of Protestantism Run Amok including:

Your mom or pop says, “Kiddo, if you don’t eat your carrots, we just have to send you to a HOLOCAUST!  Now, you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

(This can be most effectively simulated with a film like Hitchcock’s “Psycho” in the background. Start with the scene where Janet Leigh is nervously facing the cop who stops her while driving, and through the infamous shower scene. “No!” screams the prisoner, “Not the Hitchock!”).

This is a more common variant of: “If you talk back to me like that again, I’ll have to call the police and have you sent to jail.”

Sometimes with an added note of: “I realize you might die or suffer permanent injuries or worse, but I’m only acting out of tough love.”

Or: “This hurts me more than it will you. (Because I like to watch you suffer so that I can continue to judge and feel righteous).

Sometimes they are a bit sneaky before they actually cop to it.  For example, they found you reading books of Radical Philosophy, one of them stuffed in between some of your punk and hip hop records.  They understand the music.  They think it smells “rebellion.”  And they think that just means loud.

One victim we know was reading Descartes. They figured him for a French radical. They thought it might lead to smoking or some kind of dangerous art, or even wanting to be alone with books for long periods of time. Apparently the problem was that the hapless kid was trying to learn how to think, and think clearly and rigorously.

They won’t mind the sound of rebellion as long as it seems to them meaningless form. But when they don’t like the message, they will attack the messenger or the messenger’s style. Count on it.

It’s also especially difficult if they are liberal Democrats.  This is because Democrats are the Good Cops who will only mess with like you gentle folk do, while the Republicans will take away either your contraception if you’re a girl or your magazines with pictures of hot girls if you’re a boy.  Now you’re really fucked.  Threatening to send to you to (or to act like) Republicans is enough for the more timid among you.

When they grow up, they’ll understand.  They’ll think you do because you’ve learned to working at boring jobs and say yessir yes ma’am and shout at other people to shut up just so long as you are saying it working for the Man.  

The syndrome, which can be spotted with these and similar signs, bears some relationship to the commonly encountered one of Toxic Masculinity, but the absence of any particular gendered marking of the behaviors usually warrants a differential diagnosis of Authoritarian Personality Disorder or Authoritarian/Moralistic Personality Disorder, which is distinguished the person with this illness being convinced that when in doubt, the other person is wrong and damned.

Diagnosis may also need to take account ideological identification as liberals or conservative. In general, conservatives think that authoritarianism does not exist as a problem. Society is an army and should be. It follows that there cannot really be any injustice apart from sin or crime, which is abnormality, impropriety, or disorder. Those being the things they really don’t like. Liberal authoritarians tend to cast blame and damnation not on people who are outside “society’s” values but outside liberal ones. They are always looking to find that the other person is prejudiced in some way. They will look under your skin to find this; they call it “micro-aggression.” Parents who are liberals might tell their kids to clean up the mess in their room because of the God of the Environment, perhaps because some of the trash should be recycled.

All of these illnesses have in common the root conviction that:

Good is only a perspective on evil, a negation of the negation. The eternal soldier knows this. That is because (it is assumed that) there is no good life, there is only the cynical conviction that things must be the way they are, because that is how they are.

Authoritarians don’t believe in tragedy because tragic heroes are impossible. They don’t read novels either; they are the modern successor to tragic theater. The operative perspective is the newspaper crime story which has a plot in three sentences: 1) The people in their proper place were happy. 2) Someone upset the order. And so good citizens are afraid. 3) The state police (found, will find) the criminal, who disrupted the order, and will set it right, so that the people in their proper place will be happy again.
The Chorus in ancient tragedy that knows everything because it is their common sense is the true author of the books they think important; this infallible but stupid source of obvious judgments is what they call God. God is the tyrant’s dream, the tyrant his ventriloquist.

Pain inflicted as a technique has been shown to cause effective stupidity. Thoughts that once came easily become hard to think because it would be painful.

Normality kills the mind. And a mind is a terrible thing to be stupid with.

There are cures for the problems of living, but none for dying.