One gets nowhere with a theory that can “predict” whatever happened, after it happens. Having an answer for everything may make one a great used car salesman, but it rings the death knell for a theory in science. In science, the best explanations are nailed-down-testable.
Bandura’s Social Learning Theory of Aggression
A more testable explanation of aggression in general has been provided by Albert Bandura of Stanford University. Bandura says that aggression occurs after two switches are thrown. First some bad feeling like anger or envy stirs up hostility. But that by itself won’t lead to aggression. An angry individual who wants to attack someone may anticipate getting punched in return, or ending up in jail. Or he may have moral restraints against hurting others. So the second stage involves overcoming these restraints, setting aside these inhibitions, letting the aggression erupt and flow.
The Instigator. What sort of bad feelings are likely to be burning away inside high RWAs that would create an urge to attack? I looked at a lot of possibilities. Do they feel guilty about sins they have committed, and attack “sinners” to distance themselves from Satan? Do they secretly envy the jolly good times that sinners seem to be having, and attack them out of jealousy? Are they unsure God will punish the sinners—remembering the parable of the laborers in the vineyard—and so get in a few whacks in the here-and-now just to make sure sinners pay something?
Well, maybe. But please have a look at the statements below.
1. Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it.
2. Our society is not full of immoral and degenerate groups who viciously attack decent people. News reports of such cases are often sensationalized and misleading.
3. If our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it’s liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be chaos.
4. If our society continues to sink into wickedness and corruption, God will destroy us someday as surely as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
5. We do not live in an increasingly dangerous world headed for anarchy.
6. Law and order still prevail in our society. The rule of reason has not been replaced by the law of the jungle
These items and others like them comprise the Dangerous World scale. Items 1, 3, and 4 are worded such that agreement means the person believes society is about to collapse from depravity and decadence. For Items 2, 5, and 6, disagreement means you think The End Is Near.
Authoritarian followers score highly on the Dangerous World scale, and it’s not just because some of the items have a religious context. High RWAs are, in general, more afraid than most people are. They got a “2 for 1 Special Deal” on fear somehow. Maybe they’ve inherited genes that incline them to fret and tremble. Maybe not. But we do know that they were raised by their parents to be afraid of others, because both the parents and their children tell us so.
Sometimes it’s all rather predictable: authoritarians’ parents taught fear of homosexuals, radicals, atheists and pornographers. But they also warned their children, more than most parents did, about kidnappers, reckless drivers, bullies and drunks—bad guys who would seem to threaten everyone’s children. So authoritarian followers, when growing up, probably lived in a scarier world than most kids do, with a lot more boogeymen hiding in dark places, and they’re still scared as adults. For them, gay marriage is not just unthinkable on religious grounds, and unnerving because it means making the “abnormal” acceptable. It’s yet one more sign that perversion is corrupting society from the inside-out, leading to total chaos. Many things, from stem cell research to right-to-die legislation, say to them, “This is the last straw; soon we’ll be plunged into the abyss.” So probably did, in earlier times, women’s suffrage, the civil rights movement, sex education and Sunday shopping.
Thus it turns out in experiments that a person’s fear of a dangerous world predicts various kinds of authoritarian aggression better than any other unpleasant feeling I have looked at. As my mentor, Brewster Smith of the University of California at Santa Cruz, said when I told him that fear set off authoritarian aggression more than anything else, “We do have to fear fear itself.” And of course fear rose in the United States after 9/11. As Dave Barry put it in a column in November 2004, “Attorney General John Ashcroft has issued one of those vague, yet at the same time, unhelpful federal terrorism warnings that boil down to: ‘Be afraid! Be very afraid!’”
Events like the attacks of 9/11 can drive large parts of a population to being as frightened as authoritarian followers are day after day. In calm, peaceful times as well as in genuinely dangerous ones, high RWAs feel threatened. They have agreed on the RWA scale, year after year since the 1970s, that sinfulness has brought us to the point of ruin. There’s always a national crisis looming ahead. All times are troubled times that require drastic action.
Things are so bad that many high RWAs believe the world will end soon. As the year 2000 drew near, I found many authoritarian followers agreed with the statement, “The ‘end times’ predicted in the Bible are going to begin at the start of 2000,” and “Floods, famines, wars and other disasters are occurring so often now, the world is going to end in 2000.” As you know, it did not end. But I suspect this failed prediction has not changed authoritarians’ beliefs one bit, and this year’s floods, famines, and other disasters will clearly signal (to them) the end of this dangerous, wicked world. As the leader of a disappointed doomsday group says in the closing lines of the British review Beyond the Fringe, “Never mind lads. Same time tomorrow. We must get a winner someday.”
The Releaser. What releases the aggressive impulse that comes from fear? What slides off the safety on the gun? This, it turns out, is a no-brainer.
How good, how moral are you, compared to other people? (You get to say what is “good” and “moral.”) As I mentioned in chapter 1, if you’re an average human being, you’ll think you’re a better than average human being. Almost everybody thinks she’s more moral than most. But high RWAs typically think they’re way, way better. They are the Holy Ones. They are the Chosen. They are the Righteous. They somehow got a three-for-one special on self-righteousness. And self-righteousness appears to release authoritarian aggression more than anything else.
Chronically frightened authoritarian followers, looking for someone to attack because fighting is one of the things people do when they are afraid, are particularly likely to do so when they can find a moral justification for their hostility. Despite all the things in scriptures about loving others, forgiving others, leaving punishment to God, and so on, authoritarian followers feel empowered to isolate and segregate, to humiliate, to persecute, to beat, and to kill in the middle of the night, because in their heads they can almost hear the loudspeakers announcing, “Now batting for God’s team, his designated hitter, (their name).”
Thus in the experiments done on this subject, if you know how highly people scored on the Dangerous World scale, and if you know how self-righteous they are, you can explain rather well the homophobia of authoritarian followers, their heavy-handedness in sentencing criminals, their prejudices against racial and ethnic minorities, why they are so mean-spirited toward those who have erred and suffered, and their readiness to join posses to ride down Communists, radicals, or whomever.