Should a university professor be allowed to teach an anthropology course in which he argues that men are naturally superior to women, so women should resign themselves to inferior roles in our society?
Should a book be assigned in a Grade 12 English course that presents homosexual relationships in a positive light?
Should books be allowed to be sold that attack “being patriotic” and “being religious”?
Should a racist speaker be allowed to give a public talk preaching his views?
Should someone be allowed to teach a Grade 10 sex education course who strongly believes that all premarital sex is a sin?
Should commercials for “telephone sex” be allowed to be shown after 11 PM on television?
Should a professor who has argued in the past that black people are less intelligent than white people be given a research grant to continue studies of this issue?
Should a book be allowed to be published that argues the Holocaust never occurred, but was made up by Jews to create sympathy for their cause?
Should sexually explicit material that describes intercourse through words and medical diagrams be used in sex education classes in Grade 10?
Should a university professor be allowed to teach a philosophy course in which he tries to convince his students there is no God?
Should an openly white supremist movie such as “The Birth of a Nation” (which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan) be shown in a Grade 12 social studies class?
Should “Pro-Choice” counselors and abortion clinics be allowed to advertise their services in public health clinics if “Pro-Life” counselors can?
I hope you’ll agree that half of the situations would particularly alarm liberals, and the other half would raise the hackles on right-wingers. Would low RWAs want to censor the things they thought dangerous as much as high RWAs would in their areas of concern? It turned out to be “no contest,” because in both studies authoritarian followers wanted to impose more censorship in all of these cases—save the one involving the sex education teacher who strongly believed all premarital sex was a sin. How can this be?
It happened because the lows seldom wanted to censor anyone. They apparently believe in freedom of speech, even when they detest the speech. Some low RWAs may insist on political correctness, but the great majority seemingly do not. Authoritarians on the other hand, spring-loaded for hostility, seem all wound up to clamp right down on lots and lots of people. So when authoritarians reproach other people who call for censorship, the reproach may be justified. But a lot of windows probably got broken in the authoritarians’ own houses when they flung that ston e.[3]
5. Blindness To Themselves
If you ask people how much integrity they personally have, guess who pat themselves most on the back by claiming they have more than anyone else. This one is easy if you remember the findings on self-righteousness from the last chapter: high RWAs think they had lots more integrity than others do. Similarly when I asked students to write down, anonymously, their biggest faults, right-wing authoritarians wrote down fewer than others did, mainly because a lot of them said they had no big faults. When I asked students if there was anything they were reluctant to admit about themselves to themselves, high RWAs led everyone else in saying, no, they were completely honest with themselves.
Now people who abound in integrity, who have no faults, and who are completely honest with themselves would seem ready for canonization. But we can wonder if it is really true in the case of authoritarian followers, given what else we know about them. So I have done a simple little experiment in my classes on several occasions in which I give some students higher marks on an objective test—supposedly through a clerical error—than they know they earned. High RWAs, for all their posturing about being better than others, are just as likely to take the grade and run as everyone else. But I ‘spect they forget such misdeeds pretty quickly. Self-righteousness comes easily if you can tuck your failings away in boxes and put them at the back of the shelf.
In fact, despite their own belief that they are quite honest with themselves, authoritarians tend to be highly defensive, and run away from unpleasant truths about themselves more than most people do. Thus I once gave several classes of students, who had filled out a booklet of surveys for me, personal feedback about how they had done on a measure of self-esteem. Half the students were told they had scored quite high in self-esteem, and the other half were told they had scored quite low. (These scores were assigned at random, which I confessed to them at the end of the experiment.) I then told them these self-esteem scores predicted later success in life, and I would bring copies of the evidence supporting the scale’s validity to the next class meeting for all the students who wanted to see the evidence.
High RWAs were quite interested in finding out the test was valid IF they thought they had done well on the scale. But if they had been told they had low self-esteem, most right-wing authoritarians did not want to see evidence that the test was valid. Well, wouldn’t everyone do this? No. Most low RWA students wanted to see the evidence whether they had gotten good news, OR bad news about themselves.
What do you think would happen if someone gave right-wing authoritarians a list of all the things that research has found high RWAs are likely to do—such as be prejudiced and conformist and supportive of government injustices? The respondents are simply asked, for each characteristic, “How true do you think this is of you, compared with most other people?” (Are you more prejudiced? Are you more of a conformist? Etcetera.)
High RWAs show little self-awareness when making these comparisons. Sometimes they glimpse themselves through a glass, darkly. For example they agree more than most people do with, “I like to associate with people who have the same beliefs and opinions I do.” But they have no idea how much they differ from others in that way. And most of the time they get it quite wrong, thinking they are not different from others, and even that they are different in the opposite way from how they actually are. For example they are sure they are less self-righteous than most people are—which of course is what self-righteous people would think, isn’t it? And when I give feedback lectures to classes about my studies and describe right-wing authoritarians, it turns out the high RWAs in the room almost always think I am talking about someone else.[4]
6. A Profound Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism means dividing the world up into in-groups and out-groups, and it’s something people do quite automatically. You can see this by how easily we identify with the point of view of a storyteller. If we’re watching a cavalry Indians movie, told from the point of view of the cavalry, that’s whom we cheer on. If we’re watching the same kind of movie, only from the aboriginal point of view, as in Little Big Man or Dances with Wolves, we root for the Indians, don’t we?