Ordinary social dominators may meet with only limited success in life. Their biggest obstacle in an organizational structure, besides the animosity they create for themselves, will predictably be other social dominators reaching for the top, to whom they might lose out and have to play a subordinate role, biding their time. There’s only one Big Cheese in most outfits. Just because one wants power doesn’t mean one is shrewd enough, attractive enough, well-connected enough, etcetera, to get it. Or they may go too far and get caught in their manipulations, in their lies, in their illegalities-and not be able to squirm their way out of it.
Double Highs, however, have a big head start over ordinary social dominators in politics, because they are the consumate leaders of a readily-formed army of zealots longing for a great warrior. Ordinary authoritarian followers, we have seen, tend to be highly religious (in a fundamentalist way), and their highly ethnocentric minds probably evaluate people on religious grounds more than any other. Ordinary social dominators, who have little religious background or impulse, will have to fake being super-religious to get these followers’ support. They might succeed if they are good actors and clever, especially since RWAs throw the door open to whoever tells them their beliefs are right.
But a Double High has the best chance of attracting this army of yearning and loyal supporters. He comes packaged as “one of our own,” one of the in-group. He not only shares their prejudices, their economic philosophy, and their political leanings, he also professes their religious views, and that can mean everything to high RWAs. He too may be faking his religiousness to some extent, but he will have the credentials up front, and the phrase-dropping familiarity with the Bible to pass the test with flying colors. He’ll know the code words of the movement. He’ll appear to believe everything “all the good people” believe about Satan, being born again, evolution, the role of women, sex, abortion, school prayer, law and order, “perverts,” censorship, zealotry, holy wars, America-as-God’s-right-hand, and so on. Given this head start, you can expect to find a Double High leading most of the right-wing authoritarian groups in our country.
Ex-president Jimmy Carter, in describing the fundamentalist movements that have taken control of the Republican Party, recently wrote, “Almost invariably, fundamentalist movements are led by authoritarian males who consider themselves to be superior to others and, within religious groups, have an overwhelming commitment to subjugate women and to dominate their fellow believers.”[11] They’re probably even worse than Carter stated. But basically the data I’ve collected say he hit the nail, with his Habitat carpenter’s skill, smack on the head.
An Experiment Testing the Interaction of Authoritarian Leaders and Followers
Remember the Global Change Game from the end of chapter 1? When I ran that experiment in 1994 comparing a low RWA world with a high RWA one, I had not screened the players for social dominance. (The dominance scale had just been published.) In all likelihood some Double Highs participated in the high RWA simulation that destroyed the world in a nuclear holocaust, and then went to war and hell again when given a second chance. But I had not controlled for that. So in 1998 I ran the game once more on two consecutive nights, only this time high RWAs covered the earth on both nights. However on the first night the world had no Double Highs lying in the weeds, whereas on the second there were seven.[12]
At the beginning of the “Pure RWA, No Double Highs” game, it took fifteen long seconds before one of the 53 authoritarian followers present stood up and made himself an Elite. Slowly, reluctantly others rose to their feet, in one case being pushed up by players more reluctant than herself. It took 40 seconds for the process to be completed—about twice as long as usual.
After the Elites got their separate briefing, they interacted very little with one another. Usually the Elites in the simulation travel the world playing Let’s Make a Deal. But on this night there were eight little islands of participants on the map, each island inhabited by its players and its Elite, trying to solve their local economic, social and environmental problems in isolation from the rest of the world. The three female Elites did try to interest the North American Elite in a foreign aid program, but when he refused no joint activity was ever attempted again. When the ozone layer crisis occurred, no meeting of any size resulted. The Elites seemed to shrug and say, “There’s nothing anyone can do about something that big,” and no one did anything. One of the facilitators put it this way: “The Elites went into their groups and never came out.”
The groups, which another facilitator noted sometimes said “Go away” when a “foreigner”(their word) occasionally came over to talk, worked enthusiastically and earnestly shoulder-to-shoulder. But they were singularly unimaginative and took a long time finding solutions to their problems. As was true in the 1994 high RWA game, the authoritarians had enormous trouble controlling population growth. Unyielding on the issue of birth control, the high RWAs took their stand in the corner they painted themselves into. Consequently, India began bursting at the seams while disease and poverty ravaged sub-Saharan Africa.
Europe and North America made charitable contributions to the Third World, but it was not enough to keep the poor regions from going down the tubes. An atmosphere of gloom and despair settled in with a thick mental fog about two-thirds of the way into the simulation. Most of the players, assigned to the over-populated, poor regions of the world, had no idea what they could do to make things better, and glumly sat on the gym floor resigned to failure. They reminded me of my classes when I am lecturing, as only I can, in a way no one can possibly follow. “How much longer is this agony going to last?” The players were overwhelmed by the simulation.
There were no wars on this night, not even a hint of a threat. The basic high RWA attitude seemed to be, “You don’t bother us, we won’t bother you.” Still, most regions kept the armed forces they had inherited at the beginning of the game, even regions facing severe social problems. By the time forty years had passed, 1.9 billion people had died from starvation and disease, which the facilitators thought was close to a record for a non-war run of the game.
Gently Stir in a Few Double Highs. On the following night forty-eight ordinary high RWAs and seven Double Highs (all males) took the helm on the earth’s future. I made sure each Double High was “randomly” assigned to a different region. I also made sure at least one other guy was included in each group, so the Double High would not become the Elite just because everybody else was a deferring high RWA female. When the call for volunteer leaders went out, one of the Double Highs jumped to his feet instantly. All of the regions had their self-appointed Elites within twelve seconds—about half the time it normally takes.
Four of the seven Double Highs (57 percent) had literally leapt at the chance to lead their groups, in contrast to only 8 percent of the far more numerous, but far less self-promoting, ordinary high RWAs. And the Double Highs who did not quickly jump to their feet were not necessarily through. When the simulation began one of them went to the facilitators and gathered information on resource exchanges—a task assigned to his region’s Elite. He took this information to his Elite, convinced him of a strategy, and from then on became a co-Elite, never staying home with the other players in his region. (He was called a “Lieutenant” by his Elite, but the other Elites quickly found out he was the one who made the decisions for his region.)