{"id":223945,"date":"2020-12-29T14:35:38","date_gmt":"2020-12-29T14:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=223945"},"modified":"2021-01-01T07:41:17","modified_gmt":"2021-01-01T07:41:17","slug":"the-fascist-scale-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=223945","title":{"rendered":"The Fascist Scale Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilad Atzmon \u2013 gilad.co.uk Dec 29, 2020<\/a><\/strong><\/h1>\n

Revisiting Theodore W. Adorno\u2019s work on the \u2018authoritarian personality\u2019 and the \u2018F Scale\u2019 reveals that in 2020, it is actually liberals, progressives and the so called \u2018Left\u2019 that manifest 8 out of the 9 most problematic, antidemocratic and authoritarian attitudes.<\/p>\n

The theory of an authoritarian personality was introduced in the 1930s in an attempt to explain the mass appeal of fascism and right-wing ideologies. It came to life in the wake of a sharp rise in the popularity of fascist movements in many European societies in the inter-war period.<\/p>\n

At the time, many European ideologists and intellectuals were deeply inspired by Marx and Freud. Marxism predicted that the great depression would translate into a vast shift in working class conciousness, materialising into a global socialist revolution. Of course, this didn\u2019t happen. The economic crisis resulted instead in mass support for nationalist and fascist movements that were often deeply anti-Semitic.<\/p>\n

The rational behind the above deviation from the Marxist prophecy borrowed some Freudian theoretical mechanisms. \u2018People are authoritarians\u2019 was the given \u2018explanation\u2019: under certain threatening conditions \u2018authoritarian characters\u2019 are emotionally and cognitively vulnerable to the appeal of fascist and nationalist ideologies.<\/p>\n

During the 1930s a score of Jewish Germanic intellectuals mainly (but not at all) associated with the Frankfurt School (e.g., Wilhelm Reich) were committed to point at the psychological and socio-economic conditions responsible for the making of the Authoritarian personality.<\/p>\n

In his 1933 work\u00a0The\u00a0Mass Psychology of Fascism<\/em>, Wilhelm Reich attempted to explain the striking victory of \u2018reactionary\u2019 fascism over \u2018progressive\u2019 communism. Reich was desperate to rescue the relevance of revolutionary Marxism. To do so, he formed a new \u2018post-Marxist\u2019 theoretical outlook to explain why the Germans of his time favoured \u2018authoritarianism\u2019 over a \u2018preferable\u2019 communist revolution.<\/p>\n

Reich reckoned that the attraction of \u2018reactionary\u2019 and \u2018conservative\u2019 politics and the inclination towards fascism is driven by a long history of rigid, authoritarian patriarchy which affects family, parenting, primal education and eventually, society as a whole. In an attempt to save society from fascism, Reich synthesized Marx and Freud into a \u2018sexual revolution.\u2019<\/p>\n

In 1950, the Frankfurt School\u2019s prominent intellectual Theodor W. Adorno, along with others, published\u00a0The Authoritarian Personality<\/em>, a collection of studies that became a prime academic text in the domain of social science. In this volume Adorno and others delved into the theory of the authoritarian personality and reported the results of a decade-long research in testing the theory.<\/p>\n

Bearing in mind the origins of many of its members and the prime intellectual objective of the Frankfurt School, it is far from surprising that the investigation had begun with an attempt to explain the psychological roots of anti-Semitism: the assumption was that authoritarian personalities manifest some ethnocentric patterns that come to life with xenophobic inclinations and a dislike of out-groups and minorities.<\/p>\n

Adorno & co. reduced the authoritarian personality into a set of nine \u2018implicitly antidemocratic,\u2019 attitudes and beliefs. Adorno believed that it was possible to identify authoritarian personalities by the degree to which people would agree with these nine attitudes. The nine fascist attitudes; are briefly summarised here:<\/p>\n