Authoritarianism

Thoughts on authoritarianism and its connection to the big picture of what's happening today from Dave Roberts:

Authoritarianism is a philosophy of death: set hierarchical categories, everyone and everything fixed in place, stasis. But life, the universe itself, is fluidity, evolution, fuzzy boundaries, constant change. Authoritarianism denies life.

The authoritarian personality is hyper-attuned to threat, unnerved and frightened by the constant change and uncertainty that constitutes life, and so it attempts to grasp the universe and fix it in place, simplify it, contain it, control it. (All such attempts, all through history, end in tears.)

Because it springs from fear, authoritarianism is — not accidentally or contingently but *intrinsically* —hostile to science, learning, experience, change, growth.

If you're born into a role and the only purpose of your existence is to play the role, life's endless mysteries can only be a threat.

This is why, though biology shows us endless edge cases, endless ambiguous in-between cases, endless examples of fluidity, the authoritarian mind is absolutely fixated on restricting gender and gender roles to two neat boxes.

*Nothing* in nature falls into two neat boxes. Nature contains no neat divisions, no simple categories. Our minds contain those things — we use them as tools to deal with complexity — but the *world* doesn't contain them. The world is endless flux and flow.