What Is Left Authoritarianism?

03/31/22 • 132 min

In this episode, we examine the relationship between psychological variation, social role differentiation, and power, presenting a tripartite scheme of Strongmen, Technocrats, and Narcissists: societies with supposedly radically different politics tend to converge on similar outcomes because the same types of people end up in the same roles. At the same time, we examine the world through the bewildering lens of a 2021 paper making a rare journey into the psychology of left authoritarianism. Somewhere along the way, we examine similarities between Marxist and New Age cults, an epidemic of genital shrinking through magic in West Africa, the real and the imagined in the overabundant genre of cancel culture commentary, and the need for a parallel project to that of institutional academia.

Previous Episode

What Is Politics? Interview with Daniel pt. 1

It's easy enough to use exquisitely rarefied, niche terminology to talk about politics, but do we even have a foundation of shared definitions for the really common terms, like left and right, or market and state? Or, for that matter, the very term politics? In his podcast What Is Politics? Daniel argues that we don't, and does the hard work of defining terms that have meant everything at some point or another, to somebody or another. We talk about what led him to this work, the ideological discipline in academia, the ways in which both postmodernism and reductive materialism have mostly made everybody more confused and unable to exercise political agency, the political implications of hunter-gatherer studies, and his epic, marathon critique of the book The Dawn of Everything.
Watch his videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/WHATISPOLITICS69/featured
Or listen here: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/what-is-politics-worldwidescrotes-OQXC56wtuz0/ or wherever you find your podcasts.

Next Episode

What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 1 (preview)

In 2050, weary beyond reckoning but not quite dead, Arnold recounts the crises of the 2020s and the revolutionary changes they gave birth to: the synthetic biology and modular technology that allowed economies to localize and food to be produced amidst ecological calamity, the fires that gave birth to an ecstatic movement, the epic street battles over the construction of the I-5 security wall, and the seizure of industrial facilities in Portland, by those who had fought the construction of the wall and were beginning to evolve into the legendary I-5 saboteurs, for use in an ecology of survival. Visit https://www.patreon.com/biologicalsingularity for the dizzying entirety of this episode.