Authoritarianism and the Pre-Rational Mind
People give in to authoritarian rule because it mirrors the limitations they've imposed on their own psyche.
Authoritarianism is a form of governance characterized by concentrated power, limited freedoms and restricted civil liberties, and has been the prevailing form of social order in most of the world throughout history. In the context of modern liberal democracy it carries an extremely negative connotation, suggesting that liberties once taken for granted could be straight jacketed by forces previously assumed to be held at bay by modernist conventions, for the language adopted by liberal humanists over the last century spoke to a much more optimistic and aspirational future characterized by cooperation, trust, prosperity and individual freedom. “Authoritarian” was a word reserved to denigrate the worldview of the “enemy,” and served as the ultimate anathema to those who grew up claiming to value liberty and free expression as ultimate ideals that were hard to come by and worthy to die for. The authoritarian was the rogue on the world stage, embodying the threat to a way of life deemed superior but which could be stripped away at any moment in a foreign invasion or by traitors in our own midst plotting behind closed doors. In an authoritarian regime fear reigns supreme, might makes right and disorientation leads to suggestibility.
Authoritarianism is not unique to any time, place, culture, or race of people, and it comes about in ways that are as counterintuitive as they are predictable.
When the US colonies liberated themselves from the rule of King George III the subsequent effect was to double down on humanist philosophies which supported natural rights and the pursuit of personal liberty. This had been expressed in the writings of such luminaries as John Locke, and later Thomas Paine, Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson among others. The United States was born out of this zeitgeist and with it the Constitution, which despite some glaring contradictions proved a visionary document for its time, as the error correcting mechanisms built into it are what has allowed the US to exist for 250 years with both remarkable prosperity and peaceful transitions of power. The founding fathers demonstrated high-level systems thinking to ideate a form of governance that could endure the vicissitudes of time, culture and rapid technological advancement. And while the framers were far removed from the ancient wisdom of the East, there is language in the Constitution that at least semantically appears aligned with the eternal truths of the yogi and seeker.
Yet this liberal style of governance is not the prevailing social order in most of the world. It’s a luxury to live in an open society, that while fraught with many problems is far preferable to the menu of alternatives, as the majority of the world’s population still lives under varying degrees of veiled tyranny, shackled as much to their lower selves as to the threat of violence, guided by maligned political and religious mythologies that romanticize an idealized past and stoke fear of the future. As the philosopher Marshall McLuhan noted, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” This tendency towards aversion, as in “averting” what’s staring us in the face, is the signature of pre-rational cognition and its character can always be found attempting to usurp power and regress the social order to obscure its own shadow. In the yogic sciences this aversion tendency is called dvesha, and while present in the psyche of all human beings it is fully realized in the domain of right wing extremism, a political movement embodied by its insistence on conserving retrograde ideologies of the past. Right wing extremism rejects the new and the novel and that which is to come, and serves as the evolutionary brake pedal to the forward thrust of progress, change and personal transformation.
We in the U.S. are experiencing our first real brush with an authoritarian order and unsurprisingly it’s occurring from the inevitable downward pull within these ranks. It should be interesting to see if the checks and balances so deftly conceived of 250 years ago are able to endure the stresses of dictatorial ambition, post-modernity, artificial intelligence, environmental collapse and a society asleep at the wheel. The larger wave of authoritarian sentiment finding strong footholds in much of the world comes about as the rate of technological and sociological change accelerates at a pace well beyond one’s ability to apprehend, which creates tremendous amounts of fear, disorientation and anxiety.
“People embrace political conservatism because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption and ambiguity; and to explain, order and justify inequality among groups and individuals.”
- From John T. Jost’s 2003 psychological review paper Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition.
From the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott:
"To be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
When people are fearful they contract and certain compulsions follow. A compulsion implies one is behaving habitually, which in turn implies the behavior is unconscious and disconnected from the source of being. It’s while prolonged in this state that people look back to the last point in time where they felt safe in an attempt to reconnect, as if to somehow extract from it a magic elixir that possesses the ability to restore “good” in the present and make “right” with their lives. For most people this romanticized era is childhood, before one was corrupted by ideology, burdened by responsibility and confused by the moral complexity of modern life. This “looking back fondly to the past” is the nostalgia fetish writ large and reveals one’s inability to respond consciously to the uncertainty of the present moment, which ultimately is all that ever exists. The past and future are merely illusions within the mind (chitta vritti). The future is always feared. The accumulated memory of the past weighs so heavy on the unconscious that it has one longing in desperation for that which can never be truly had, and it’s out of this futility you get something as flat and uninspired as Make America Great Again, a retrograde ideology born of the pain and hopelessness of a dying imagination.
Pre-Rational (Instinctual) - Embodied in the lower chakras, preoccupied with base survival concerns— Food, resource acquisition and genetic propagation. What Freud called the id.
Rational (Intellectual) - This comprises the vast majority of people in modern capitalist technocratic democracies. It’s human-centric, goal-oriented, materialistic and atheistic. See my post on Yoga and Humanism.
Post-Rational or Trans-Rational (Intuitive) - This is where yoga and self-transformation resides. I often make it a point to emphasize that yoga is not a heightened state of intellect but rather a state of consciousness that is intuitive, post-rational and non-dual.
While evolutionary psychology makes distinctions between pre-rationality and mainstream conservatism, there’s far more overlap than many would like to acknowledge. The pre-rational mind is instinctual and predetermined. It knows little other than to channel fear and intimidation as the primary means of securing what it sees as its best survival outcomes in a seemingly brutal and distrustful world. The pre-rational mind sees injustice as an acceptable cost to maintaining its preferred style of social order, which is absolutist, religious, hierarchical, nationalistic, ethnocentric, moralistic, traditional, conformist, resistant to change and highly sensitive to threat, which accounts for its preoccupation with guns, social, racial and gender divisions, territorial boundaries, defense, property rights, and vehement resistance to barriers around genetic propagation and threats to male paternity. The pre-rational mind is painfully unironic and has an extremely poor track record of seeing the deleterious outcomes of its decision making over long term time horizons. It comes about through the emergence of deeply entrenched patterns within the psyche (samskars), and thus manifests a reality just as flat as the rigidity of its worldview.
Pre-rationality was the prevailing order of mind before the Enlightenment, before logic and the sciences took hold and before one even had a distinct sense of themselves as an individual, which is an existence difficult to imagine in modern times. Whereas science and logic have embedded within them the ability to course correct through self-reflection and reason, pre-rationality is contemptuous of such pursuits and sees creativity and the imagination as altogether subversive, leaving them to be left unclaimed by the higher mind under threat of violence, imprisonment or worse.
One might wonder how it is that a people who claim to put such high value on freedom would elect to the highest office an insurrectionist with clearly stated dictatorial ambitions. It’s because the average person is ultimately not interested in true freedom, at least not to the extent that it interferes with their compulsions around self-preservation. By “average person” I mean one who is incapable of generating thoughts of their own, whose behavior is determined by tribal affiliation and whose sense of morality is aligned to consumerist propaganda, corporatist media and marketplace values, the shallow insights of which they’ve adopted as their own personal ideology.
The path towards liberation and the compulsions around self-preservation run completely contrary to one another on the ladder of egoic development as seen in the chakras and other such models. In yoga one seeks the path out of cyclic existence while the gun-toting “freedom lover” unconsciously participates in it. And while the enlightened person does not pass judgement on another’s lot in life, it’s important to note that when the modern American speaks of freedom they’re not speaking of moksha or jivan muhkta as the yogi understands— They’re speaking rather about the ability to keep themselves insulated from experiencing the suffering of others. This is an important distinction to understand, for if these masses of freedom lovers were to avail themselves of true freedom they’d quickly find themselves crushed under the weight of their own ignorance and greed.
Many foresee a point in the future where some kind of universal reckoning will take place around choices poorly made, and one will finally be able to bask in the satisfaction of their own prescience and keen judgement. Everyone wants their “I told you so” moment, as if it will be welcomed by the newly awakened and those who come to realize too late that their suffering was brought on not by the world around them but by limitations they imposed on their own worldview. Unfortunately this is not how it works. One must see societal upheaval for what it is— Just another revolution of the karmic wheel revealing those undesirable facets of the human condition lost to memory but familiar to time— Birth, ego, ignorance, power, dominance, fear, greed, confusion, destruction and death— Repeat. Things repeat because humanity is largely unconscious and the effects of that unconsciousness generate an infinite causality in order to be worked out. This is our experience of life, soon to be washed over by time and space like sandcastles at high tide. This is the very nature of cyclic existence and it will be such for all eternity. Better to understand it than not.
Namaskaram to you all,
Scott