Quote Originally Posted by Adam Strange View Post
Freelance, the real world is more complicated than the Global Change game, and isn’t cleanly separated into Authoritarian and non-Authoritarian ranks of nearly-equal class status college students. In the real world, people of different economic classes war with each other, and can form mutually self-interested groups across political and national boundaries.

The politicians in the US all represent the ruling class, and as such, have been screwing the middle class pretty consistently ever since the oil-and extraction industry-funded Republicans destroyed the unions, which were where the Democrats got most of their campaign money. Now, the Democrats get their money from the parasitic Finance industry, and the Middle class is left without any say in the economy at all. The economic decline of the Middle class is a direct consequence of this.

But Altemeyer’s essay does illustrate the fact that Authoritarians will destroy the planet in the interest of their group. I’m absolutely certain that this kind of behavior has been selected for by evolution as being advantageous in certain situations, but those situations didn’t take into account the ability to end life on this planet.

I wonder if this is why we don’t see any other civilizations in the galaxy? They have all hit this Great Filter.
I see it as a lot less black and white and we need to talk about real world interaction between groups rather than some experiment. Authoritarians engage in social conflict for their group which form for reasons usually related to geography, ethnicity and culture. The Russians and Chinese did not engage in social conflict within their society and against other societies because they were Authoritarian. The Authoritarians got power because they were willing to engage in social conflict. Authoritarians probably have the tendency see things was winning/losing/zero sum, which rationalizes the conflict but sometimes this is the enviroment which people live in. The west was very good for a period of time at sending their authoritarians to other parts of the world in order to use them and their lives to subjugate other groups, while largely being non-authoritarian with their own group. The British were especially good at this, however the authoritarians in the west eventually still got into conflict.

Historically non-authoritarian modes of coexistence is not possible without sending your authoritarians on wars of conquest and subjugation. However doing so today is difficult and there is little political will or profit to this, the authoritarians stay home and engage in social conflict domestically which of course create social instability. Also without authoritarians fighting these social conflicts and fighting to win, it is largely impossible to overcome authoritarians of a more advanced society.

I think it's also important to differentiate between forms of authoritarianism, as inverted totalitarianism which is rooted in very different ideas vs say Fascism or communism. This study is largely right wing authoritarianism which is of a fundamentally different character than LWA.