In every authoritarian structure, ones views must accord with their superiors rather than with objective reality in order to prevent oppression
Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on top. This is the typcal flow chart of any government, corporation, army, bureaucracy, and mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms—the acts of hearing, seeing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc.—are in accordance with the reality tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important—a luxury that can be easily discarded—that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact. As Upton Sinclair put it: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
For instance, in the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, the agent had to develop the capacity to see godless Communists everywhere. Any other agent whose perceptions indicated that there were actually very few godless Communists everywhere in the country at the time would experience cognitive dissonance—his or her reality tunnel was at varience with the reality tunnel of the rest of the pyramid. To talk about such perceptions at all would be to invite suspicions of eccentricity, intellectual wiseacreing or of being oneself a godless Communist. The same would apply to a Dominican inquisitor who lacked the capacity to “see” witches everywhere. In such authoritarian situations, it is important to see what the Top Dogs (alpha males) see; it is inconvenient, and possibly dangerous, to see what is objectively happening.
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 16 The Snafu Principle (Location 2965). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Sociology / Politics Status:☀️