Hypothetical: What if a police officer tells me to wear a mask? Is it more American to comply or stand up for my freedom?
Both?
I'm going to assume your question opened the door to this, and indulge myself, for a moment.
*pulls out soapbox and stands on it*
A couple months ago, while going down an internet rabbit hole about white vigilantes killing black people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (
link for those curious... prepare to be horrifed, unless you're a psycho), I learned that after WWII, the US government commissioned a study about Nazi Germany to understand how ordinary Germans could have gone along with all the awful things the Nazis did.
The preliminary research was done at UC Berkley, but never fully developed, or widely publicized. If I had to speculate why, it was probably because it showed that the sort of "Right Wing Authoritarian" mindset that underpinned Hitler's rise to power was prevalent
everywhere, including America, and no one in the US government really wanted to dwell on this, especially since a lot of our authorities
LIKE having authoritarian followers. . .
The research was picked up by an American professor, Bob Altemeyer, at the University of Manitoba, who wrote a book about it which you can download for free
here.
They're called "Right Wing" authoritarians not because they subscribe to any particular political ideology, but because they are basically boot lickers who will blindly follow an authority,
any authority. For example, in the book he notes that researchers provided his test to former residents of the Soviet Union who supported their own government, and found they scored as high as Right Wing authoritarian Americans.
ANYWAYS, I bring this up because one of the defining characteristics of right wing authoritarians is the ability to have two (or more) contradicting ideas in their head, and never see an issue with this. In the book he says their worldview is not coherent, but more like a series of individual slogans or "files" that they pull out when "triggered" by something. And they never question the truth of these files, because they're part of their group identity. It's more important to them to belong to a group - the group in power, or that imagines themselves in power - than to think for themselves and try to navigate their own path in life.
So, you can have retards like this screaming that they will not follow the authorities (and wear a mask)...
... while also saying "
If you don't want to get shot and killed, better do exactly what the authorities tell you."
you or I might struggle with a mental contradiction like that; it would cause us to reconsider our world view, question our beliefs, and come up with more nuanced ones that take objective evidence into account. Right wing authoritarians don't. They keep right on, untroubled by mental contradictions like this.
If you're curious how you stack up, you can take the Right Wing Authoritarian test
here.
