she was a Swiss psychoanalyst who studied the causes of authoritarianism and concluded it was severe child abuse. The abrahamic religions, the more orthodox and hardline, are great at creating authoritarianism because of their love of severe child abuse ('spare the rod spoil the child'). Authoritarianism is essentially when the person disowns their own internal point of reference (which most authoritarians have had beaten and/or tormented out of them) and aligns with the point of view of an external authority. Most authoritarians do this in childhood on threat of death or great physical harm (interestingly George Orwell did a fantastic job of documenting the whole process of tormenting a person into authoritarianism in 1984 via the torture of his protagonist by the gov't.) Miller's book "For Your Own Good" made an extensive study of German child rearing methods in the time prior to the rise of the Third Reich and she makes a convincing argument that people tolerated Hitler because they were already so compartmentalized to violence anyway through childhood discipline. Part of the development of authoritarianism also is casting the negative aspects of oneself onto a minority in an effort to release the pathological anger that results from severe abuse, hence the need for anti-semitism or other bigotry toward minorities that Trumps followers have been so receptive to. If Miller is right then whether or not we are screwed depends on what percentage of society is this brain-damaged. I think we are at a point in time where that percentage is significantly less than in the first half of the twentieth century when the abrahamics had a much greater hold on society and corporal punishment of children was much more accepted.
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