Negotiating Authoritarianism: The Achilles Heel of Power and Control
On October 19, 1994, something remarkable happened in a gymnasium at the University of Manitoba. Two groups of university students played a sophisticated simulation called the Global Change Game, where they controlled the fate of the world for the next forty years. On the first night, 67 students who scored low on measures of authoritarianism cooperated internationally, demilitarized their regions, and managed to feed and provide healthcare for 8.7 billion people—though 400 million died from starvation and disease in the poorest regions.
The next night, 68 students who scored high on authoritarianism played the same game. Within hours, they had triggered a nuclear holocaust that killed 7.4 billion people. Given a second chance, they started another war that killed 400 million more. By the end of their simulation, they had caused 9.5 billion deaths through war, starvation, and disease. Their world ended divided into armed camps threatening mutual destruction.
This wasn't a difference in intelligence, education, or values between evil people and good people. These were all first-year university students. The difference was psychological—a specific personality pattern that psychologist Bob Altemeyer spent forty years studying: the authoritarian personality.
Understanding this psychology has never been more urgent. Because while authoritarianism might seem like something from history textbooks—the domain of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini—the underlying psychology remains alive and well in democratic societies today. And it poses one of the greatest threats to democracy itself.
Authoritarians are their own worst enemy, as well as being a threat to democracy. This is the paradox with Authoritarianism, in fact there are many, but at its core authoritarianism is about giving up our power in the hope that someone else will use it wisely for everyone’s benefit. They never do, and it becomes the quintessential race to the bottom. Authoritarianism is fragile, it makes its adherents fragile. Authoritarian leaders speak of strength but in reality everything about it is a form of weakness. Fragile people, and fragile leaders. This is the Achilles heel. Later in this article we will look at the specific vulnerabilities that can be used to turn their thinking around, both as individuals and societally.
Authoritarian followers aren't wannabe dictators (we'll get to authoritarian leaders later). They're ordinary people whose personalities feature three key traits:
Authoritarian Submission: An excessive willingness to submit to established authorities in society, trusting them beyond what evidence warrants, and holding them blameless even when they do wrong.
Authoritarian Aggression: High levels of hostility toward people and groups that their authorities disapprove of or that seem to threaten the social order.
Conventionalism: A fierce commitment to following social norms and traditions as defined by their authorities, combined with a belief that everyone else should be forced to follow them too.
The crucial word here is "excessive." Everyone submits to authority sometimes—we stop at red lights, pay our taxes, and follow workplace rules. But authoritarian followers take it further. They trusted President Nixon long after Watergate evidence mounted. They believed President Bush's false claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction more than other Americans did. When authorities say "jump," authoritarians don't ask "how high?"—they're already airborne.
Consider how these traits played out in Altemeyer's research on government surveillance. He presented students with a scenario about the FBI conducting illegal wiretaps without court approval—ignoring laws designed to protect privacy. He asked: "If the story is true, how serious would you say these illegal wiretaps are?"
Most people scored it as a 3 or 4 on a 0-4 scale, seeing it as a serious threat to democracy. Authoritarian followers? They scored it 0, 1, or 2—not serious, probably justified by circumstances.
When Altemeyer ran similar studies about police burglaries of newspaper offices, drug raids without warrants, denial of assembly rights, and even burning down meeting places of "radical organizations," authoritarian followers consistently tolerated or supported these illegal government actions. They viewed authorities as above the law—like parents who can decide which rules apply to them.
Most disturbingly, when presented with a (fake) letter arguing that the Bill of Rights should be repealed because it had been "twisted" by the Supreme Court, authoritarian followers found it more sensible than others did and were more willing to support repealing the very constitutional protections designed to prevent tyranny.
The Dangerous World
Here's where the psychology gets fascinating—and frightening. What drives the aggression in authoritarian followers? Altemeyer's research identified a powerful two-stage process of fear and self-righteousness.
The first stage is fear. Authoritarian followers score extremely high on what Altemeyer calls the Dangerous World scale—a measure of belief that society is degenerating, chaos is imminent, and collapse is just around the corner. Consider these statements they tend to strongly agree with:
"Any day now, chaos and anarchy could erupt around us. All the signs are pointing to it."
"If our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it's liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be chaos."
"If our society continues to sink into wickedness and corruption, God will destroy us someday as surely as he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah."
This isn't situational anxiety—it's chronic. Authoritarian followers are more afraid than most people, consistently, across time and situations. Research shows their parents raised them to fear more threats: not just cultural "others" like homosexuals, atheists, and radicals, but also kidnappers, bullies, reckless drivers, and drunks. They grew up in a scarier world than most children, and they remain scared as adults.
For them, social changes that others view as progress—women's suffrage, civil rights, sex education, gay marriage, stem cell research—aren't just disagreeable policies. They're apocalyptic signs that perversion is corrupting society from within, leading to total collapse. The "end times" are always near.
But fear alone doesn't cause aggression. The second stage—the crucial release mechanism—is self-righteousness.
When asked to rate their own morality compared to others, most people show mild self-enhancement bias. Authoritarian followers? They rate themselves as vastly more moral, more righteous, more holy than others. They see themselves as the Chosen, the Righteous, God's designated hitters in the cosmic battle between good and evil.
This combination is explosive. Chronically frightened people looking for someone to attack find in self-righteousness their moral justification. Despite religious teachings about loving others, forgiving enemies, and leaving judgment to God, authoritarian followers feel empowered to isolate, humiliate, persecute, and punish—because in their minds, they're batting for God's team.
In Altemeyer's experiments, if you know how dangerous someone thinks the world is, and how self-righteous they are, you can predict with remarkable accuracy their:
Xenophobia
Heavy-handedness in sentencing criminals
Racial and ethnic prejudices
Mean-spiritedness toward those who have suffered misfortune
Willingness to join "posses" to hunt down virtually any group
This aggression manifests in cruel ways. When given the opportunity to deliver electric shocks in learning experiments, authoritarian followers chose stronger shocks. When role-playing as judges, they imposed longer sentences—not just on violent criminals, but on almost everyone except authorities who committed crimes.
Perhaps most revealing: they admitted that punishing wrongdoers made them feel good. They experienced "secret pleasure" when learning that high school classmates who misbehaved, got pregnant, or had bad drug experiences got "exactly what they deserved."
This is aggression in the name of righteousness, and it typically targets the vulnerable: women, children, minorities, anyone who can't fight back effectively. The attackers maintain moral superiority even while engaging in fundamentally immoral behaviour.
Let's now return to that gymnasium in 1994, because what happened there tells us something profound about authoritarian psychology.
The Different Worlds
When students low in authoritarianism ran the University of Manitoba strategy world, cooperation emerged immediately. The Pacific Rim region called for a summit in Tasmania, and all regional leaders attended. They continued meeting whenever crises arose. No wars occurred—when North America's leader suggested starting one, his own region told him to "go fly a kite."
When an ozone crisis hit, all leaders met and pooled resources to fix it. Armies were reduced. Trade agreements benefited multiple parties. The world's elites diverted minimal funds into their own pockets.
They weren't perfect—Africa and India suffered terribly, partly because North America refused to help. But they saw themselves as interdependent, riding the same planetary merry-go-round together.
The next night with high-authoritarians began differently. Immediately, the Middle East leader doubled oil prices. The former Soviet Union bought armies and invaded North America, which responded with nuclear weapons. Seven-point-four billion people died in nuclear holocaust.
Given a second chance (the facilitators reset the simulation), the Soviet Union rebuilt its armies and invaded China, killing 400 million. When someone called for a United Nations meeting, no one came. When the ozone crisis hit, only Europe took action.
The world's richest regions formed military alliances while the poorest collapsed. The authoritarian leaders embezzled more than twice as much as the low-authoritarians had. By the end, 2.1 billion had died from war, starvation, and disease, and the world teetered on the brink of another nuclear war.
Why the difference between low-authoritarian and high-authoritarian worlds? The high-authoritarians suffered from extreme ethnocentrism. In a room full of people just like themselves, they turned their backs on each other and focused only on their own groups. While the lows read from a page saying "Let's Work Together and Clean Up This Mess," the highs read from one saying "Care About Your Own; We Are NOT All In This Together."
They also proved inflexible on issues like birth control, letting populations explode despite warnings. They prioritized short-term profits over long-term environmental consequences. And crucially, they saw every interaction through the lens of power, threat, and competition.
One of the strangest findings in authoritarian psychology is the intense conventionalism—the desire to be "normal" and to make everyone else normal too. The paradox is that authoritarians are fringe but they want to be normal and believe that they are normal. Therefore, they do not see themselves as authoritarians. They will label others who are not authoritarian as such, believing that normal people are abnormal.
When Altemeyer showed authoritarian followers the average responses others had given to questions, then asked them to answer again, they shifted their answers toward the middle about twice as much as others did. They could even be nudged on core beliefs about homosexuality and religious fundamentalism.
When asked what RWA score they'd like to have, low-authoritarians said they wanted to be low. High-authoritarians typically said they wanted to be in the middle—not low, but not extremely high either. They ranked "being normal" substantially higher than most people did as a life value.
Think about the implications: people who want to disappear into the "vast vat of Ordinaries" while simultaneously believing they're morally superior to everyone else. People desperate to conform while convinced they're the Chosen Ones defending truth against a degenerate world.
This isn't hypocrisy—it's the complexity of the authoritarian mind, which holds contradictory beliefs without apparent discomfort.
Here's something crucial to understand: authoritarian followers don't discriminate. That is, they don't discriminate in whom they discriminate against. They're "equal opportunity bigots."
Altemeyer found that people prejudiced against one group are usually prejudiced against many groups. It has little to do with the targeted groups themselves and everything to do with the prejudiced person's personality.
More remarkably, he developed a scale asking people if they would support a hypothetical law outlawing various groups, and if they would join posses to enforce it. Authoritarian followers were willing to persecute:
Homosexuals
Religious cults
"Radicals"
Journalists the government disliked
The Ku Klux Klan
Right-wing political parties
Left wing political parties
Even "authoritarians" themselves
That last one is staggering. Some authoritarian followers agreed to join a posse to hunt down people just like themselves—apparently unable to recognize that they were endorsing their own persecution: "If the government says these people are dangerous, they must be stopped." This factor is important in media and social media messaging, and we’ll come to that later.
How Authoritarians Are Made
So where does this personality pattern come from? Altemeyer's research points to a complex interaction between genetic predisposition and environment, particularly parenting.
There's evidence that temperamental tendencies toward anxiety and submission may be partly heritable. A genetic component. Breeding experiments show you can create more dominant or submissive animal offspring through selective mating. Twin studies suggest similar patterns in humans.
But genes aren't destiny. The environment—especially childhood experience—shapes how these tendencies develop.
Authoritarian parents teach their children to be afraid. This is the fear legacy. They warn about more threats, emphasize danger more often, and create a worldview in which evil forces constantly threaten good people. The child learns that the world is dangerous, that authority provides safety, and that strict adherence to rules prevents chaos.
These lessons get internalized. The child becomes an adult who sees threat everywhere, who clings to authority for protection, who desperately needs the structure of clear rules and conventional behaviour to feel safe.
Similarly, these parents and their religious communities teach moral absolutism: clear categories of right and wrong, good and evil, righteous and sinful. The child learns to see themselves as fundamentally good, on God's team, morally superior to those who don't follow the same rules. It becomes a self-righteousness feedback loop: Fear increases the need for moral certainty, which increases self-righteousness, which justifies aggression against threatening "others," which confirms the dangerous nature of the world, which increases fear.
Perhaps the cruellest irony in authoritarian psychology is this: the people most likely to undermine democracy are often those who most loudly claim to defend it. Authoritarians become freedom’s most dedicated opponents.
Authoritarian followers will tell you they revere those who died defending freedom. Yet they support measures that take freedom away. They display the flag while endorsing violations of the Bill of Rights. They praise the Constitution while backing authorities who ignore it.
They believe things that have been disproved repeatedly and disbelieve things that are well-established. They think they're the best people in the world despite evidence to the contrary. Their leaders are often crooks and hypocrites, yet they maintain unwavering loyalty.
How is this possible? Because in the authoritarian mind, "freedom" doesn't mean freedom for everyone to live as they choose. It means freedom for the righteous to impose their vision on society, freedom from the chaos they fear would result from actual liberty, freedom to live in a world where everyone follows the same rules and the same authorities.
Before we get too comfortable feeling superior to authoritarian followers, we need to confront an uncomfortable truth: authoritarian tendencies are "spring-loaded" in most people.
When Altemeyer asked people to answer the RWA scale while imagining various national crises—left-wing violence, right-wing coups, terrorist attacks—most people's scores soared. Threat activates authoritarian psychology in individuals who don't normally score high.
We saw this after 9/11, when fear levels rose across American society and support increased for policies that would have been unthinkable before: warrantless surveillance, indefinite detention, torture. Attorney General John Ashcroft's constant warnings to "Be afraid! Be very afraid!" found receptive audiences far beyond the core authoritarian follower population.
This means authoritarianism isn't just a problem with "those people." It's a vulnerability in human psychology, activated by fear and crisis. Which means those who would create authoritarian systems know exactly what to do: keep the population afraid.
The Authoritarian Leader
We've focused on followers, but they're only half the equation. Authoritarian leaders actively cultivate and exploit these psychological vulnerabilities. They:
Amplify fears about crime, immigration, cultural change, terrorism
Create enemies and scapegoats for followers to direct their aggression toward
Position themselves as the only ones strong enough to protect their followers
Demonstrate their own righteousness while attacking opponents' morality
Demand loyalty while offering protection
Promise to restore a mythical past when things were "normal"
The followers provide the numbers and the energy. The leaders provide the direction and the permission. Together, they can dismantle democracy from within.
Democracy depends on pluralism—the idea that diverse people with different views can coexist peacefully, governed by laws that apply equally to all. It requires tolerance for disagreement, acceptance of legitimate opposition, and trust that losing today's election doesn't mean catastrophe.
Authoritarian psychology threatens all of this:
Trust in Authority Over Law: When followers see authorities as above the law, the rule of law collapses. Democracy becomes rule by whoever can seize power.
Aggression Toward Difference: When difference is seen as dangerous, pluralism becomes impossible. Minorities get scapegoated. Dissent gets crushed.
Fear-Based Decision Making: When chronic fear drives policy, rational deliberation disappears. Panicked populations grant excessive power to leaders who promise safety.
Moral Absolutism: When complex issues get reduced to battles between good and evil, compromise becomes betrayal. Politics becomes war by other means.
Erosion of Rights: When followers will repeal the Bill of Rights if authorities suggest it, constitutional protections become meaningless.
The danger isn't that authoritarian followers will suddenly become storm troopers (though history shows some will). The danger is that they'll gradually consent to democratic backsliding—accepting a little more surveillance, a little less free speech, a little more executive power—until democracy has been hollowed out from within.
Countering Authoritarianism: Strategies That Work
Understanding the psychology is crucial, but what can we actually do about it? Both research and historical experience suggest several approaches—some targeting individuals, others addressing the broader social phenomenon.
Individual-Level Interventions: Changing Minds One Person at a Time
Firstly, education and social exposure are powerful antidotes. Altemeyer's research found that higher education significantly reduces authoritarian tendencies—but not in the way you might think. It's not the content of education that matters most; it's the exposure to diversity.
When authoritarian followers attend university and actually interact with the "dangerous others" they've been taught to fear—atheists, feminists, people from different cultures, LGBTQ+ individuals—something remarkable happens. The feared groups turn out to be ordinary people with hopes, dreams, and humanity. The dangerous world becomes less dangerous. Fear decreases.
This suggests that programs promoting genuine cross-group contact—not just tolerance workshops, but actual meaningful relationships—can reduce authoritarian psychology. When the atheist turns out to be your study partner who helps you pass chemistry, when the gay person is your roommate who makes you laugh, fear-based prejudice becomes harder to maintain.
Secondly, thinking about the nature of authority can expose the mechanisms of illegitimate authority. Another educational approach involves teaching critical evaluation of authority claims. This doesn't mean teaching disrespect for all authority—authoritarian followers often misinterpret this as anarchism. Rather, it means teaching:
How to evaluate evidence for claims authorities make
Historical examples of authorities who were wrong or corrupt
The difference between legitimate authority and authoritarian control
How checks and balances protect everyone, including authority figures
Altemeyer found that courses on critical thinking, particularly those examining propaganda techniques and logical fallacies, helped students become more sceptical of unjustified authority claims.
Thirdly, encouraging self-reflection can reveal flawed thought processes. When presented with their own contradictions—like supporting freedom while endorsing surveillance, or believing in equality before the law while excusing authorities' illegal actions—some authoritarian followers experience cognitive dissonance that can promote change.
The key is framing these contradictions non-judgmentally: "You said you value X, but you also supported Y which conflicts with X. How do you think about that?" This opens space for self-reflection rather than triggering defensive self-righteousness.
And finally, openness to alternative ways of thinking can come when we are in trusted company. Perhaps most importantly, change rarely happens through confrontation. It happens through relationships. When people trust you, they're more willing to consider perspectives that challenge their worldview.
This means that reaching authoritarian followers requires:
Patience and genuine respect (even when disagreeing)
Avoiding the "holier than thou" attitude they expect from critics
Finding common ground on shared values before addressing differences
Presenting information from sources they trust, not ones they've been taught to dismiss
A liberal shouting at a conservative that they're "brainwashed" will only confirm the conservative's belief that liberals are hostile elitists. But a friend sharing concerns about government overreach, or a family member asking thoughtful questions, might actually be heard.
Societal-Level Strategies: Structural Protections
Individual change is slow and uncertain. More reliable are institutional and cultural strategies that prevent authoritarianism from taking root or spreading.
Reducing residual fear. Since fear is the primary instigator of authoritarian aggression, societies that want to resist authoritarianism must avoid fear-mongering. This means:
Responsible Media Coverage: Avoiding sensationalism about crime, terrorism, and social change. Presenting threats proportionally to actual risk rather than maximizing audience anxiety.
Political Rhetoric: Leaders should avoid apocalyptic framing of policy disagreements. When every election becomes "the most important election of our lifetime" and every opponent represents an existential threat, you're activating authoritarian psychology across the population.
Addressing Real Insecurity: Economic instability, job insecurity, and social dislocation create genuine anxiety that authoritarian leaders exploit. Strong social safety nets, economic opportunity, and community stability make populations less susceptible to fear-based appeals.
Transparent, Effective Governance: When governments are responsive to genuine threats without overreacting, when they're honest about risks and limitations, public trust increases and fear-based authoritarianism has less purchase.
Protect and strengthen democratic institutions. Constitutional democracy's genius lies in its structural protections—but these only work if defended:
Independent Judiciary: Courts that can check executive and legislative overreach, regardless of which party controls them.
Free Press: Protecting journalism from government control or corporate consolidation. A press that can investigate and criticize authorities without fear.
Legislative Oversight: Congress actually exercising its constitutional role to check executive power, rather than becoming a rubber stamp for presidents of their own party.
Whistleblower Protections: Making it safe for insiders to expose government wrongdoing.
Electoral Integrity: Ensuring voting access, preventing gerrymandering, and protecting election administration from partisan manipulation.
These structures prevent any faction from accumulating unchecked power—which is exactly what authoritarian followers want to give their leaders.
Democratic citizenship requires understanding how democracy works and why its protections matter, so promoting civic institutions provide a common lens through which to negotiate with and use legitimate moderate fluid authority rather than seeking alternative extremist authorities. This means education systems should teach:
Constitutional principles and the reasoning behind them
Historical examples of democratic backsliding and how it happened
How to participate effectively in democratic processes
Media literacy and propaganda recognition
The value of pluralism and why disagreement is healthy
Critically, this education must emphasize that these principles protect everyone, not just minorities. Authoritarian followers need to understand that the rights they'd like to see stripped from "others" are the same rights protecting them.
The self-righteousness that releases authoritarian aggression thrives on simple good-versus-evil narratives. Countering it requires developing a better understanding of moral complexity and ambiguities.:
Moral Humility: Religious and community leaders acknowledging uncertainty, modeling doubt, and emphasizing compassion over judgment.
Complex Narratives: Media and education presenting issues in their full complexity rather than reducing everything to tribal conflict.
Emphasizing Shared Humanity: Stories and programs that highlight what people have in common across political and cultural divides.
Accountability for All: Consistently holding authorities accountable regardless of political affiliation. When "our side" commits wrongdoing, self-righteousness decreases if we acknowledge it rather than excuse it.
And build democratic culture, not just institutions. Institutions matter, but culture matters more. Democratic culture includes:
Tolerance for Disagreement: Treating political opponents as legitimate participants in democracy rather than enemies to be destroyed.
Acceptance of Loss: Understanding that losing elections is normal and doesn't mean catastrophe. The permanent government of bureaucrats, courts, and institutions continues regardless of who wins.
Pluralism as Strength: Viewing diversity not as a threat but as a source of resilience and innovation.
Rule of Law: Genuinely believing that no one is above the law, and demanding accountability from authorities we support as well as those we oppose.
Truth-Seeking Over Tribe: Valuing factual accuracy over partisan advantage, even when facts are inconvenient.
This culture can't be imposed; it must be modelled by leaders, taught in schools, reinforced in communities, and reflected in media.
Finally, we must recognize that authoritarianism flourishes when people feel genuinely insecure and when institutions fail them. This is where the roots of authoritarianism take hold in a society. Long-term prevention requires:
Economic Opportunity: When people feel they can build stable lives, they're less attracted to authoritarian "strong men" promising to fix everything.
Functional Government: When democratic institutions actually solve problems effectively, people trust democracy. When they fail persistently, authoritarianism becomes appealing.
Community Connection: Social isolation and atomization make people more susceptible to authoritarian movements that offer belonging and identity. Strong communities provide these without requiring submission.
Meaningful Participation: When people feel they have genuine voice in decisions affecting their lives, they're less likely to abandon democracy for authoritarianism.
One fascinating finding from Altemeyer's research offers hope: authoritarian psychology has a weakness. In his crisis scenarios, one situation actually decreased authoritarianism—when authorities attacked nonviolent protestors exercising legitimate democratic rights.
This is what Gandhi understood: authoritarian systems depend on looking strong and righteous. When they brutalize peaceful, sympathetic victims, the illusion shatters. The authorities appear tyrannical rather than protective. Fear and self-righteousness lose their power.
This suggests that principled, nonviolent resistance—combined with clear documentation of authoritarian overreach—can reduce rather than increase authoritarian support. But this requires courage and discipline from those willing to expose authoritarian brutality by becoming its targets.
And then there are the strategies that do not work against authoritarianism. The kinds of responses we give to non-authoritarian behaviour are habitual, and we make the error of applying them in the face of authoritarians. Avoiding these is key to getting past the defences. We should acknowledge strategies that research suggests are ineffective or counterproductive:
1. Direct Confrontation and Mockery: Telling authoritarian followers they're "stupid" or "brainwashed" only confirms their belief that critics are elitist and hostile. It increases defensiveness and hardens positions.
2. Appealing to Rights They Don't Value: Arguing that immigrants, minorities, or dissidents have "rights" means little to people who think rights should only protect the righteous. More effective is showing how authoritarian policies threaten their own freedoms.
3. Ignoring Their Concerns: Dismissing the anxieties of authoritarian followers as simply bigotry misses the genuine (if often misplaced) fears underneath. People feeling economically insecure or culturally displaced need those concerns addressed, not dismissed.
4. Surrendering Institutional Ground: Hoping that authoritarianism will burn itself out or that "being reasonable" will appease authoritarian leaders has never worked historically. Appeasement signals weakness, which only emboldens authoritarian movements.
5. Fighting Fear With Fear: Responding to left-wing authoritarianism by creating right-wing authoritarianism—suppressing speech, demanding ideological conformity, viewing opponents as irredeemable—simply creates a race to the authoritarian bottom.
Concluding Thoughts: The Long Game
Understanding authoritarian psychology doesn't mean writing off everyone who scores high on these measures. These are our neighbours, coworkers, family members. Many are kind in personal interactions, genuinely believe they're doing good, and sincerely think they're protecting society.
But understanding the psychology does mean taking the threat seriously while developing effective responses. It means recognizing that:
Fear is the mind-killer: We must actively work to reduce societal fear rather than amplifying it for political advantage.
Self-righteousness enables cruelty: Promoting moral humility and complexity serves democracy better than simplistic good-versus-evil narratives.
Authority requires scrutiny: Teaching critical evaluation of authority claims protects democracy without requiring disrespect for legitimate authority.
Rights are fragile: We must defend constitutional protections even—especially—when they protect people we dislike or disagree with.
Crisis reveals character: How we respond to threats determines whether democracy survives: with panic and crackdown, or with resilience and principle.
Change is possible: Both individuals and societies can become less authoritarian through education, exposure, institutional protection, and cultural development.
That simulation in 1994 wasn't just an academic exercise. It was a warning. Give one group of people world power, and they'll cooperate imperfectly but meaningfully to solve shared problems. Give another group the same power, and they'll trigger nuclear holocaust.
The difference isn't intelligence or education. It's psychology. And that psychology is shaped by fear, self-righteousness, and submission to authority.
But here's the crucial point the experiment also demonstrates: psychology isn't fixed. The students who played those games weren't born authoritarians or non-authoritarians. Their psychological patterns developed over time in response to their experiences and environments.
Which means we can shape those environments. We can reduce fear. We can model humility. We can build institutions that resist authoritarian takeover. We can create cultures that value pluralism and democracy.
The question for our time is: Which world do we want to build? And what are we willing to do to prevent the other one?
The answer requires both short-term vigilance and long-term commitment. Defending democracy today while building the conditions for democracy tomorrow. Protecting rights now while teaching the next generation why they matter. Resisting authoritarian movements while addressing the conditions that make them appealing.
It's not easy work. It's not quick work. But as that gymnasium experiment demonstrated so vividly, the stakes couldn't be higher. Democracy isn't just a form of government—it's a daily choice, made by millions of people, to embrace complexity over simplicity, pluralism over uniformity, and freedom over the false security of authoritarian control.
The choice is ours. But we must make it consciously, consistently, and courageously. Because the alternative—we've seen where that leads.
And 7.4 billion simulated deaths should be warning enough.
This article draws extensively on Dr. Bob Altemeyer's decades of research on authoritarianism, particularly his book "The Authoritarians" (2006), available free online. Altemeyer's work provides crucial empirical evidence for understanding one of the greatest threats to democratic societies, and for developing effective responses to protect democracy from authoritarian movements.
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