> The authoritarian personality character structure
also
> includes automatonism. Indifference and what Arendt
> identified nicely as "the banality of evil" are
> intertwined.
>
> socialist greetings,
> Mike B)
No, this completely misses the point! Obedience to authority is typical of most people, not just people with "authoritarian" personalities. (Milgram found that personality traits did not help him predict who would obey and who would not.)
(Just another knee in the groin of the cult of personality--)
Miles
****************************************************** I was referring to the nurses who gave the overdose of placebo to the patients. They accepted the authority of their boss, the doctor. I suspect many in the workforce accept the authority of their bosses to do harm because to do otherwise would mean loss of their livlihood and/or public ostracism. They are taught this in part by seeing how many whistleblowers are actually punished, rather than rewarded. I don't that this more or less blind acceptance of authority (being a good German and keeping our mouths shut--apologies for that commonplace) is necessarily a conscious decision that ruled people make. It's too depressing to keep reminding yourself that you're a fearful wage-slave. No, it's more a trained acceptance of authority which unconsciously weaves its way through class society. This bland, kind of acceptance is what I was trying to identify as "automatonism".
And speaking of same and the cult of personality, here's another view of how automatonism functions in relation to bureaucratic authortiy:
Today the people participate in meetings, discussions and votes since it meets their immediate self-interest not to appear to the official apparatus as members of an opposition. Nevertheless, they remain preponderantly passive or their participation limits itself to the routinized approval of official proposals. The participants are deeply convinced that taking part in such discussions has practically no significance for the issues themselves, or can frequently cause the participants personal harm. On the average, these facts are generally well-known, although the official reports paint a totally different picture and this becomes part of the public record. Political participation is reduced to mere automatonism.
Georg Lukács 1968 Democratisation Today and Tomorrow: Part II. The Pure Alternative: Stalinism or Socialist Democracy
communist greetings, Mike B) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/democracy/ch07.htm
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