Authoritarian aggression targets the defenseless and avoids fair fights
Evidence
- Do you notice how seldom authoritarians aggress against others in a fair fight? The victim is usually already under control, as in a prison, or else caught unawares, outnumbered, or overwhelmingly outweaponed. Women, children, and others unable to defend themselves are typical targets. Attacks occur at night by hooded men, or when the victim has been isolated or when his or her back is turned. Undoubtedly authoritarians fear retaliation and legal punishment. But doesn’t their behavior suggest an enjoyment of power per se? Something else is at work here, for authoritarian aggression is done in the name of some higher authority. This authority gives the attack legitimacy in the minds of the aggressors, and they will often say they are proud of what they did. Yet what they did was almost always extraordinarily cowardly. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3875
Categorization
- XREF: Directly extends the Milgram findings and the book’s argument that authority legitimates cruelty; connects to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil and the ‘following orders’ defense.
- DEEPTHINKING: The compression of proud, authority-legitimized aggression and its actual cowardice into a single insight is dense and uncomfortable — worth sitting with.
- SEED: Could fuel an essay on the moral psychology of bullying, or on how movements brag about attacks they engineered to be risk-free.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3875