Conservative ideology has gotten more and more extreme over the past few decades — as well as being mainstreamed within the Republican Party. Formerly moderate Republicans are referred to as “RINOs” (Republican In Name Only) and are being pushed out of the party, whether by primary defeat or ostracism by the right-wing base.
Only those who pass the utmost purity tests are allowed to remain amid, and especially atop of, the right-wing political establishment in recent years. They persist in holding some truly debunked, thoroughly delusional “explanations” for phenomena in the real world.
Originalism — the idea that we cannot fundamentally make new laws; that all we can do is peer into the past and try to imagine the original intent of the Founders when writing the Constitution
Independent State Legislature Theory — so-called “states’ rights” by another name, taken to a more extreme twist in which only the state legislature — unchecked by executive power or judicial review — can have any say in the state’s election procedures
The Republican National Committee, in perhaps the most stunningly stupid self-own in the history of modern politics certainly in my lifetime, finally said the quietest part out loud: that in their official pronouncement, the events at the Capitol on January 6 constituted “legitimate political discourse.” Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were censured by the RNC in the statement as well, for their role on the January 6 Committee and their investigation into these “legitimate” events involving a murderous attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
Yale historian Joanne Freeman had this to say about the RNC statement:
The RNC statement about “legitimate political discourse” is a line in the sand.
Democracy vs. Authoritarianism is on the ballot in 2022
If there’s any upside to the dark situation we’re in, it’s these gifts Republicans keep on giving — further debasing themselves each time you think they can’t possibly stoop any morally lower — that we can use to our advantage to turn out our base in record numbers in these upcoming midterms. We did it in 2018, and there’s no reason to believe we can’t do it now. Trump’s support is waning, not growing — and the fractures within the GOP are widening, not tightening. Plus, we’ll have 8 million new 18-year-old eligible voters we can potentially reach — the vast majority of whom statistically speaking, are going to be progressive Democrats.
None of the other policy questions or culture wars will matter if we cannot solve the most fundamental question at the heart of our democracy: do we still believe in the ideals of the Constitution, the rule of law, and the vision of a self-governing people shared by the Founders? Or do we want to hand over the keys to the nation to the erstwhile billionaires, old money heirs, and trust fund playboys who want to drag us back to some perverted nostalgic fantasyland that’s part Leave It To Beaver, part wild west, and part Silence of the Lambs?
Meanwhile Bob has made The Authoritarians available free of charge here, and I absolutely encourage you to read it — it’s fascinating stuff and he’s an entertaining as well as informative writer. In this post I’ll do my best to summarize the main points of the book, because I know people are busy and not everyone has time to read a whole book much less scrape together hours to volunteer and do activist work.
Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians
Dr. Altemeyer defines authoritarianism as “something authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders cook up between themselves.” Followers submit blindly to the leaders and give them too much free rein to do anti-democratic, brutal, and tyrannical things. Power corrupts absolutely, and power seems to corrupt authoritarians most of all.
He classifies the authoritarians into three primary groups:
Authoritarian followers — typically this group follows the established authorities in their society, including government officials, clergy and traditional religious leaders, business leaders, and self-appointed gurus of all stripes. They tend to have a “Daddy and Mommy know best” approach to the government, believing that authorities are above the law. Psychologically, authoritarian followers exhibit a high degree of submission to authorities they accept as legitimate, high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities (if so called upon), and a high degree of conventionalism and conformity. They tend to be bigots, with prejudices against many types of groups.
Authoritarian leaders — tend to be Social Dominators, who long to control people and affect others’ lives. They are overall highly prejudiced and bigoted, do not believe in the American value of equality, and feel justified in wielding great power over society with little qualification and even less self-reflection. They believe the world is divided into wolves and sheep, and they have no qualms fooling the sheep into opening the pasture gate so they can eat. “Might makes right” is their personal motto.
Double Highs — about 10% of any given sample score highly on both the social dominance test and the right-wing authoritarian scale, which is odd given the social dominator’s otherwise reluctance to be submissive. They exhibit extra prejudice and extra hostility — beyond either the social dominators or the RWAs. They tend to be the “religious” social dominators, who had a fundamentalist upbringing, or had a conversion experience as an adult (George W. Bush, e.g.) and now tend to believe in some form of Strict Father Morality.
More traits of authoritarian followers
They tend to feel more endangered in potentially threatening situations that most people do (think: Dick Cheney‘s descent into bunker mentality after 9/11)
More afraid than most people; they tend to have overactive amygdalas
Were raised by their parents to be afraid of others — both parents and children have told researchers so
More likely to issue threats than low authoritarians
Most orthodox — were raised fundamentalist and are highly repressed
Most hardline
Believe “whatever I want is right”
Paradoxically, want to “be normal” very badly — they tend to get tugged by the people around them
Authoritarian aggression
Authoritarians prefer not to have fair fights out in the open — they tend to aggress when they believe their hostility is welcomed by established authority, or supports established authority. They also often aggress when they have an obvious physical advantage over the target — making women, children, and others unable to defend themselves as ideal targets. These cowards have the gall to feel morally superior to the innocent victims they assault in an ongoing asymmetrical warfare between supremacists and marginalized groups.
To make matters worse, authoritarians do their dirty deeds in the shadows and scream bloody murder at anyone who dares try and expose their dark secrets to the light. Their theatrical and performative self-righteousness is just an act to avoid accountability and responsibility for what they do — even unto themselves.
Moreover, authoritarians are extra punitive against lawbreakers they don’t like (though exceedingly permissive for lawbreakers they *do* like, which is infuriatingly hypocritical), because they believe fervently in the value of punishment. Many advocate child corporal punishment — spanking and worse — for children as young as 1 year old. Authoritarian followers tended to report feelings of “secret pleasure” when hearing of the misfortunes of high school classmates who had misbehaved, believing they got what they deserved in life.
It would be accurate to think of authoritarians as “little volcanoes of hostility,” almost heat-seeking their way into authority-approved ways to erupt and release their pent-up anger. Many of them do not, and will not ever realize that their fundamentalist upbringing has sadly left their brains underdeveloped, and ill-equipped to navigate the modern world with its rapid changes, accelerating inequality, advancing climate change, and political instability.
Lethal Union
When a social dominator becomes an authoritarian leader, and leads his authoritarian followers down malevolent roads from informing to threatening to vigilanteism, researchers refer to this state of affairs as a “lethal union.” It’s a highly dangerous and volatile time for a democracy, one warranting caution and vigilance from concerned citizens.
Throughout history, these are the situations that tend to devolve further into aggression, political violence, civil war, genocide, and worse. We need to be very damn careful about who we elect as our leaders — we cannot allow our government to be captured by special interests and the narrow, quixotic delusions of old billionaires outshining daddy and staving off death.
More books about authoritarians
If you’ve already read Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians, or you’re just looking for more resources on authoritarianism — here’s a list to get started:
Motivated reasoning is a common daily phenomenon for all of us, assuming we’re human and/or interact with other humans. It’s a cognitive science term that refers to a type of emotional bias in which we have a tendency to prefer decisions or justifications based on their personal desirability vs. an unbiased examination of the facts.
Thinking and feeling aren’t anywhere near as “separate” in the brain as is commonly believed — they are very intertwined, and it’s also incredibly difficult for us to understand or detect from moment to moment which parts of our stream of consciousness are “thinking” and which are “feeling.”
What’s worse, we have other biases that exacerbate the motivated reasoning bias — like the “Lake Wobegon Effect” wherein we tend to overestimate our own abilities vs. others. So, we’re overconfident — at the same that we are less rational than we think we are. That can be a volatile combination — especially when found in individuals who hold a lot of power, and make decisions that affect people’s lives.
For we know not what we do
It can be infuriating to deal with people who are using motivated reasoning to make decisions instead of critical thinking: they tend to work backwards from the conclusion they wish to reach, and ignore evidence that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. The way they deal with the cognitive dissonance of conflicting information is simply to toss the new information out, instead of evaluating it. Generally, though, they are unaware that their brain is in the habit of making that easier choice, and tend to get angry when this is pointed out.
President Biden and Vice President Harris commemorated the 1 year anniversary of the January 6 attack on our democracy with morning speeches and a day of remembrance inside the Capitol rotunda with Representatives and Senators giving a number of moving speeches in their respective chambers. The tone on TV news and blue check Twitter was somber and reflective. The President referred to the violent events of Jan 6, 2021 as a terrorist attack on our democracy, and said that the threat was not yet over — that the perpetrators of that event still hold a “dagger at the throat of America.”
Only two Republicans were present in chambers when the moment of silence was held for the nation’s traumatic experience one year ago — Representative Liz Cheney and her father, Dick Cheney, the former VP and evil villain of the George W. Bush years. That this man — a cartoonish devil from my formative years as a young activist — was, along with his steel-spined force of nature daughter, one half of the lone pair that remained of the pathetic tatters of the once great party of Lincoln.
What do you do if you’re in a 2-party system and one of the parties is just sitting on the sidelines, heckling (and worse!?)? How do you restore confidence in a system that so many people love to hate, to the point of obsession? Will we be able to re-establish a sense of fair play, as Biden called on us to do today in his speech?
The Big Lie is about rewriting history
We don’t need to spend a ton of time peering deeply into discerning motive with seditionists — we can instead understand that for all of them, serving the Big Lie serves a function for them in their lives. It binds them to their tribe, it signals a piece of their “identity,” and it signals loyalty within a tight hierarchy that rewards it — all while managing to serve their highest goal of all: to annoy and intimidate liberals. Like all bullies, their primary animating drive is a self-righteous conviction that “I am RIGHT!” at all times and about all things, and that disagreement is largely punishable by death or, in lieu of that, dark twisted fantasies of death passed off lamely and pathetically as “just joking, coworker!”
Research has shown that emotional repression causes authoritarianism (Altemeyer, Adorno, Stenner et al). Fundamentalist religious groups favor the most repression, culturally — ergo, fundamentalist groups are at the highest risk for nurturing authoritarian traits.
Emotional repression is the keystone of fundamentalist parenting. The strict application of “Biblical law” as cherry-picked by extremists is inherently contradictory & hypocritical, stunting emotional and psychological growth through corporal punishment and capricious applications of anger for sometimes opaque reasons.
When trusted caregivers apply physical violence to a developing mind, seeds of deep distrust and paranoia are planted. Children learn to “obey” by repressing negative parts of themselves so deeply they fall out of conscious awareness altogether & rule the personality “from below.”
Never being given the required emotional support to transcend the paradoxical human project of reconciling the positive & negative aspects inherent in all people, they become “arrested” at a moment of obsession with punishment as the only solution to every problem. They see the world in very black and white terms — the classic “you’re either with us or against us” zero-sum worldview in which everybody who doesn’t agree with you must be delegitimized and eradicated completely.
The Founders knew acutely the pains of centuries of religious warfare in modern Europe and resoundingly did not want that for their new nation. Many of them moreover knew religious persecution intimately — some whose families fled the Church of England for fear of being imprisoned, burned at the stake, or worse. Is America a Christian nation? Although many Christians certainly have come here, in a legal and political sense the nation’s founders wanted precisely the opposite of the “Christian nation” they were breaking with by pursuing independence from the British.
Contrary to the disinformation spread by Christian nationalists today, the people who founded the United States explicitly saw religious zealotry as one of the primary dangers to a democratic republic. They feared demagoguery and the abuse of power that tilts public apparatus towards corrupt private interest. The Founders knew that religion could be a source of strife for the fledgling nation as easily as it could be a strength, and they took great pains to carefully balance the needs of religious expression and secular interests in architecting the country.
The main impetus for a large percentage of the early colonists who came to the Americas was the quest for a home where they could enjoy the free exercise of religion. The Protestant Reformation had begun in Europe about a century before the first American colonies were founded, and a number of new religious sects were straining at the bonds of the Catholic Church’s continued hegemony. Puritans, Mennonites, Quakers, Jesuits, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Amish, Lutherans, Moravians, Schwenkfeldians, and more escaped the sometimes deadly persecutions of the churches of Europe to seek a place to worship God in their own chosen ways.
By the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, many religious flowers were blooming within the 13 colonies. He had seen for himself the pitfalls of the experiments in which a unitary control of religion by one church or sect led to conflict, injustice, and violence. Jefferson and the nation’s other founders were staunchly against the idea of establishing a theocracy in America:
The founding fathers made a conscious break from the European tradition of a national state church.
The words Bible, Christianity, Jesus, and God do not appear in our founding documents.
The handful of states who who supported “established churches” abandoned the practice by the mid-19th century.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that his Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom was written on behalf of “the Jew and the gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindu and the infidel of every denomination.” In the text he responds negatively to VA’s harassment of Baptist preachers — one of many occasions on which he spoke out sharply against the encroachment of religion upon political power.
The Constitution explicitly forbids a religious test for holding foreign office.
The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
There is a right-wing conspiracy theory aiming to discredit the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” by claiming that those exact words aren’t found in the Constitution.
The phrase comes from Thomas Jefferson’s 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists, wherein he is describing the thinking of the Founders about the meaning of the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which Jefferson contemplates “with sovereign reverence.”
The phrase is echoed by James Madison in an 1803 letter opposing the building of churches on government land: “The purpose of separation of Church and State is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
The 1796 Treaty of Tripoli states in Article 11: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” — President George Washington first ordered the negotiation of a treaty in 1795, and President John Adams sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1797, with this article widely interpreted to mean a reiteration of the purpose of the Establishment Clause to create a secular state, i.e. one that would not ever be going to holy war with Tripoli.
The Founders were deists
For the most part, the prominent Founders were deists — they recognized the long tradition of Judeo-Christian order in society, and consciously broke from it in their creation of the legal entity of the United States, via the Establishment Clause and numerous other devices. They were creatures of The Enlightenment, and were very much influenced by the latest developments of their day including statistics, empiricism, numerous scientific advancements, and the pursuit of knowledge and logical decision-making.
They distrusted the concept of divine right of rule that existed in Europe under monarchies. We fought a revolution to leave that behind for good reason.
They disliked the idea of a national church, and were adamant about the idea of keeping the realms of religion and politics independent of each other.
Thomas Paine lamented that “Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly marked feature of all religions established by law.”
Paine also pushed the envelop even further, asserting his belief that the people would eventually abandon all traditional religions in favor of the “religion” of nature and reason.
I’ll be continuing to work on this as information comes out of the various investigations and inquiries into the attempted coup to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, from the January 6 Committee to Merrick’s DOJ, the GA district attorney, NY district attorney, various civil suits, and probably more we don’t even know about yet. You can navigate the full mind map as it grows here:
Head onward into “Continue Reading” to see the same mind map through a geographic perspective:
Or capital vs. labor, oligarchs vs. plebes, plutocrats vs. proles, rich vs. poor — however you want to narrate it, the property vs. people struggle continues on in new and old ways, each and ere day.
Here in America, the plutocrats have devised many clever methods of hiding the class struggle behind a race war smokescreen, that is both real and manufactured — instigated, exacerbated, agitated by the likes of schlubby wife abusers like Sloppy Steve Bannon, wrinkly old Palpatines like Rupert Murdoch, and shady kleptocrats like Trump and Putin.
The United States has nursed an underground Confederacy slow burning for centuries, for sociopathic demagogues to tap into and rekindle for cheap and dangerous political power. Like The Terminator, racist and supremacist troglodytes seem always to reconstitute themselves into strange and twisted new forms, from slavery to the Black Codes to sharecropping to convict leasing to Jim Crow to Jim Crow 2.0 — the psychopaths want their homeland.
Ds need to start framing this as an oligarch's game in which a global class war is repeatedly laundered and diverted into a provincial race war. https://t.co/9a0KikBuGo
The political left loves people, and our extremists for the most part destroy capital or property that insurance companies will pay to make shiny and new again — unlike the right wing extremists who bomb federal buildings, killing hundreds of people and costing taxpayers’ money to replace.
Meanwhile, the right wing claims to be the righteous party for its extreme fixation on life before birth, yet its regulation-allergic capitalists destroy people and the natural world more broadly, from factory farming to deforestation, the destruction of habitats, strip-mining and other toxic extraction practices, and on into climate change itself. Being in fact the chief architects of manmade atmospheric devastation, they have managed to make themselves invisible from the deed by simply (wink wink!) denying it exists.
WWJD?!
Certainly, not anything the Republican Party is up to. Jesus would be sad.
Freedom means the right to make choices. When you have a large population, that means many different kinds of people are making many kinds of different choices for different reasons. That means, mathematically speaking, a broad distribution graph of options chosen over time. Freedom produces diversity, as a direct consequence of its own laissez-faire philosophy.
The Founders knew this. James Madison was an intellectual of his day, and a polymathic student of the great ideas of his time. It is hard not to see the influence of exposure to Condorcet’s theory about decision-making in Madison’s later ideas about diffusing the flames of factions by essentially dousing them in the large numbers of people spreading out within the growing nation. He believed that ideas and interests that were actively opposing each other would be a good way to preserve enough vigor to sustain an active self-governing democracy.
Regardless of the origin, Madison clearly himself was advocating for the power of diversity to preserve the very republic. He believed that this diversity of views in fact provided the structure that would help prevent singular demagogues from rising up too far and destroying democracy forever in their quest for unlimited power. The founders shared this foresight — that giving Americans the freedom to live as they may would lead to a healthy democracy, through the promulgation of different ideas and knowledge as well as through vigorous debate.
You can’t have freedom without diversity
Many who cite Freedom as their patriotic raison d’être do not seem to tolerate well the exercise of freedom by others, particularly others they disagree with or do not like. But as the great Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer once said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” She had the insight that if her civil rights could be taken away from her, then no one else’s rights would be safe in this nation either.
America has always struggled to live up to its founding ideals — but it seems like if we want to truly honor their memories, we would continue to take that vision at face value and continue to carry the light of the torch of equality, perhaps upwards to the crest of a hill from whence we may shine once again.
Elder wisdom, Thinkers, and Creators Since Antiquity
Some say there’s nothing new under the sun. Maybe we don’t need to go that far — but we should definitely appreciate the voluminous contributions of the ancient thinkers and great philosophers of antiquity, who figured out a dizzying array of complicated concepts long before the modern era.
We have much to learn from our ancestral teachers. Here’s a place to start — which shall grow over time as the knowledge is passed down yet again, age unto age. Things that stand the test of time are valuable, no matter what the currency of the day.
The Great Philosophers
Name
Known for
Born
Died
Where lived
Influenced
St. Thomas Aquinas
Summa Theologiae
1225
1274
Italy
Anaxagoras
Early Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who moved forward ideas about the nature of existence
c. 500 BC
c. 428 BC
Greece, Persia
Diogenes, Plutarch
Hannah Arendt
A politically progressive Jewish philosopher, Arendt fled the Nazi regime for America, where she wrote the foundational text on the political psychology of authoritarianism, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951)
1906
1975
Germany, America
Aristotle
Student of Plato and founder of the Lyceum, he is widely known for his Socratic Method of questioning as a basis for philosophical discussion
384 BC
322 BC
Greece
The Enlightenment, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante
Marcus Aurelius
Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher who advocated for cultivating an ethos of impermanence and doing one's duty.
121
180
Roman Empire
Avicenna
Persian polymath, father of early medicine, and a key figure during the Islamic Golden Age
980
1037
Persia
Francis Bacon
declaring that human intellect and reason are means of discovering the truth: "Knowledge is power“
1561
1626
England
Roger Bacon
Most celebrated European scientist of the Middle Ages.
1220
1292
England
Pierre Bourdieu
The French sociologist's work focuses on how upper social classes preserve their social privileges through generations despite the persistent myth of social mobility in post-industrial liberal societies
1930
2002
France
Jeremy Bentham
father of Utilitarianism
1748
1832
England
Daniel Bernoulli
Swiss mathematician widely credited for pioneering the field of statistics
1700
1782
Switzerland
Jacob Bernoulli
1655
1705
Switzerland
Jean Boudin
French political philosopher known for his theory of sovereignty
1530
1596
France
Louis Braille
French educator and inventor of the Braille system of reading and writing for the blind
1809
1852
France
Brunelleschi
Italian architect, sculptor, and designer
1377
1446
Italy
Joseph Campbell
Literature professor most known for his work in world mythologies, and the widely observed narrative of the archetypal hero
1904
1987
White Plains, NY
George Lucas and Star Wars
Andrew Carnegie
Gilded Age tycoon who made a fortune leading the steel industry in the late 19th century, becoming one of the richest Americans in history
1835
1919
Scotland, America
Cicero
Roman statesman, orator, philosopher, scholar, lawyer, and skeptic who championed a return to republican government during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar.
106 BC
43 BC
Rome
John Locke, David Hume, Motesquieu, Edmund Burke
Marquis de Condorcet
French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who played a key role in transforming European society from feudalism to modern secular democracy.
1743
1794
France
Thomas Jefferson
Confucius
Confucianism -- a system of ethics and morals to guide "right" behavior
551 BC
479 BC
China
Marie Curie
Chemist and physicist whose work on radioactivity earned her a Nobel Prize -- the first woman ever to win the award.
1867
1934
Poland, France
Leonardo da Vinci
The Italian polymath, painter, engineer, inventor, scientist et al was a giant of the Renaissance. He is often credited as being the greatest painter in th history of art.
1452
1519
Italy
Charles Darwin
English naturalist most famous for the knowledge of evolution
1809
1882
England
Democritus
basic theory of the atom: a fundamental building block unit of all things that itself is not divisible (although later we would discover even smaller particles, the atom is still essentially the most basic building block)
460 BC
371 BC
Greece
René Descartes
cogito ergo sum: I think therefore I am
1596
1650
France
Alexis de Tocqueville
French diplomat, philosopher, historian, and aristocrat best known for his two volume Democracy in America (1835 & 1840), now considered one of the earliest works of sociology.
1805
1859
France
Diogenes
The most famous of the Cynics, a school of philosophy founded in Athens c. 400 BC, advocating the pursuit of happiness through avoiding the unnecessary temptations of material goods
412 BC
323 BC
Greece
Zeno
Emilé Durkheim
anomie — concept of lack of a shared moral order. Normlessness.
1858
1917
France
Albert Einstein
Known for his theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, Einstein is widely agreed to be one of the greatest physicist of all time.
1879
1955
Germany, America
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Writer, philosopher, poet, and abolitionist who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century and became a key figure in the American romantic movement
1803
1882
America
Henry David Thoreau
Empedocles
Greek philosopher best known for his cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements.
494 BC
434 BC
Greece
Epicurus
Greek philosopher and founder of the highly influential school of philosophy bearing his name, Epicureanism
341 BC
270 BC
Greece
John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx
Erasmus
A Dutch philosopher and Catholic theologian, Erasmus is acknowledged as one of the greatest minds of the northern Renaissance
1466
1536
Netherlands
Euclid
Greek mathematician and founder of geometry
c. 325 BC
c. 270 BC
Alexandria, Egypt
Michael Faraday
Hugely influential English scientist who made numerous contributions to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry
1791
1867
England
Enrico Fermi
Italian physicist who emigrated to America with his Jewish wife in 1938 and worked on the Manhattan Project, creating the world's first nuclear reactor and becoming dubbed the "architect of the atomic bomb."
1901
1954
Italy, America
Michel Foucault
Widely influential philosopher, literary critic, historian, and activist best known for his theories on the relationship between power and knowledge.
1926
1984
France
Sigmund Freud
Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis
1856
1939
Austria, UK
John Kenneth Galbraith
Concept of countervailing power — that collective worker power is needed to balance against growing corporatism in the economy
1908
2006
Canada, America
Galen
Greek physician, surgeon, and philosopher credited with developing the fields of anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, neurology, and logic
130
200
Greece, Rome
Galileo
The Italian polymath is considered the father of modern science, making groundbreaking contributions to the fields of modern physics, observational astronomy, and the scientific method itself.
1564
1642
Italy
Siddharta Gautama
The Buddha; achieving enlightenment under the Bodhi tree in India
563 BC
483 BC
India
Ghiberti
Sculptor most famous for his creation of the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistry
1378
1455
Italy
Johann Gutenberg
Invented the printing press, democratizing the dissemination of information for the first time.
1394
1468
Germany
Jürgen Habermas
German philosopher and member of the Frankfurt School, his work addresses public opinion and the public sphere through the lens of critical theory
1929
Germany
Friedrich Hegel
One of the most important figures in German idealism and a founding figure in Western philosophy
1770
1831
Germany
Martin Heidigger
German philosopher and member of the Nazi Party
1889
1976
Germany
Heraclitus
posited that change or flow is the most basic character of nature; that the world is characterized by opposites; and that God or "logos" is the essence of nature's constant flux and source of all things
535 BC
475 BC
Greece
Herodotus
first historian; first journalist; first foreign correspondent
480 BC
425 BC
Greece
Hippocrates
Greek physician who is considered the Father of Medicine and known for the Hippocratic oath still in use today
c. 460 BC
c. 370 BC
Greece
Thomas Hobbes
English philosopher and founder of modern political philosophy
1588
1679
England
Homer
Ancient Greek poet and author of the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey
c. 750 BC
Greece
David Hume
Key Enlightenment philosopher who championed empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism
1711
1776
Scotland
William James
The father of American psychology
1842
1910
America
Thomas Jefferson
Founding Father and third president of the U.S., Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence
1743
1826
America
Carl Jung
Founder of analytical psychology
1875
1961
Switzerland
Immanuel Kant
A central Enlightenment thinker who made contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics among other fields.
1724
1804
Prussia
John Maynard Keynes
English economist whose ideas profoundly changed the field of macroeconomics and economic policy, now known as Keynesian economics
1883
1946
England
Søren Kierkegaard
Danish poet and polymath regarded as the first existentialist philosopher
1813
1855
Denmark
Thomas Kuhn
Philosopher of science known for his theory of scientific paradigms and paradigm shifts
1922
1996
America
Lao Tzu
the Dao de Ching and philosophy of Daoism
6th c. BC
6th c. BC
China
Lamark
A botanist, naturalist, and taxonomist, the French academic was an early proponent of the idea of evolution
1744
1829
France
Gottfried Liebniz
The German polymath is a key figure in the history of philosophy and mathematics both
1646
1716
Prussia
Vladimir Lenin
Fomented the Russian Revolution of 1917 that overthrew the tsarist regime
1870
1924
Russia
Joseph Stalin
Carolus Linnaeus
The father of modern taxonomy and inventor of binomial nomenclature for the modern system of naming organisms
1707
1778
Sweden
John Locke
philosophy of liberty and natural rights
1632
1704
England
Martin Luther
Kicked off the Protestant Reformation when he broke with the Catholic Church over the practice of indulgences
1483
1546
Germany
James Madison
Founding Father and fourth president of the U.S., Madison is known as the father of the Constitution and the author of the Bill of Rights, as well as a co-author of the Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay
1751
1836
America
Karl Marx
His political theories were so revolutionary he lived in exile much of his life, with his works The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital exerting enormous influence on subsequent intellectual thought and world history
1818
1883
Germany, England
John Stuart Mill
A key thinker in the pantheon of classical liberalism, Mill contributed to political theory, political economy, and social theory among others
1806
1873
England
Mozi
An ethical philosophy advocating the caring for everyone equally
470 BC
391 BC
China
Legalism
Mohammad
Arab social and political leader who founded the religion of Islam
570
632
Mecca
Isaac Newton
One of the greatest scientists of all time, Newton discovered gravity and the laws of motion among much else
1642
1727
England
Friedrich Nietzsche
Key figure in modern intellectual history
1844
1900
Germany
Alfred Nobel
Inventor and philanthropist who gave his fortune to establish the Nobel Prize
1833
1896
Sweden
Georgia O'Keeffe
Painter known as the Mother of American modernism
1887
1986
America
Thomas Paine
Political theorist and revolutionary whose pamphlets Common Sense and The American Crisis helped persuade the colonists to declare independence from Great Britain
1737
1809
Britain; America
Parmenides
early Rationalist; believed our perceptions are an illusion shielding us from true reality, which is only discernable via human reason
515 BC
445 BC
Greece
Plato
Louis Pasteur
A French chemist and microbiologist who discovered vaccination and pasteurization, Pasteur is considered the father of bacteriology and the father of microbiology
1822
1895
France
Petrarch
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters helped spark the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century
1304
1374
Italy
Philo of Alexandria
Philosopher and theologist who entwined Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy
c. 20 BC
c. 50 AD
Alexandria, Egypt
Plato
Platonic Forms
427 BC
347 BC
Greece
Aristotle
Pliny the Elder
Author, naturalist, and navy commander who wrote encyclopedic works on natural philosophy
23
79
Rome
Marco Polo
The first European to create a detailed history of his voyage to Asia via the Silk Road, including China, Japan, Persia, India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.
1254
1324
Italy
Neil Postman
The professor and cultural critic warned against the ill effects of tchnology and is best known for his book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
1931
2003
America
Protagoras
Father of relativism; coined the phrase "man is the measure of all things"
490 BC
420 BC
Greece
Pythagoras
The Pythagorean theorem
570 BC
495 BC
Greece
Parmenides
François Rabelais
A writer, physician, Greek scholar, Renaissance thinker, Rabelais is infamous for his satirical and bawdy humor
1483
1553
France
John Rawls
Moral and political philosopher known for the thought experiment known as the "veil of ignorance," in which participants make decisions about the society they will live in without knowing a priori which class or social position they themselves would occupy.
1921
2002
American
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Political philosopher whose concept of the Social Contract inspired the French and American Revolutions, and underpins all modern liberal democracies
1712
1778
France
The Enlightenment, French Revolution
Jean-Paul Sartre
A key thinker in the philosophy of existentialism
1905
1980
France
Arthur Schopenhauer
The German philosopher was one of the first in the west to embrace Indian philosophy, including asceticism, self-denial, and the concept of worldly illusion. He influenced many other important thinkers and creators of the 19th and 20th centuries
1788
1860
Poland
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wagner, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler
Joseph Schumpeter
An Austrian emigree to the US, Schumpeter taught at Harvard and popularized the economic term "creative destruction"
1883
1950
Hungary, United States
Seneca
Rhetoric teacher and Stoic philosopher
55 BC
37 AD
Roman Empire
Adam Smith
This Scottish philosopher was a pioneer of political economy, and is widely regarded as the father of economics and the father of capitalism.
1723
1790
Scotland
David Hume
Socrates
Widely considered a founder of philosophy; the dialectic method, among much else
469 BC
399 BC
Greece
Plato
Spinoza
An early Enlightenment thinker inspired by Descartes to go on to lead the Dutch Golden Age
1632
1677
The Netherlands
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
The author, mathematical statistician, and former options trader has written several influential books on probability, uncertainty, and randomness.
1960
Lebanon, America
Thales
Posited water as being the basic material of the cosmos
624 BC
546 BC
Miletus, Greece
Theocritus
Creator of ancient Greek pastoral poetry
c. 300 BC
c. 260 BC
Greece
Thucydides
Athenian historian and general who wrote the History of the Peloponnesian War about the conflict between Sparta and Athens
460 BC
400 BC
Greece
Edward Tufte
Professor of computer science at Yale and a pioneer in the field of data visualization
1942
America
Virgil
Regarded as one of Rome's greatest poets, Virgil penned the Aeneid, the national epic of ancient Rome
70 BC
19 BC
Rome
Dante and the Divine Comedy
Vitruvius
Roman author, architect, and army engineer known for his significant contributions to architecture and design
c. 80 BC
c. 15 BC
Rome
The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci
Voltaire
Key figure in the Enlightenment, Voltaire was famous for his criticism of the Catholic Church and advocacy of civil liberties including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the separation of church and state
1694
1778
France
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
James Watson
Credited with discovering the double helix structure of the DNA molecule
1928
America
Max Weber
German historian and political economist widely regarded as one of the most important theorists of modern Western society
1864
1920
Germany
Critical theory, the Frankfurt School
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Considered one of the greatest modern philosophers, Wittgenstein made significant contributions to the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.
1889
1951
Austria, England
Zeno
Founder of the Stoic school of philosophy in 4th c. BCE Greece and Parmenides's most famous student.
Or: How Milton Friedman destroyed Western civilization, the neolliberalism story.
An economic ideology first theorized in the 40s and 50s by scholars, it was brought to popular attention in the 1970s by the works of economist Milton Friedman and novelist Ayn Rand among others. It grew in popularity and became widely adopted in U.S. economic policy beginning with Ronald Reagan in the 80s.
The essential heart of neoliberalism is the idea of the rich as top performers and job creators, driving the economy forward through their achievements and innovations; and that societies work best with little government regulation and where citizens are shaped to work according to market principles. Its adoption as a major driver of policy effectively undid many of the gains to middle class opportunity created by the New Deal, FDR‘s ambitious public works project that pulled the nation out from the grips of the Great Depression following the 1929 crash on Wall Street.
Neoliberalism is the dominant economic orthodoxy in the modern era. It is both a political and a financial ideology, with the following extremist beliefs:
Antigovernment sentiment — Their pitch is that all governments, including democratic ones, threaten individual liberty and must be stopped (or “drowned in the bathtub,” in the words of anti-tax zealots and movement conservatives).
Free markets should conquer governments — They claim, absurdly, that the toppling of self-governance would improve both economies and individual liberties.
The victory of markets is inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it — The fall of the Soviet Union and Cold War Communism was deemed the “end of history” by neoliberals, who believed that laissez-faire free market capitalism would inevitably triumph over all other forms of economic and political systems.
Economies work best when governments don’t intervene — Neoliberals want to prevent the powers of government from interfering with their ability to cut corners, dump industrial waste, pay fair wages, offer benefits, adhere to safety standards, engage in deceptive advertising, commit tax evasion, and so on — while continuing to supply them a steady stream of the public’s money via unpaid for tax cuts that balloon holes in the deficit. They fight against regulation tooth and nail, and try to claim that markets operate “naturally” as if under something akin to laws of physics — while failing to mention that there are no markets without regulation, without standards of fairness, without a justice system to enforce contracts and do its best to ensure a relatively equal business playing field.
The alchemy of neoliberalism will transmute greed into gold for everyone — The neoliberal promise is about spreading wealth, freedom, and democracy around the world — at the barrel of a gun, missile, or drone if necessary. Neoliberals consider greed to be the essence of human nature, and have modeled an entire societal system around this most base of human instincts. They claim, improbably — and surely many are True Believers — that narcissism and the aggressive pursuit of power and wealth will somehow magically create peace, happiness, and riches for everyone.
The insistence that governments and self-rule should be subordinated to the ultra-rich, to the oligarchs — that, to me, is the core essence of why this framework is evil. The staggeringly dissonant conviction about transforming sociopathy into global peace is a very close second.
Since the 1970s and accelerating with Reagan years, wealthy elites in the right wing have been spending gobs of their ill-earned wealth on creating a conservative movement echo chamber of think tanks, talk radio, literature, televangelists, YouTube streamers, and more — it is the vast right-wing conspiracy Hillary Clinton warned us about. It most certainly exists, and it most certainly is aggressively pursuing its political aims to disenfranchise the American people as fully as possible, so as to better walk away with an absurdly unjust share of the mutually created wealth by the wealth of intelligent and diligent labor here in the United States.
Common whites
It appeals to the MAGA crowd because it allows them to vicariously tag along with the rich and powerful right-wing bigots who flaunt and dangle their wealth in front of the plebes by which to entice them to open up their wallets and send in a meagre donation for this or that white victimhood fund that does nothing but enrich the scam artists who run it as a hollow shell. It validates their hardcore white supremacy and casual racism alike, provides the sadistic satisfaction of attacking their enemies (symbolically and/or literally), gives them something to do and believe in, and keeps them entertained while their pockets are being fleeced in broad daylight.
Neoliberalism has succeeded in undermining some of the last shreds of democratic infrastructure and civic goodwill in society at this point in American political history. The defenses brilliantly architected by the Founders to ensure checks and balances would manage the power games in Washington to within workable levels have frayed even further under 4 years of Trump, and the vitriol of the January 6 coup attempt and insurrection that’s fueled further right-wing Big Lie entrenchment and domestic terrorist extremism.
Democracy is in crisis, and neoliberalism the culprit of this hostage story.
At least Joe Biden is correct in his analysis of the solution: we should tax the rich.
For all their angry rhetoric and now, overtly political violence, I maintain that it is the right wing that is profoundly insecure, anxious, and in need of soothing. They are panicking at the idea that the world can possibly change without their approval, and deprive them of their stolen superiority — they do not want the party to end for white male dominance of this entire planet.
Right-wing authoritarian adults latch on to symbols and ideologies and demagogues as “surrogates” for the childhood safety blanket they once needed — these are the “adult-acceptable” pablum substitutes.
Moral Flat Earthers characteristically lack discernment between very good and very bad on the moral spectrum — it is as if they see the “absolute value” of the moral impact and judge very evil to be “good” because of its sheer bigness. They are overwhelmed by the size and power of forces beyond their control, and become gobsmacked easily at the sight of muscle being flexed. Many want to be on the side of the flexer.
Behold, the inverted morality system of evil. They compete with each other to be the Biggest Bad, because moral flat earthers cannot see positive or negative — only magnitude. Evil is taking the "absolute value" of terrible things to magically transmute them into "good"
Moreover, they see the interest in discernment as a waste of time — as inefficient. Which, in the religio-capitalist worldview, is extremely sinful. When the money keeps rolling in, you don’t ask how — just Give it to God and let Jesus take the wheel. Because God loves people with money, and Jesus must have hung out with the poors by mistake, that quirky guy!
Inability to grasp ethics = hallmark trait of sociopaths. Or as I like to call them, Moral Flat Earthers.
Moral Flat Earthers are bad at analogies, because they have no proper sense of the weight or gravity of things relative to each other. They spend very little time turning concepts over in their mind to understand them — their wisdom is largely received, and often sort of cut and pasted there by others. They pastiche their guiding philosophy from random sampling the authorities throughout their lives.
That she unironically compared mask-wearing to the Holocaust speaks volumes about the psychopathology of people who lack a functional conscience: they have zero ability to make moral distinctions. I call them "Moral Flat Earthers" — they are extremely dangerous, esp. in groups.
