I don’t know billmon, Robert Anton Wilson says we should –at least one in life–learn to completely immerse ourselves in anothers reality tunnel, especially someone we do not admire, as a zen lesson to understand them.
There are many ways and angles from which to study them, one is the traditional way, such as what John Dean has done.
Joe Cannon of Cannons fire blog has an excellent insight and review:sex, lies, and authoritarian conservatives

Snip:
Nevertheless, Dean has actually done “right” by his efforts to beyond these somewhat pedestrian definitional issues in his attempts to answer the more pressing question that plagued him and Goldwater and prompted the first initiative to write this book. Namely, who are these people, and why do they hate American principles so much?
After considerable inquiry and investigation, Dean finally ran across a series of sociology studies inspired by the work of Adorno and associates in the late ’40s on the authoritarian personality, and the historical Milgram experiments of the early ’70s, which demand description here.
If you’re unaware of these experiments, don’t feel bad. They occurred decades ago, and they’ll never be exactly replicated (one hopes, Gitmo notwithstanding) because the methodology would never pass current restrictions on use of human subjects. The experiment went like this. A subject entered a laboratory room with a scientist in a lab coat, sat at a table on which was placed a button that they were told controlled voltage to an electrode device placed on another person in another room they could see through a one-way mirror. This other person was supposed to be learning word pairs, and the subject was to apply a jolt for each error. Occasionally the scientist would suggest that the subject increase the voltage, up to 450 volts, which is pretty dangerous.
What the subject did not know was that the button did not really deliver electrical voltage, and that the other person was not really learning word pairs but was acting out the pain each time the shock was applied. Still, to Milgram’s great dismay, more than 65% of the subjects increased the voltage to maximum levels without ever questioning the scientist’s orders, despite the painful cries of the person they were ostensibly zapping. Milgram concluded that for many human beings who are otherwise decent, caring, and reasonable, it is harder to disobey authority than it is to set aside conscience and their own good judgment. A conclusion not inconsistent with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”
Dean felt he was on to something with this discovery, and looked further to find the more recent work of Bob Altemeyer, a sociologist who has defined various aspects of what he has come to call the Right Wing Authoritarian personality(RWA). Altemeyer’s work is world-renowned and has gained him acclaim, recognition, and several awards. Dean corresponded with him at length when writing CWC, and gave him drafts of many sections to make sure it accurately represented the research. Bear in mind what I share here is a synopsis of my scant memory of his early studies, augmented by Dean’s detailed descriptions.
Altemeyer is careful to explain that what he means by “right wing” is not the typical political right wing, as opposed to left wing, as he actually predicted and documented that extreme left wing members of the Soviet Union scored high in his Right Wing Authoritarian scale. What he refers to here instead is the tendency to defer to the established authority in one’s life.
What Altemeyer has discovered empirically is that high scoring RWA individuals tend to favor conservative politics to a very strong degree. The kinds of statements endorsed on his measure by these folks prefer old-fashioned values, God’s laws, tradition, strong leaders, and the duty to follow them, while disagreeing with statements asserting the health of homosexuals, the goodness of atheists, and the admissibility of nudist camps and premarital sex.
The RWA is a constellation of traits falling into three distinct but converging categories, submission, aggression, and conventionalism. Scoring high on this scale indicates adherence to tight social and ideological circles, with inclination to accept without question what authorities have said. This of course leads inevitably to inconsistencies, double standards, hypocrisies, and dogmatism.
Snip: Another scale was developed (not by Altemeyer, but inspired by his work) to capture the authoritarians who run things, who lead; the Social Dominance Orientation (SDOs). The key dimension focused on here is equality, and the SDO feels this is a “sucker word in which only fools believe.” The statements they endorse are variations on the Animal Farm theme: Some pigs are more equal than others. Their world is competitive, dangerous, and threatening, where the powerful survive anyway they can, to hell with everyone else, and the ends always justify the means. They evidently suffer virtually no moral restraint, and feel allowed to do whatever they can get away with. They dismiss the Golden Rule and champion prejudice. They are ruthless and hedonistic, and do not care about harming others. Consequently, they gravitate to status jobs where inequality is the norm, such as corporate hierarchies and law enforcement, and research finds they are over-represented in positions of political power. Their personalities are “intimidating, unsympathetic, untrusting and untrustworthy, vengeful, manipulative, and amoral….power hungry, domineering, mean, [and] Machiavellian.”
The RWA and SDO personalities would seem to be somewhat orthogonal, one being more inclined to follow and the other to lead, but there are those who score high on both scales; Altemeyer calls these individuals “particularly scary.” These “Double Highs” are not submissive, instead seeking those who will be submissive to them. They are exceedingly prejudiced, exhibiting stark hostility against rights for ethnic groups, homosexuals, and women. This group, unlike the SDOs but more akin to the RWAs are extremely religious, tending to be Christian fundamentalists, who are also profoundly parochial, wishing to mingle only with their own kind.
Double Highs appear willing to take the ruthlessness of the SDO and the self-righteousness of the RWA to perilous heights. In a game simulation of global policy and power, these individuals quickly provoked world crisis by risking everything to win, including billions of lives and destruction of the ozone layer, just to “win.” This type of individual leading the gullible and unthinking RWAs with a band of SDOs….well, we’ve seen it in action.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 9 2006 20:03 utc | 2