I’m in a band.
I’m not saying this to proclaim my musical chops, though if you ask people who have seen me play, I play better than I look like I would. Of course, I look like someone took and shaved Chewbacca, so that’s not really saying much, is it?
And I’m not saying that you should go and listen to our music, but if you wanted to, you could find us under Downwater Union on Spotify and Apple Music.
I mention this because one of the songs we cover is Frank Turner’s 1933, comparing the world of 2016 to 1933.
“1933 was the year that the Nazis took power in Germany,” said Turner in an interview. “Obviously I’m quite consciously aware of Godwin’s Law and the idea that mentioning the Nazis gets pretty tired in principled debate pretty quickly. But it still, nevertheless, seemed like it was a turning point which in and of itself didn’t necessarily seem apocalyptic at the time – in 1933 I’m not sure that anybody in Germany was thinking of 1945 and yet they were inextricably linked. The year 2016 in particular felt quite momentous to me, it was a threatening year, and it’s a song that was written when we were touring in the USA in the summer of 2016 while the election campaign was ongoing.”
That song features this verse (and apologies for the moderately spicy language. Kids might want to plug their ears and pretend to avert their eyes):
If I was of the greatest generation I’d be pissed
Surveying the world that I built slipping back into this
I’d be screaming at my grandkids: “We already did this”
Be suspicious of simple answers
That shit’s for fascists and maybe teenagers
You can’t fix the world if all you have is a hammer
If you recall, last editorial I was talking about how “We live in a world full of chance and chaos and probabilities, but we want certainty and determinism.”
But, as Frank Turner would tell you, determinism leads to fascism.
And, you know, authoritarianism of all kinds. Not just the extreme right. (And yes, fascism is a far-right movement. Yes, I know they were called the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. That doesn’t mean they were a left leaning party. Sorry.)
According to research published in the Journal of Research in Personality, belief in determinism plays a role in authoritarianism.
The idea was posed in 1941 by German psychologist Erich Fromm in 1941 and several other political thinkers have made the connection as well.
Over the years, researchers keep looking at the link between the desire for “certainty, structure, and safety in one’s environment” and this idea of authoritarianism.
Most recently, a study in 2020 (by Thomas H. Costello Shauna M. Bowes and Scott O. Lilienfeld) found “intriguing intersections between worldviews and personality traits.”
But why would people—especially people living in a Western Culture that places the idea of individual choice above all else—buy into authoritarianism?
Well, for one thing, it doesn’t really start out as authoritarianism.
It starts out as a desire to “stave off existential uncertainties,” as the study authors would put it. It starts with a preference for concrete information.
It passes through the father who rules his family with an iron fist, the boss who believes in the carrot-and-the-stick method of managing, the school system that seeks to mould young minds into automatons, rather than create a generation able to think for themselves.
It finds root in determinism, which is the idea that things happen not based on one’s free will, but as a consequence of external conditions and circumstances beyond the control of the individual.
And it ends? Well, nobody is sure where it ends. We think that authoritarianism is a relic of the past, of the Nazis, of the Soviet Union, of the Cold War. But even as I write this, an estimated 38 percent of the world lives under authoritarian rule. Indeed, according to the Freedom House—a non-partisan government agency in the US—only about 20 percent of the world’s population is considered free.
That’s down from 46 percent in 2005.
Yes, you heard that right, over the last 17 years, the number of people living in what could be considered free and democratic states has halved.
This takes various forms. Last year, the Nicaraguan elections saw opposition candidates tossed in jail. Same thing happened in Russia. In Myanmar, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party party was trounced (winning only 33 seats, compared to 396). But just before the new parliament was due to be sworn in, the election was declared fraudulent and commander in chief Min Aung Hlaing as acting president. An initial one-year state of emergency has since been extended by two additional years.
In Sudan, the military seized power in October. They’re promising “democratic” elections, maybe in a couple of years.
In Tunisia, the president decided he didn’t need no stinkin’ parliament, and dismissed them, starting to rule by decree.
And while some people have called Trudeau a dictator (and worse), Canada has it relatively well off, rating a 98 out of 100 on the Freedom scale, behind only Sweden, Norway, Finland and New Zealand. The US, in contrast, ranked 61, after Mongolia but ahead of Jamaica.
And here’s where there should be a summation. A simple answer. A punch line. But that’s the thing. There is no simple answer. There is no one path to avoid falling into authoritarianism, no editorial that captures the complexity of politics. And reducing political discourse down to sound bites and F-Trudeau bumper stickers does nothing to encourage that.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
