Verified by 
What if our DNA forces certain decisions on us? It does for sexual preference. What if, confronted with some decision, the DNA which provided the initial architecture for our brains speaks the loudest, sets the agenda, and compels us to act one way and not another?
Let’s examine a specific case: Trump’s ascendency. We will see that our DNA may well be driving the thunder on the right and Trump’s rise.
As I argued in a recent blog, the ascendancy of Mr. Trump is a Black Swan — a very important but impossible to predict event (the September 11 attacks were Platonic Black Swans). With Black Swans, special humans, usually Scientists, are deployed to explain what happened and to try to formulate work-arounds and ways to avoid future, similar bad events. (Of course, by definition, predicting the next Black Swan is impossible.) Scientists (psychological, political, economic) suggest that the single best explanation of Trump’s ascendancy is . . . Authoritarianism. That’s right, many people love authority, and the majority of them support Trump. For lovers of authority, the stronger and more authoritative the authority, the better. And loving authority is almost certainly genetic, not learned.
The issues here are large. I refer the independent, following-up reader to (1) The rise of American authoritarianism: A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving Donald Trump's ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016, by Amanda Taub (March 2016); (2) Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler; and (3) Kahneman’s and Tversky’s research which lead to their Prospect Theory; see Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.
Here’s the gist.
(1) The bad is stronger than the good. That is, among Homo sapiens, negative events have a greater impact on the individual than positive events of the same on-paper magnitude and type. Humans therefore, try to avoid the bad more than they seek the good. As Baumeister, Finkenauer, and Vohs put it: “You are more upset about losing $50 than you are happy about gaining $50.” (See their Bad Is Stronger Than Good Review of General Psychology, 2001, 5, 4 323-370.)
(2) Modern society, from one point of view — the authoritarian one — is very bad and getting worse. The working class is being destroyed. By far most of the people of that class work two or more jobs just to put food on the table and have a roof over their heads. The rich control most of the nation’s wealth and power. Race is becoming an even more serious issue than it already is. Diversity in the U.S. is increasing — the U.S. has had its first black president. This puts extra strain on those who fear other races. Transgendered people sometimes use, and feel entitled to use, the bathroom of the gender they transitioned to. Evolution is taught openly. Muslims live and worship openly in this Christian nation. An Islamic state of a particularly radical bent is emerging in the Middle East. An afternoon spent on the web is enough to learn how to build a dirty bomb and detonate it. The old virtues are eschewed. The old ways are ignored. iPhones are required for modern living. The end is nigh. . . . But things are going to get far worse before they get better, assuming that they do get better. Huge social change is upon us whether we want it to be or not, and independently of what we imagine. Global warming and 15 to 25 billion humans needing food and fresh water daily, are going to completely up-end our current social structure (though these latter bad things are mostly denied by the lovers of authority).
(3) Evolution long ago produced a group of humans who have what is now called a pro-authority psychology profile. Such humans love strong authority. Authoritarians (as they are called), by and large, are born, not made. Loving authority is in our genes. Note, all mammals who function in groups have hierarchical classes and centralized authority. So authoritarianism runs deeper than just human DNA.
(4) Stanley Feldman, in the early 1990s, figured out a highly reliable, simple test to test for this profile using these four questions:
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: independence or respect for elders?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: obedience or self-reliance?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: to be considerate or to be well-behaved?
- Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have: curiosity or good manners?
Lovers of authority value hierarchy, order, and conformity over equality, freedom, innovation, imagination, diversity (see Taub, referenced above). This pro-authoritarian profile persists in modern human populations.
(5) Authoritarians are extra-sensitive to perceived social threats. When they feel threatened socially, they react by rejecting outsiders of all sorts. So, e.g., they reject gays, transgendered people, Muslims, immigrants, scientists, etc.
(6) Unhappily, this strain of authoritarianism apparently runs through all of us to some extent. Taub reports that Hetherington and Elizabeth Suhay found that with some social threats, like terrorism, even non-authoritarians often become authoritarian. The key here is that authoritarians, even mild ones, fear other kinds people — the more different, the greater the fear.
(7) Trump supporters always score high on the love-of-authoritarianism test. If you meet a Trump supporter, or are one, then the probability that you are pro-authority is high.
So, what we have is that a large group of humans, world-wide, are going to move to stifle, block, hinder, prevent, slow-down social change. Such change is upon us anyway. Profound change — change that most authoritarians deny exists, like global warming. To cope with this change and keep humankind flourishing, we need more innovation, more science, more engineering, more inclusion, more open-mindedness, more willingness to explore and manipulate. But what we need more of is exactly what the Authoritarians want to block. If the authoritarians win out, the coming changes may usher in some sort of social and cultural collapse.
So, what of the future? Are we doomed? As we become more and more technologically advanced and therefore more and more one world, the old social orders will die. Authoritarians, like Trump and all his supporters, will perhaps rise up to prevent or slow down change. They will do this primarily by destroying everything they fear. Which is everything new and different. If we add in that authoritarianism is probably due to our DNA, we get a bleak vision of our future.
Is authoritarianism a mental disease? Not straightforwardly. It was arguably useful for our flourishing when we were mere African apes. Perhaps it was useful to some extent up through World War II. But it is clearly not useful now. Just like our love of fats and sugars was important for our early flourishing, but now is killing us by making us overweight, our love of authority could well make bad situations worse. Could psychology and neuroscience cure it? Maybe. But we’d have to know much more about how our brains and minds work. And that requires science, and lots of it.
