Talk:Authoritarian

Authoritarian means favoring, encouraging, or enforcing faithful obedience to authority, as opposed to individual freedom.

Traits

Authoritarian personal traits are defined by issues of trust:

• a person who seeks or accepts a role as an underling would tend to lack trust in her/his own capabilities, and would look outside him/herself for direction and boundaries

• a person who has confidence in his/her own ability to adapt and thrive is more likely to look to her/himself first and to use others as examples and resources

• a person who seeks to control others would tend to lack trust in the ability or the willingness of those other people to behave properly or to achieve goals

• a person who seeks to control others would also tend to be unsure of his/her ability to deal with equals, and so is reassured being surrounded by subordinates.

Power-seekers are authoritarian.

Relationship Dynamics

An authoritarian nature is required of both/all parties in an authoritarian relationship. It needs people or persons who feel qualified to run other people's lives, and it needs willing underlings who agree that others can properly run their lives better than they can themselves.

Authoritarian people fit well into societies that practice authoritarianism as a primary social model and governance model. They mistrust people who display independence of mind, because they see such persons as a threat to the comfortable routine of obeying orders or of issuing orders and having them obeyed.

Leadership

Leadership, while it may be part of authoritarianism, is distinct and can exist quite handily without authoritarian traits. Independent, self-realized persons frequently and easily take leadership roles, or seek leadership in any number of situations, based on situational competence, but the salient difference is that the relationships are built on trust and convenience, and they are dissolved when the need is outgrown. Thus, it is useful to make a distinction between leadership by example and leadership based on authority or entrenched tradition.

Contrary to popular belief, authoritarian people ("overlords" OR underlings) are not precluded from being libertarian, or at least co-existing in a libertarian-tending society. All that is required is that the relationship be consensual and that it have opting-out provisions.

Summary

An authoritarian nature, or authoritarian personality traits are neither good nor bad in themselves. They are simply one mode of confronting situations, and can be considered part of the human "tool chest" of coping strategies. Such traits become problematic only when they are combined with violence, or when used to excuse improper actions ("I was just following orders").