Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ljm | Hacker News Reader

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If you go with the horseshoe theory then the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right. The only thing that changes really is the framing of the issue and the motivation.

If you're looking at people being criticised because they're not writing characters of their own skin colour or sexuality, or 'staying in their lane' with their culture, or because their own experiences don't conform to some expectation (like the author criticised for describing slavery but not how it was in the US), then you're still looking at segregation and oppression, but approaching it in a way that is falsely empowering. It is still massively authoritarian and oppressive and extreme, no matter how virtuous people think the left wing is, and it's certainly not liberal. There's just nothing good about being at the extreme end of anything.

But that aside, and with the crowds on twitter, I just wonder what it will take for people like that to be happy, and not perpetually angry. So much aggression couched in seemingly kind language.

I don't think the horseshoe theory works. The critical factor is authoritarianism. Which is a grown-up word for bullying and narcissism.

Authoritarians are invariably toxic damaged people who are full of rage and are looking for a target to make themselves feel better.

Sometimes they end up on the left. Sometimes they end up on the right. Sometimes they end up in management or venture capital.

Same issues, same dynamic, different context.

The difference is authoritarians on the right are more likely to use physical violence. "Cultural" authoritarians are more likely to use social exclusion - brigading on social media, getting people fired, and so on.

The key point is that the presenting issue is irrelevant. The social dynamic and mode of relationship - angry tribalism used to justify violence without any sense of context - is the real tell.

You're just redescribing the horseshoe theory. The X axis is political leaning, the Y axis is level of authoritarianism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory

Horseshoe theory implies (if not explies, if that's a word) that going far left or far right automatically entails becoming authoritarian, and that they converge as you go farther "left" or "right". That's pretty demonstrably false, and even a two-dimensional political compass (let alone one with more axes) does a much better job of describing actual political stances than a horseshoe can. Authoritarianism v. libertarianism and socialism v. capitalism are separate and independent axes, and societies have existed across the whole gamut, corner-to-corner-to-corner-to-corner and everything in between.

I always viewed it as descriptive and not prescriptive, so I wouldn't say it implies movement across the authoritarian axis just by moving more right or left.

I feel like even as a descriptive theory it doesn't really map all that well to reality, though.

Pretty sure leftist authoritarianism exists and is violent. i.e.: Communist Russia, Maoist China, Cuba.

Portland.

Bob Altemeyer would disagree. He formulated the idea of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) as a psychological condition. His research discovered that there is no corresponding left-wing authoritarianism -- that even the authoritarianism exhibited by followers of Stalin or Mao was right-wing.

Kinda hard to be authoritarian if one of your central beliefs is in the fraternity and equality of all. It's more useful to describe Stalinist USSR or Maoist China as right-wing regimes cloaked in leftist rhetoric.

Thomas Costello has found countering data: https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)

All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.

Have to agree. If Mao and Stalin can be disqualified as being left-wing due to the contradiction between their actions and the leftist values of equality and universal solidarity, then, by the same token, Hitler and Mussolini must be disqualified as being right-wing because of the contradiction between their actions and the values of limited government and rule of law.

Critical race theory has more in common with National Socialism than with the leftist values of equality and solidarity, because when you get past the verbal subterfuge which ostensibly denies that race exists, you find a deeply racist ideology of racial collectives locked in a struggle for supremacy, with one particular collective singled out as evil beyond redemption and in need of destruction. We have seen that before, and it is undeniable where it must lead. Critical Race Theory is Nazism barely disguised by a light sprinkling of leftist pixie-dust.

The common factor between the extremes of left and right is collectivism. Totalitarian demagogues, left or right, favor collectivism as a tool of control because it detaches people from their moral obligations to other individual human beings and transfers their loyalties wholly to an abstraction controlled by that demagogue.

I completely agree. Honestly, I'm pretty sure those people have no friends in real life, the way they jump down peoples' throats for every minor thing, so they gravitate online to find echo chambers. Their cohorts online are only "allies", not real friends. They will turn on each other as soon as one of them challenges their ideology.

I agree that it isn't really about 'left' or 'right', as both leanings are held by plenty of rational non-extreme people. Extremism itself seems to be growing in our culture, and as long as we're focused on putting a political label on it I think it will continue to grow. It is very tempting to believe that everyone you disagree with is part of the most extreme representation of that disagreement, because that makes it easy to dismiss them, and ultimately I think that just pushes people more to the extreme ends.

I don't know how we get out of this. I can't think of a good way to encourage empathy over outrage, as the former is often too painful and the latter often too enjoyable. In the information age it is far too easy to find the hedonistic outrage-dens, and there's a lot of money to be had running such places.

Speaking of likening echo chambers to opium dens, the Rat Park[0] experiments suggest that environment does play a significant role in drug-seeking behavior, and it does seem that a lot of this extremism can be traced back to things like the increasing wealth-gap, the hollowing out of rural America, systemic racism, rampant political corruption, and other societal ills. Therefore, maybe it isn't necessary to address the symptom of extremism directly --by, say, trying to teach people empathy-- but instead focus on treating the underlying illnesses. Of course, since our politicians are elected by the people they represent, and it would seem far easier to manipulate people's outrage for votes than to focus on actually fixing things, that might not be possible either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park

It's interesting you're being downvoted - because from the way I'm reading this you're not advocating that this theory is true but merely pointing out that it exists, describing it's attributes, and showing a couple of examples that seem to overlap with the theory. Which only seems to shore up your last statement.

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