In my refusal to comply with Minnesota governor Kim Jong Walz's WuFlu Burqa "mandate", which he wrote on a piece of toilet paper along with his signature, I've been avoiding stores, and in fact hadn't been inside a single establishment since July, when the "mandate" went into place.

Until today.

I wanted a birthday cake for my daughter, and having no other way to obtain one, I went into the local grocery store, sans burqa-- I don't even own one, and would never, ever compromise my principles in that way: "my body, my choice" as the Lefties like to say.

The thing I quickly discovered is that while absolutely everyone was staring at me-- how sad is that, in and of itself-- the absolute cowardice which has gripped the population cuts both ways: the same psychology stopping them from standing up for their freedom prevented them from actually confronting me, even though I'm certain from the glances that several of them desired to do so.

Which leads me to the topic of this post: in the 1950s, a fellow named Theodor Adorno headlined the creation of a book called "The Authoritarian Personality". As a partial aside and preface, I have strong suspicions, based on Adorno's connection to the formation of the insane "Cultural Marxist" ideology, that he's rather a crackpot: do not take any further praise as an endorsement of his views, as I have not read any of his works-- only isolated excerpts.

But just as was the case with Marx himself, there are still nuggets of truth buried beneath the intellectual rubble.

In this case, those nuggets take the form of his observations regarding-- as the book title suggests-- "authoritarian personalities". Understandably, his examples suffer from recency bias as they are almost all rooted in the Nazi disaster, which had just come fully unraveled a mere five years before the publication of this aforementioned work. I would also wager to guess that, like all intellectuals of his ilk, examples were cherry-picked for political purposes, although I have no direct proof having not read the book: it's just an intuition based on experience.

Sort of like how Wikipedia has an extensive article covering "right-wing authoritarianism"-- but no article at all involving "left-wing authoritarianism". Part of that is because the use of "right-wing" in that sense means authoritarian, and the article even admits that the "right-wing" authoritarians in Russia, working by that definition, were the Soviet Communists.

Riffing on that theme, I've observed over the past few years especially how the terms "left / liberal" and "right / conservative" are no longer descriptive in America-- or rather, they are descriptive in the reverse: today's "liberals" are actually right-wing, authoritarian theocrats who want a strict social hierarchy imposed at gun-point-- whereas today's "conservatives" are, using Adorno's language from the 1950's, "left-wing liberals": in other words, non-authoritarian.

For example: Adorno described authoritarians as people who are concerned with authority and obedience, and who tend to be ethnocentric-- as in, only members of their own nationality or religious group are accepted. Sounds an awful lot like the DNC convention to me: it's black-versus-white, gay-versus-straight, women-versus-men, and anyone who questions the victim status of those former groups-- who questions the religion-- deserves to be fired from their jobs, have their houses set on fire, chased out of restaurants, have their bank account retracted, and so on.

But here is the most interesting part-- he recognized that authoritarians were inherently insecure: that because of a hatred of their parents-- and I routinely encounter millennials who think their by-most-standards good parents were the root of all evil-- they displace that hate and anger onto those around them. Their insecurity leads them to reinforce the existing structures, in order to provide stability. Think about how "the Left" today are the establishment, pro-war and all, much to the bemusement of commentators.

Any criticism, observed Adorno, of these norms-- in modern times think fifty seven genders, men can be women and vice-versa, Donald Trump is evil, Christians are oppressive, and so forth-- was a personal attack on the believer's security: that's why today's Lefties react so violently when their religion is questioned!

Interestingly, he also concluded that children who develop a fear of their parents become excessively respectful to authority figures. I see this with individuals such as my father-in-law, whose childhood memories primarily involve avoiding his father, and his father's belt: as a result, he's one of the most micro-managing, controlling people I've ever met, and I inadvertently but nonetheless frequently annoy him with my relaxed views regarding rules and authority.

Theodor Adorno thus joins other misguided luminaries such as Marx or Keynes on the list of "people who had the big things wrong, but many of the little things correct"-- illustrating how you need to be open to inspiration from anywhere, even if the teacher is unaware of the lesson.