A Conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Authoritarians, Debasement, and Defending Democracy
In early June 2024, Ruth Ben-Ghiat and I spoke about the psychology of authoritarians and what drives people to debase themselves and submit to them.
A video of our brief conversation here.
Our conversation was followed by a Q&A with the Lucid community (which was not recorded) during which I touched on a cluster of important related issues, including:
the psycho-social forces that enable and facilitate corrupt power-abusers.
understanding how we got here—the countless micro-maneuvers by which wannabe autocrats ascend to power, not only by weaponizing institutional loopholes and the blind idolatry of supporters but also countless flawed but rationalized decisions by progressive citizens, the liberal media, and defenders of Democracy and the rule of law that unwittingly abdicate power and unthinkingly foster wrong-doing, corruption, and the normalization of cruelty and violence.
why it’s important to overcome arcane prohibitions against publicly leveraging psychological expertise (such as the Goldwater Rule) in print and broadcast media to be able to accurately spotlight (not formally diagnose) autocrats’ and tyrants’ psychopathologies—identifying and exploiting the vulnerabilities and weaknesses created by their psychological damage—and to break down the manipulative psychological tactics they employ to overwhelm and defeat systems intended to protect against them.
understanding the similarities between corrupt business leaders and authoritarians, including the importance of referencing established best practices in assessing leadership competencies and characteristics as a bulwark against elevating charismatic but dangerous extremists whose appealing promises of enrichment for all disguise a kleptocratic grift.
a call-to-action on what can proactively be done to combat aspiring authoritarians and their cronies before they consolidate power, and seeing denial, magical thinking, resignation, or collapse into anxious pessimism as absolutely tactically inadvisable but also as a symptomatic feature of the autocrat’s perverse system intended to induce submission into mass helplessness.
Additional Related Resources:
An interview Professor Ben-Ghiat did with me in 2021 on the psychology of fraudsters and abusers (also accessible here).
How To Disguise Impotence As Power. Forbes November 2018
How To Become a Malevolent Leader: A Field Guide for Aspiring Fraudsters and Tyrants. Forbes January 2021
The Psychology of Integrity and Corruption. FCPA Blog January 2017
Imposters Are Everywhere: How To Avoid Being Duped. Forbes May 2019
