Social Dominance Authoritarians – Rule By Fearful Fantasies

In 2006, John Dean wrote this about neoconservatives in his book Conservatives Without Conscience:

Neoconservatives are a relatively small group of social dominance authoritarians, with significant, if not disproportionate, influence.

Dean also stated that, “Neoconservatism first surfaced in the public during the Reagan Administration.” As posted here and elsewhere, neoconservatism started with Leo Strauss, a WWII German immigrant, in the late 1940s.

Also discussed here are the ways in which American social dominance authoritarians have actually helped their Islamic counterparts. This posting uses a BBC documentary to detail that relationship where both groups use fear mongering to wreak havoc on all the world and build the myths of Soviet superiority and world-wide al-Qaeda organization.

In late 2004, Adam Curtis’ documentary, three part series, The Power of Nightmares – The Rise of the Politics of Fear, was aired on the BBC. In it, Leo Strauss and other American neocons are compared to Sayed Kotb and other Islamic radicals. Both groups, as John Dean describes, are “social dominance authoritarians, with significant, if not disproportionate, influence.”

Curtis describes what these authoritarians have done and said over recent decades. This documentary is an extension of what John Dean, Shadia Drury, and others have written about the authoritarians of our time. These authoritarians exist and this documentary shows how they rule by fear and Noble Lies.

Below, the documentary is presented in 18 segments. You will see how Leo Strauss, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Sayed Kotb, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other Islamic radicals used Nobel Lies, or “simple powerful myths,” to promote fear and war. Eventually, these two groups actually, but not intentionally, created the myth of an al-Qaeda organization.

Both groups of social dominance authoritarians (SDA) feel the same moral duty to put a stop to individual freedoms that are corrupting the morals of America, Egypt and the rest of the Middle East. Both groups see the other as an evil that must be eliminated, and use their imaginations to replace broken dreams with frightening nightmares and thus generate fear of each other.

The original documentary consisted of three one hour programs. The SDAs gain power fighting the Soviet myth in part 1, turn inward after the collapse of the Soviet Union in part 2 while failing to rally the “masses,” and then regain control with the myth of al-Qaeda in part 3.

(YouTube provides both 18 short segments, shown below, and three longer segments. Links to the longer segments are listed at the end of this posting. )

Three longer videos available from one video blogger:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3