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from the what-y'all-love-social-sciences dept.
It's 2017. Why are there still Nazis?
It's a question many observers are asking after hundreds of white supremacists, many displaying swastikas and Confederate battle flags and shouting racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist slogans, took to the streets of Charlottesville, Va., this weekend, provoking violence that claimed the life of one counter-protester and resulted in multiple injuries.
The continued existence of people who hold openly white supremacist ideologies more than seven decades after the fall of the Third Reich can be explained, in part, through a social theory developed in the early 1990s. Social dominance theory seeks to explain how hierarchy-enhancing ideologies do not just drive social inequality, but are also a result of it. It suggests that a single personality trait, called social dominance orientation (SDO), strongly predicts a person's political and social views, from foreign policy and criminal justice to civil rights and the environment. What's more, it offers insight into how ideologies such as racism, sexism, and xenophobia tend to arise from the unequal distribution of a society's resources.
"Social dominance theory provides a yardstick for measuring social and political ideologies," says Felicia Pratto, who developed the theory with fellow psychologist Jim Sidanius. "SDO is one way – not the only one – to try to figure out what those ideologies are 'about.'"
You too can take the Social Dominance Orientation quiz to determine your nazi quotient.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 16 2017, @11:41PM (1 child)
If you don't like people turning to stupid answers like authoritarianism (which includes fascism, along with communism, mercantilism, and all the other de facto slave governments), then get your kids out of government schools where authoritarianism is pounded into their soft skulls for the mandated-at-gunpoint twelve years, more or less.
No wonder the government-educated majority look to government solutions to things they don't like. Sure sucks to find out that you're on the wrong end of government authority, otherwise known as government guns, eh? You can help fix that by recognizing that the only legal authority a government like the USA's has is NO MORE than that which is delegated to it by its source, which is no more authority than a single human being has all by himself. (But that also means you don't get to try to point government guns as people you don't like anymore. What will you choose: freedom, or the petard of slavery you seem to find yourself currently hoist by?)
(Score: 2) by Taibhsear on Monday September 18 2017, @05:09PM
If you think public schools are authoritarian you should see religious private schools. They've basically mastered it. 12 years of Catholic school experience here, some of which was back when nuns and brothers were still allowed to teach.