Today's excerpt begins on page 4.
There seems little reason to doubt that ideology-in-readiness (ideological receptivity) and ideology-in-words and in action are essentially the same stuff.
The description of an individual’s total ideology must portray not only the organization on each level but organization among levels.
What the individual consistently says in public, what he says when he feels safe from criticism, what he thinks but will not say at all, what he thinks but will not admit to himself, what he is disposed to think or to do when various kinds of appeal are made to him—all these phenomena may be conceived of as constituting a single structure.
The structure may not be integrated, it may contain contradictions as well as consistencies, but it is organized in the sense that the constituent parts are related in psychologically meaningful ways.
In order to understand such a structure, a theory of the total personality is necessary.
According to the theory that has guided the present research, personality is a more or less enduring organization of forces within the individual.
These persisting forces of personality help to determine response in various situations, and it is thus largely to them that consistency of behavior —whether verbal or physical—is attributable.
But behavior, however consistent, is not the same thing as personality; personality lies behind behavior and within the individual.
The forces of personality are not responses but readinesses for response; whether or not a readiness will issue in overt expression depends not only upon the situation of the moment but upon what other readinesses stand in opposition to it.
Personality forces which are inhibited are on a deeper level than those which immediately and consistently express themselves in overt behavior.
What are the forces of personality and what are the processes by which they are organized?
For theory as to the structure of personality we have leaned most heavily upon Freud, while for a more or less systematic formulation of the more directly observable and measurable aspects of personality we have been guided primarily by academic psychology.
The forces of personality are primarily needs (drives, wishes, emotional impulses) which vary from one individual to another in their quality, their intensity, their mode of gratification, and the objects of their attachment, and which interact with other needs in harmonious or conflicting patterns.
There are primitive emotional needs, there are needs to avoid punishment and to keep the good will of the social group, there are needs to maintain harmony and integration within the self.
Since it will be granted that opinions, attitudes, and values depend upon human needs, and since personality is essentially an organization of needs then personality may be regarded as a determinant of ideological preferences.
Personality is not, however, to be hypostatized as an ultimate determinant.
Far from being something which is given in the beginning, which remains fixed and acts upon the surrounding world, personality evolves under the impact of the social environment and can never be isolated from the social totality within which it occurs.
According to the present theory, the effects of environmental forces in moulding the personality are, in general, the more profound the earlier in the life history of the individual they are brought to bear.
The major influences upon personality development arise in the course of child training as carried forward in a setting of family life.
What happens here is profoundly influenced by economic and social factors.
It is not only that each family in trying to rear its children proceeds according to the ways of the social, ethnic, and religious groups in which it has membership, but crude economic factors affect directly the parents’ behavior toward the child.
This means that broad changes in social conditions and institutions will have a direct bearing upon the kinds of personalities that develop within a society.
The present research seeks to discover correlations between ideology and sociological factors operating in the individual’s past—whether or not they continue to operate in his present.
In attempting to explain these correlations the relationships between personality and ideology are brought into the picture, the general approach being to consider personality as an agency through which sociological influences upon ideology are mediated.
If the role of personality can be made clear, it should be possible better to understand which sociological factors are the most crucial ones and in what ways they achieve their effects.
Although personality is a product of the social environment of the past, it is not, once it has developed, a mere object of the contemporary environment.
What has developed is a structure within the individual, something which is capable of self-initiated action upon the social environment and of selection with respect to varied impinging stimuli, something which though always modifiable is frequently very resistant to fundamental change.
This conception is necessary to explain consistency of behavior in widely varying situations, to explain the persistence of ideological trends in the face of contradicting facts and radically altered social conditions, to explain why people in the same sociological situation have different or even conflicting views on social issues, and why it is that people whose behavior has been changed through psychological manipulation lapse into their old ways as soon as the agencies of manipulation are removed.
The conception of personality structure is the best safeguard against the inclination to attribute persistent trends in the individual to something “innate” or “basic” or “racial” within him.
The Nazi allegation that natural, biological traits decide the total being of a person would not have been such a successful political device had it not been possible to point to numerous instances of relative fixity in human behavior and to challenge those who thought to explain them on any basis other than a biological one.
Without the conception of personality structure, writers whose approach rests upon the assumption of infinite human flexibility and responsiveness to the social situation of the moment have not helped matters by referring persistent trends which they could not approve to “confusion” or “psychosis” or evil under one name or another.
There is, of course, some basis for describing as “pathological” patterns of behavior which do not conform with the most common, and seemingly most lawful, responses to momentary stimuli.
But this is to use the term pathological in the very narrow sense of deviation from the average found in a particular context and, what is worse, to suggest that everything in the personality structure is to be put under this heading.
Actually, personality embraces variables which exist widely in the population and have lawful relations one to another.
Personality patterns that have been dismissed as “pathological” because they were not in keeping with the most common manifest trends or the most dominant ideals within a society, have on closer investigation turned out to be but exaggerations of what was almost universal below the surface in that society.
What is “pathological” today may with changing social conditions become the dominant trend of tomorrow.
It seems clear then that an adequate approach to the problems before us must take into account both fixity and flexibility; it must regard the two not as mutually exclusive categories but as the extremes of a single continuum along which human characteristics may be placed, and it must provide a basis for understanding the conditions which favor the one extreme or the other.
Personality is a concept to account for relative permanence.
But it may be emphasized again that personality is mainly a potential; it is a readiness for behavior rather than behavior itself; although it consists in dispositions to behave in certain ways, the behavior that actually occurs will always depend upon the objective situation.
Where the concern is with anti-democratic trends, a delineation of the conditions for individual expression requires an understanding of the total organization of society.
It has been stated that the personality structure may be such as to render the individual susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda.
It may now be asked what are the conditions under which such propaganda would increase in pitch and volume and come to dominate in press and radio to the exclusion of contrary ideological stimuli, so that what is now potential would become actively manifest.
The answer must be sought not in any single personality nor in personality factors found in the mass of people, but in processes at work in society itself.
It seems well understood today that whether or not antidemocratic propaganda is to become a dominant' force in this country depends primarily upon the situation of the most powerful economic interests, upon whether they, by conscious design or not, make use of this device for maintaining their dominant status.
This is a matter about which the great majority of people would have little to say.
The present research, limited as it is to the hitherto largely neglected psychological aspects of fascism, does not concern itself with the production of propaganda.
It focuses attention, rather, upon the consumer, the individual for whom the propaganda is designed.
In so doing it attempts to take into account not only the psychological structure of the individual but the total objective situation in which he lives.
It makes the assumption that people in general tend to accept political and social programs which they believe will serve their economic interests.
What these interests are depends in each case upon the individual’s position in society as defined in economic and sociological terms.
An important part of the present research, therefore, was the attempt to discover what patterns of socioeconomic factors are associated with receptivity, and with resistance, to antidemocratic propaganda, however, it was considered that economic motives in the individual may not have the dominant and crucial role that is often ascribed to them.
If economic self-interest were the only determinant of opinion, we should expect people of the same socioeconomic status to have very similar opinions, and we should expect opinion to vary in a meaningful way from one socioeconomic grouping to another.
Research has not given very sound support for these expectations.
There is only the most general similarity of opinion among people of the same socioeconomic status, and the exceptions are glaring; while variations from one socioeconomic group to another are rarely simple or clear-cut.
To explain why it is that people of the same socioeconomic status so frequently have different ideologies, while people of a different status often have very similar ideologies, we must take account of other than purely economic needs.
Other than this, it is becoming increasingly plain that people very frequently do not behave in such a way as to further their material interests, even when it is clear to them what these interests are.
The resistance of white-collar workers to organization is not due to a belief that the union will not help them economically; the tendency of the small businessman to side with big business in most economic and political matters cannot be due entirely to a belief that this is the way to guarantee his economic independence.
In instances such as these the individual seems not only not to consider his material interests, but even to go against them.
It is as if he were thinking in terms of a larger group identification, as if his point of view were determined more by his need to support this group and to suppress opposite ones than by rational consideration of his own interests.
Indeed, it is with a sense of relief today that one is assured that a group conflict is merely a clash of economic interests—that each side is merely out to “do” the other— and not a struggle in which deep-lying emotional drives have been let loose.
When it comes to the ways in which people appraise the social world, irrational trends stand out glaringly.
One may conceive of a professional man who opposes the immigration of Jewish refugees on the ground that this will increase the competition with which he has to deal and so decrease his income.
However undemocratic this may be, it is at least rational in a limited sense.
But for this man to go on, as do most people who oppose Jews on occupational grounds, and accept a wide variety of opinions, many of which are contradictory, about Jews in general, and to attribute various ills of the world to them, is plainly illogical.
And it is just as illogical to praise all Jews in accordance with a “good” stereotype of them.
Hostility against groups that is based upon real frustration, brought about by members of that group, undoubtedly exists, but such frustrating experiences can hardly account for the fact that prejudice is apt to be generalized.
Evidence from the present study confirms what has often been indicated: that a man who is hostile toward one minority group is very likely to be hostile against a wide variety of others.
There is no conceivable rational basis for such generalization; and, what is more striking, prejudice against, or totally uncritical acceptance of, a particular group often exists in the absence of any experience with members of that group.
The objective situation of the individual seems an unlikely source of such irrationality; rather we should seek where psychology has already found the sources of dreams, fantasies, and misinterpretations of the world—that is, in the deep-lying needs of the personality.
This series of posts will insure that these free thinkers' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
There is a reason these books are not taught in the modern skools.
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