Reality

"Reality" [is] a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being independent of our own volition (we cannot "wish them away).... [an] order [that] is relative to a particular socio-historical situation [but] appears to the individual as the natural way of looking at the world.

Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality

The Authoritarian Personality

• Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values.

• Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealised moral authorities of the in-group.

• Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded.

• Tendency to…condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values.

• The belief in mystical determinants of the individual’s fate….

• Preoccupation with the dominance- submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures….

• Generalized hostility, vilification of the human.

• The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses.

• Exaggerated concern with sexual “goings-on.”


From a March 23, 2017 New York Review piece on the Frankfurt School: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/23/frankfurt-school-headquarters-neo-marxism/