Tag: Authoritarian personality

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Reiner’s need

Many of the recent posts have had something to do with Anthony Reiner, specifically his moral and psychological weakness.

I’ve been trying to understand the things that are not only hurting Reiner, his psychological weakness, but are also hurting the people around him, his moral weakness. I’ve realised his moral weakness is his persecution of the drug user, implicitly informed by his psychological weakness, an authoritarian personality.

What I haven’t addressed so far is his need.

To paraphrase John Truby, Reiner’s need is what he must fulfil within himself in order to have a better life. I have to admit, I’m having difficulty reconciling Reiner’s need with Adam’s, knowing how their individual needs interact.

The events of Carrion transform Adam from a self-righteous policeman into, what I can only describe as, a caring insurgent. I realise that reads like an oxymoron but essentially that’s what he becomes. By the end he cares about Christine, putting her needs first, for the first time in their relationship, even though what she asks devastates him. From this personal crisis comes his new moral action, he picks up a gun to fight prohibition. The story ends only after he has taken this action, finally making the moral argument against security and for freedom.

What does all this mean when considering Reiner and his need? What must he fulfil within himself in order to have a better life, and how does he argue for security? I think the answer to this question can be found in his authoritarian personality.

Reiner and the totalitarian mindset

In “Reiner and the totalitarian mindset” I noted Alfonso Montuori’s characterisation of the totalitarian mindset as a response to the stress of contemporary pluralism. Basically we live in complex times, full of uncertainty, and feel threatened. Backed into a corner we have a tendency to succumb to black-and-white solutions.

When I translate this back to Reiner, it indicates a course of action. Adam’s refusal to kill Christine turns Reiner’s reality upside down. Until this point he considered Adam a protege, and so perceives his refusal to kill Christine as nothing short of a treasonous betrayal. He has a psychological need to restore order, return Adam to the fold. Unable to make that happen, he has a moral need to destroy him.

Reiner’s attempts to enforce prohibition are his attempts to make the moral argument against freedom and for security. The punch, counter-punch, of antagonist and protagonist play out as Adam and Reiner fight over the kind of world they will live in.

Reiner’s argument for security is crushed by Adam’s argument for freedom. If this were Reiner’s story instead of Adam’s, the argument for security would crush the argument for freedom.

One final thing. At some point I will have to turn all of this conjecture into a screenplay, but until I’m clear about each character that seems like a folly.

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Margaret Thatcher’s authoritarian personality

Margaret Thatcher died on Monday. In death, as in life, she divides opinion.

Personally I think she was the worst thing that happened to this country since World War Two. All the problems we currently face have their genesis in her premiership.

The financial collapse of 2008 was a direct result, not just of the economic strategies she initiated, but more importantly a way of thinking she promoted. The senior managers and business brains of the banking sector, were the Young Turks of the financial industry when she came to power. The mantra of rampant self-interest she espoused, and they took to with such vigour, is the same “I’m all-right Jack” attitude, that lets these big-bonused-bankers do business the way they have and continue to.

Her devotees say she was a strong leader. For me she was a “strong leader” only to those who need that kind of guidance. To the rest of us she was nothing more than a bully. I think there was a callousness in her leadership that was nothing short of sadistic. She had a viciousness about her that I see in the “tough decisions” fiscal policy of George Osborne. No to a plan “B”, “C” or “D” is all-right when your worth £4.3 million, have a Notting Hill property worth £1.8 million and a wife who’s father is a life peer. A life peer who interestingly was also a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.

Recent entries about Carrion, specifically those regarding Anthony Reiner, have made me realise something about Margaret Thatcher. Her success was due in no small part to her authoritarian personality. At this point it might be a good idea for you to take a look at Erich Fromm’s 1957 article “The Authoritarian Personality“. I referenced it in posts that grapple with the totalitarian mindset of prohibition and Reiner’s authoritarian personality.

Fromm makes some interesting insights, notably the symbiotic relationship between the passive and active authoritarian. If I were to characterise Reiner as a passive-authoritarian, an individual who belittles himself so he can, as part of something greater, become great himself. I would characterise Thatcher as the active-authoritarian, the sadist who feels strong because she has incorporated others.

To those who say she encouraged people to be free of the state, to go out there and do it for themselves, I say the free market is not freedom. Ask anyone struggling to pay a utility bill, or trying to buy a house, or even secure a living wage, how free do they feel? Market freedom is only freedom to those who have. If you already have it, you’re free to take it somewhere else. What if you don’t?

That argument aside, one of the most interesting thing for me, in realising Thatcher had an authoritarian personality, is realising how many people have the emotional need to follower her. The irony of her message of self-reliance and freedom is actually a message of subjugation. You must supplicate yourself at the alter of Thatcher or you’re one of “them” and if you’re one of “them” you’re vilified, blamed for everything that is wrong with the world. If we rid ourselves of them, things will be better for us. That people is the dynamic of totalitarianism. Which is perhaps Thatcher’s real legacy.

Personally I do not mourn her passing, because unfortunately I have to survive the world she created.

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Throwing out the first act

Finishing my last post brought an insight that means I’m ditching the first act, at least those scenes involving Adam and Reiner.

The ideas for this change bubbled up after a lot of research about Reiner’s totalitarian mindset. I’ve been concerned since the outset with the action that puts Adam in conflict with Reiner. The idea I’ve been working with, has his relationship with Christine provide the conflict, that pits the two men against each other.

But I’ve never really been happy with how that scenario plays out. It wasn’t strong enough, and doesn’t explain Adam’s decision to put his self-righteous attitudes to one side and save Christine. Neither does it explain the vitriol Reiner has for Adam.

What I’ve really been looking for is something that serves two functions.

First it has to force Adam to land definitively on Christine’s side. Second it has to make an absolute enemy of Reiner. I think I’ve found the solution in the hierarchical structure of the totalitarian regime. Reiner puts his standing with the regime on the line when he sponsors Adam’s induction. The price of admission is Christine, Adam must kill her. When he refuses, he not only puts himself on the wrong side of the regime, he also makes a mortal enemy of Reiner.

Adam is cast out, throw into a cell with Christine and John, condemn to suffer the fate of all junkies in the coming genocide. This changed scenario brings with it an inciting event that kick-starts the story. It allies him with Christine but lets her be an opponent. It gives Reiner a character specific reason to hate Adam.

This mirrors the final battle, resonating against Adam’s choice to help Christine commit suicide.

I hope that all makes sense, this really is me thinking out loud.

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Inciting Adam

While writing about Reiner’s authoritarian personality I noted the polarisation of freedom and security.

Reiner’s authoritarian personality

The conflict between Adam and Reiner is a fight over the kind of world they will live in. “Will it be a world ruled by freedom or one ruled security?”

If Adam is to have a better life at the end, he has to reject the world of security demanded by Reiner, and make a positive choice for freedom.

The seed of this decision is sowed in the stories inciting event.

Adam has to do something that, to quote John Truby, “causes the hero to come up with a goal and take action”. The difficulty I have is that Adam and Reiner are part of the same tribe, they’re policemen in a totalitarian state that has built its identity on attacking drug users. Adam at some level shares this totalitarians mindset, he couldn’t be a policeman if he didn’t.

So what would make him question the orthodoxy?

If part of the totalitarian mindset, that Adam is part of, is the authoritarian personality exemplified by Reiner, an individual willing to belittle himself so he can, as part of something greater, become great himself, what startles Adam out of that delusion? My gut tells me the only thing powerful enough to force that kind of revelation in Adam, is a direct attack on Christine.

Whatever self-righteous stance he might take against her drug use, she’s still his sister, the only remaining member of his family. Whatever he believes at the beginning of the story, when she is attacked, he’s compelled to save her.

At present the inciting event happens as Reiner attacks a surrogate for Christine. Adam gets a call from her as Reiner beats the surrogate to a pulp. Reiner’s actions, and Christine’s plea for help, prompt Adam to abandon his post and go to help her.

The attack on Adam would need to be more sustained before he finally reject Reiner. Perhaps it’s in the symbiotic tendency of the authoritarian personality, seen in the tyrannical father who torments his wife but is subservient to his superiors. Perhaps Reiner uses Christine against Adam, he’s forced to choose.

Instinct tells me that’s actually the choice Adam has to make in the final battle, the last stepping stone that gets him to the freedom side of the river. What I’m looking for, is the first stepping stone on that journey.

I’m sure it has to be a direct attack on Christine. Reiner makes a move against Christine, which forces Adam to step in. His instinctive response puts him in direct conflict with Reiner.

With this choice made I now have to go back and restructure the first thirty five minutes of the plot.

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Reiner’s authoritarian personality

In my two previous posts I tried to pin down the totalitarian mindset, what is it that makes Reiner such a vitriolic exponent of prohibition? That prompted me to uncovered Reiner’s moral and psychological weakness. Those things that are hurting not only himself, his psychological weakness, but also the people around him, his moral weakness.

Reiner’s moral weakness is his persecution of the drug user, a characteristic implicitly informed by his psychological weakness, an authoritarian personality. The realisation that Reiner has an authoritarian personality fits perfectly with the standing I have for him in my head but ignorance forces me to ask, what is an authoritarian personality?

I found a good answer in Erich Fromm‘s 1957 article “The Authoritarian Personality“. Fromm defines the authoritarian personality as “the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom”.

I’m struck by this phrase “to endure freedom”.

At the core of the conflict between Adam and Reiner is the polarisation of freedom and security. As John Truby points out “a true opponent not only wants to prevent the hero from achieving his desire but is competing with the hero for the same goal“.

On first inspection the two men have completely different goals. Adam needs to save Christine, and Reiner wants to destroy all drug users. On the surface their desires are different, but I’ve realised the two men are actually fighting over the kind of world they will live in. Will it be a world ruled by freedom or one ruled security?

If Adam is to have a better life at the end of Carrion he must choose freedom to the exclusion of that demanded by Reiner. For Reiner freedom always exceeds to security, the safety of the nation, the security of belonging to something greater, a mindset that accepts the logic of the ruler and the ruled.

Exploring the digression a little further I am struck by the torturous state of mind that Reiner must suffer if freedom is something that has to be endured. The freedom implicit in a choice to take drugs must be physically painful for him. Which gives an indication of his hostility for drug users, and why he is compelled to correct the imbalance with violence. 

That said Reiner’s inability to endure freedom is not the whole story. Fromm’s description of the authoritarian character is complex, more detailed that I can outline here, but when I apply it to Reiner, he is described as an immature personality who “can neither love nor make use of reason”.

Reiner feels alone, gripped by fear, and needs to feel a bond with something greater. A bond he finds “in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity”. His adherence to the prohibitionist cause is a subconscious desire to be part of a larger unit. What Fromm might describe as “masochistic and submissive character aims” has Reiner belittle himself so he can,”as part of something greater… become great himself”.

Reiner is a “passive-authoritarian” and can only survive by connecting with the figure of an “active-authoritarian”. A character type who, I now realise, is missing from Carrion. He is present in the abstract, in the form of a government, in the “Code-10” laws that seek to marginalise the drug user, but as a tangible character that Reiner has to look up to, has to submit to, they’re missing.

I need to fill this gap if the story world of Carrion is to work. It’s a mistake on my part to think Reiner can function without this figure.

Finally I think it’s a mistake to understand Reiner as an entirely passive. Inherent in the notion of the active and passive authoritarian is the notion of hierarchy. Reiner’s masochistic desire to be ruled, also comes with a sadistic desire to rule. It’s part of the symbiotic tendency inherent in the authoritarian personality, and goes some way to codifying the relationship between Adam and Reiner.

Fromm likens this characteristic to the tyrannical father “who treats his wife and children in a sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in the office he becomes the submissive employee”. Reiner treats Adam in a sadistic manner but in his dealings with his boss is submissive. Put simply he’s a bully.

I’m sure that Reiner’s desire to dominate Adam plays some part in Adam’s rejection of Reiner, but the exact nature of his choice eludes me at the moment. In the story world of Carrion, where the totalitarian mindset is all pervasive, what makes Adam step back and pause for thought?

Perhaps the simple act of hesitation puts him at odds with Reiner? He can smell the scepticism, which is enough to elicits the wrath of the pedant in Reiner.

Adam’s “rebellion” cuts Reiner to the quick, the same way freedom is something he has to endure?

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Reiner and the totalitarian mindset

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Anthony Reiner, and struggling to understand what makes him such a willing exponent of prohibition?

Within Carrion prohibition is the product of a totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism is “a political system where the state holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life whenever necessary”.

The question I’m really asking is, what attracts a person to totalitarianism?

To answer that question we need to understand, what allows totalitarianism to flourish? The short answer is uncertainty. In his paper “How to make enemies and influence people” Alfonso Montuori characterises the “totalitarian mindset” as a response to the stress of contemporary pluralism.

Living in complex times full of ambiguity and uncertainty, we feel threatened, and when we’re backed into a corner we have a tendency to succumb to “simplistic, black-and-white solutions”. Montuori goes on to note that “individuals all over the world have sought relief from the uncertainty of a pluralistic world in the arms of absolute belief systems of a religious fundamentalist and/or political/nationalistic nature”.

Within the world of Carrion, the threat posed by drugs is lightning rod, a life-threatening danger, that allows the government to “drastically reduce ambiguity and complexity”. The forces of authority instinctively “fall back on a form of very simplistic… totalitarian thinking”.

Just as the Nazi’s persecuted the Jews, so the prohibitionist persecutes the drug user.

(I realise that this is only half finished but I’ve taken this idea as far as I can for today. My thoughts need further clarification so will have to wait for another post.)