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JOHNRAY

This is a summary site that I have put up mainly to help anyone doing Google searches using the term: johnray . That term returns over 500 links at the moment and I think I should be in there somewhere. To help differentiate myself from all the other John Rays, the username that I mostly use on the internet is: jonjayray .

For some obscure reason, however, lots of fine and reasonable people mistake that username for my full name. They think it implies that my full name is Jon Jay Ray. My full name is in fact John Joseph Ray. But the form of address that I like best is simply my initials -- "JR". The fact that some soap-opera character was referred to in that way is in my view unfortunate. I can assure you that I neither identify with nor wish to emulate ANY soap-opera character.

It would have been so much easier if I had been christened Aloysius Finkelsteingruber or some such. I guess I should be glad that Indians are not yet big on the net. Ray is a very common Indian surname -- particularly in Bengal.

The best known John Ray is the founder of English naturalism -- a famous botanist and zoologist from centuries back (1627 - 1705) who also had some funny theological ideas -- but that is not I!

One of his sayings, however, I do like -- as it reflects my own constant attempts to write as clearly and simply as possible:

"He that uses many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink"

There are in fact a few John Rays about today even in academe (I know of an educationist and an ancient historian) but I am a retired university social science teacher -- and a blogger -- from Brisbane, Australia. If you really want to find out more about me, you can do so here.

But now that you are here, have a look at the brief summary below of my theory about the psychology of politics:


AUTHORITARIANISM IS LEFTIST


By: John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.)


"Revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon" (Friedrich Engels -- from his controversy with the Anarchists).


History


The rather obvious insight from Karl Marx's collaborator quoted above -- which associates authoritarianism with Leftism -- seems to have been totally overlooked by psychologists who purport to study "authoritarianism". This is rather surprising when we realize that the tradition of research into psychological authoritarianism traces back to The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford (1950). And the leading author (Adorno) of the study concerned was a prominent Marxist theoretician!

This overlooking of the obvious by the Adorno team was however symptomatic of their whole approach. Apparently, as committed Leftists, they wanted to explain Nazism and Fascism in a way that discredited Rightists rather than Leftists. But the theoretical convolutions required for that were from the outset truly heroic -- considering that Hitler was a socialist rather than a conservative, considering that Mussolini was a prominent Marxist theoretician, considering that Stalin had been a willing ally of Hitler as long as Hitler wanted him and considering that Hitler's most unrelenting enemy was no Leftist but the arch-Conservative Winston Churchill. From history, then, the obvious conclusion is that Nazism was simply a racist form of Leftism (Ray, 2002). How can one make that harmful to conservatives?

But the Adorno group managed their self-imposed and unlikely task after a fashion and the basic conclusions that they produced (that "authoritarianism" underlay Nazism, that authoritarianism also underlies conservatism and that authoritarianism is a "disease") were therefore hardly surprising. Only the generally Left-leaning orientation of social scientists, however, can explain why such a historically and theoretically ridiculous work turned out to be enormously popular and influential among social scientists generally.

Regrettably, however, we have known since Galileo that the popularity of a belief is no guarantee of its truth. And The Authoritarian Personality must hold some sort of record for the amount of criticism and disconfirmatory research that it has attracted. There are various summaries of this body of criticism but the first half of Altemeyer's (1981) book and Ray (1988) give a pretty good idea of it. And what the various criticisms have repeatedly shown is that only the most trivially true contentions of the Adorno theory survive the encounter with empirical testing. The most basic postulates of the theory are just plain wrong.


A better theory


The popular press refer to Communists in present day Russia as "conservatives". Yet "conservative" would once have been taken as the antithesis of "Communist". And anyone inferring that conservatives in the USA must also therefore harbour a longing for Stalinism would be rapidly disabused of the notion.

Underlying this confusion is of course the old equation of conservatism with a love of the status quo and a dislike of change and new arrangements. Journalists still implicitly use that hoary formula and, in consequence, quite reasonably refer to both Communists in Russia and anti-Communists in the USA as "conservative". Relative to the different traditions of their respective countries both groups do favour traditional values.

Clearly, however, modern times have thoroughly upset the notion that political Rightists are principally motivated by a love of the status quo. There are political parties in Russia that have similar goals and policies to what we would call the Right in the USA and in other Western countries yet they are clearly heavily reformist in a Russian context rather than defenders of the old Soviet status quo. And in the West as well, the Reagan/Thatcher "revolution" has made Rightists the big advocates of change and cast Leftists into the role of defending the status quo.

But is that a satisfactory account of the matter? Has everything changed so much overnight? Rightists are still Rightists and Leftists are still Leftists and the Left/Right divisions has been associated for so long with attitude to the status quo that there surely must be something still behind that association.

My suggested solution to the puzzle is to turn the traditional understanding on its head. It is suggested that attitude to change versus the status quo defines the political Left rather than the political Right. It is not conservatives who are FOR the status quo but rather Leftists who are AGAINST it.

Note that this implies that the two sides of politics are not mirror-images of one another. It is suggested that Rightists are simply indifferent to change rather than opposed to it whereas Leftists actively need change. Leftists and Rightists have different rather than opposite goals.

Whatever Rightists might want, however, wanting to change the existing system is the umbrella under which all "Western" Leftists at all times meet. Even at the long-gone heights of British socialism in pre-Thatcher days, for instance, British Leftists still wanted MORE socialism. That permanent and corrosive dissatisfaction with the world they live in is the main thing that defines people as Leftists. That is the main thing that they have in common.

The Rightist, by contrast, generally has no need either for change or its converse. If anything, Rightists favour progress -- both material and social. So when Rightists are conservative (cautious), it is not because of their attitude to change per se. On some occasions they may even agree with the particular policy outcomes that the Leftist claims to desire. When they resist change, then, it is mainly when it appears incautious -- and they are cautious (skeptical of the net benefits of particular policies) generally because of their realism about the limitations (selfishness, folly, shortsightedness, aggressiveness etc.) of many of their fellow humans (Ray, 1972, 1974 & 1981). So it is only vis a vis Leftists that the Right can on some occasions and in some eras appear "conservative" (in the sense of being cautious about proposals for social change).

Leftists do not of course want just any change. In particular, they want change that tends in the direction of tearing down or drastically revising existing authorities, power structures and social arrangements. And this generally takes the form of advocating greater equality between people. What the Leftist ultimately wants in this direction however is fairly heroic in its dimensions and unlikely ever to be fully achieved in at least contemporary Western societies so the Leftist always has a corrosive discontent with the world he lives in and therefore is permanently in a position of wanting change from the way things are.


Leftists in Power


The analysis above was principally of what Leftism/liberalism is in the economically advanced countries of the contemporary "Western" world -- where Leftists have only ever had partial success in implementing their programmes. So what happens when Leftists get fully into power? Does the same analysis apply?

For a start, it should be obvious that the personality and goals of the Leftist do not change just because he gets into power. He is still the same person. And that this is true is certainly very clear in the case of Lenin -- who is surely the example par excellence of a Leftist who very clearly did get into power. In his post-revolutionary philippic against his more idealistic revolutionary comrades, Lenin (1952) makes very clear that "absolute centralization and the strictest discipline of the proletariat" are still in his view essential features of the new regime. He speaks very much like the authoritarian dictator that he was but is nonetheless being perfectly consistent with the universal Leftist wish for strong government power and control over the population -- but only as long as Leftists are in charge. So Leftists in power certainly do NOT cause the State to "wither away" -- as Marx foresaw in "The Communist Manifesto".

Obviously, Leftists in power also cease to want change. Aside from their focus on industrialization, change in the Soviet Union was glacial and any institutional change or change in the locus or nature of political power was ferociously resisted. So if a clamour for change is characteristic of Leftists in the "West" but not characteristic when Leftists attain full power, what are the real, underlying motives of Leftism?


Why Leftist?


The theory that would seem to have the widest explanatory power is that Leftist advocacy serves ego needs. It is submitted here that the major psychological reason why Leftists so zealously criticize the existing order and advocate change is in order to feed a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting -- and ultimately for power, the greatest ego boost of all. They need public attention; they need to demonstrate outrage; they need to feel wiser and kinder and more righteous than most of their fellow man. They fancy for themselves the heroic role of David versus Goliath. They need to show that they are in the small club of the virtuous and the wise so that they can nobly instruct and order about their less wise and less virtuous fellow-citizens. Their need is a pressing need for attention, for self-advertisement and self-promotion -- generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction. They are people who need to feel important and who are aggrieved at their lack of recognition and power. One is tempted to hypothesize that, when they were children, their mothers didn't look when they said, "Mommy, look at me".


Envy


And, of course, people who themselves desperately want power, attention and praise envy with a passion those who already have that. Businessmen, "the establishment", rich people, upper class people, powerful politicians and anybody who helps perpetuate the existing order in any way are seen by the Leftist as obstacles to him having what he wants. They are all seen as automatically "unworthy" compared to his own great virtues and claims on what they already have. "Why should they have ........ ?" is the Leftist's implicit cry -- and those who share that angry cry have an understanding of one-another that no rational argument could achieve and that no outsider can ever share.

The Leftist's passion for equality is really therefore only apparently a desire to lift the disadvantaged up. In reality it is a hatred of all those in society who are already in a superior or more powerful position to the Leftist and a desire to cut them down to size. They are haters who want to subjugate everyone and everything to their rule. As Engels rightly saw, there is nothing more authoriarian than that.

So why do Leftist psychologists claim that conservatives are pro-authority whereas Leftists are anti-authority? That this vast and perverse oversimplification became widely accepted among psychologists is perhaps an understandable mistake given the characteristic opposition by Leftists in the modern "Western" democracies to the existing centres of authority and power in their countries and given the characteristic acceptance by conservatives of those same authorities.

Looking at history more broadly, however, we see that authoritarianism is central to Leftism and that Leftists are in fact dedicated practitioners of it -- so what Leftists oppose is not authority as such (or there would be no Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc.) but only authorities that they do not control; and what conservatives favour is not any and all authority but rather carefully limited authority -- only that degree of central authority and power that is needed for a civil society to function.



REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950) The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper

Altemeyer, R. (1981). Right-wing authoritarianism. Winnipeg: University Manitoba Press.

Lenin, V.I. (1952) "Left-Wing" Communism, an Infantile Disorder. In: Selected Works, Vol. II, Part 2. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

Ray, J.J.(1972) Acceptance of aggression and Australian voting preference. Australian Quarterly 44, 64-70.

Ray, J.J. (1974) Conservatism as heresy Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co.

Ray, J.J. (1981) Conservatism and misanthropy. Political Psychology 3(1/2), 158-172.

Ray, J.J. (1988) Why the F scale predicts racism: A critical review. Political Psychology 9(4), 671-679.

Ray, J.J. (1989) The scientific study of ideology is too often more ideological than scientific. Personality & Individual Differences, 10, 331-336.

Ray, J.J. (1990) The old-fashioned personality. Human Relations, 43, 997-1015.

Ray, J.J. (2002) Leftist racism. Front Page Magazine October 8th. .



Note also

My Marx & Engels in their own words blog has lots of good stuff on it that Marxists would never tell you about but I am not posting regularly to it now as I have run out of all the bad/mad bits that I know about so far. (Backups here or here)

My Scripture Blog is an attempt to reconstruct what Christians believed in New Testament times -- in contrast with the heavily paganized beliefs that constitute most of Christianity today. I no longer post to it regularly but a tour through the archives should tell most Christians things they did not know. Both the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the immortal soul are not Biblical, for instance. (Backups here or here)


Some more links:

MONOGRAPH ON LEFTISM

Rightism defined
What are Leftists
Psychology of the Left
Leftist Racism
Fascism is Leftist
Hitler was a socialist
Leftism is authoritarian
"Authoritarianism" research -- a plain English summary
Leftism in the Churches
Christian authoritarianism and Leftist authoritarianism
History versus psychology in explaining the Left/Right divide
Leftism as comedy: Comment on the "Berkeley" study of conservatism
Leftists are born that way: Summary of the genetics evidence
Why elites tend Left
The American roots of Fascism
Of Interest 1
Of Interest 2
Understanding women
Longer Academic Papers

Archive Master file for "Dissecting Leftism"
Old "Dissecting Leftism" Blog site


I am also putting on this site the chapters from my 1974 book (Conservatism as Heresy). See here. The book is also available here or here.


I am also using this as a "Public service" site. I am putting online here a series of excerpts from older articles that are of academic interest. The articles concerned are in general otherwise available only by special request to a University or other major library.

And in addition to that, I have posted a series of more popular articles off the internet that I would not like to see vanish. You can find them here or here.

And fourthly, I have put online a small number of articles by other authors that were not online at all at the time that I published them. You can find them here




Cheers

(Dr.) John Ray (Email)

Last and definitely least, here is a picture of the villain in question:





And if that picture is not enough, click here or here for some pictures of my 2004 vacation. And there is also a picture of me here in Highland dress. And you can find some notes about my 63rd birthday celebrations here or here.

If you have not found here what you were looking for, try here or here or here




Index page for this site


DETAILS OF REGULARLY UPDATED BLOGS BY JOHN RAY:

"Tongue Tied"
"Dissecting Leftism"
"Australian Politics"
"Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch"
"Greenie Watch"
"Western Heart" (A summary blog)


BLOGS OCCASIONALLY UPDATED:


"Marx & Engels in their own words"
"A scripture blog"
"Recipes"
"Some memoirs"
"Paralipomena"
To be continued ....
Of Interest
My alternative Wikipedia
Laughing at New Matilda
Dagmar Schellenberger is an operatic genius

Updated as news items come in:

Coral reef compendium.
IQ compendium
Queensland Police -- A barrel with lots of bad apples
Australian Police News


BLOGS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED

"Food & Health Skeptic"
"Eye on Britain"
"Immigration Watch International".
"Leftists as Elitists"
Socialized Medicine
OF INTEREST (2)
QANTAS -- A dying octopus
BRIAN LEITER (Ladderman)
Obama Watch
Obama Watch (2)
Dissecting Leftism -- Large font site
Michael Darby
AGL -- A bumbling monster
Telstra/Bigpond follies
Optus bungling
Vodafrauds (vodafone)
Bank of Queensland blues


There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)



Main academic menu
Menu of recent writings
basic home page
Pictorial Home Page
Selected pictures from blogs (Backup here)
Another picture page (Best with broadband. Rarely updated)



Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.comuv.com/

OR: (After 2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322114550/http://jonjayray.com/



A WORD TO THE WISE:

Very often in my writings, I link back to previous articles of mine as a way of making available a more detailed treatment of a given subject. It's a pervasive academic practice. At times, however, the link concerned will cease to work after a while -- usually for reasons beyond my control. In such cases the article concerned is still available -- but at a different address. To find the article, putting one of the following in front of the filename will generally recover the article concerned:

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename the following:
http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20151027-0014/jonjayray.comuv.com/

OR: (After 2015)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160322114550/http://jonjayray.com/

"Dead" links are a besetting problem on the net but "difficulties exist to be overcome"! Who said that? I think it is usually attributed to Maria Montessori but Hitler had his own predictably aggressive version of it too: "Widerstaende sind nicht da, dass man vor ihnen kapituliert, sondern dass man sie bricht". Breaking things won't work in this instance, though. The Wayback Machine is also a good way of recovering "lost" files.