Something I've noticed through years of service to a variety of social groups with varying levels of formality, from authoritarian businesses that have strict rules, the transgression of which results in imediate termination, to less formal church group projects and homeschool group projects, to super informal such as just helping friends out...

Through it all, I've observed two types of leaders: leaders who I respect due to their virtues, such as honesty, fairness, knowledge, wisdom, and "leaders" who demand that I respect the authority of their position. Unfortunately for this second class of "leader," on me, such demands have always had the reverse effect.

Authority, in and of itself, doesn't have anything respectable about it. The virtues mentioned in the preceding paragraph are respectable; but when someone says obey me because I'm in charge here, I suspect they are deficient in the integrity department, and hoping to hide such deficiencies behind their position in their institutional pecking disorder (behind their crown, badge, shield, rank, etc.).

I don't believe in first class, middle class, lower class. Imho, class is a combination of style and virtue that you either have or don't. Natural leaders have class. Authoritarian leaders do not.

One of these classless leaders ending up on top of a pecking disorder, creates authoritarianism.

What happens when we serve an authoritarian?

There are four types of people in an authoritarian state: the authoritarian; sycophants; conformists; and dissidents.

The conformists generally comprise the largest group, and imho are most dispicable. The sycophants inflict the authoritarian's decrees, punishments, and propaganda on the conformists and the dissidents. The authoritarian and sycophants generally deny their level of cruelty, or offer some kind of explanation as to why its necessary (for everybody's safety, yadi yadi yada...). The dissidents do not believe these explanations, and resist by creating underground mafias that defy authoritarian decrees, usually at such a great risk to themselves, that conformists do not wish to be associated with them.

The conformists are ultimately who create the authoritarian. One cannot be an authoritarian, if nobody obeys.

Let's consider the popular dictatorship that we all read about in our history books growing up, and some of our elders even recall: Hitler and the Nazis. Hitler was the authoritarian. The Nazis were the sycophants. Regular German citizens conformed, while in denial that a holocaust was happening around them. And some Germans, like the Jehovah Witnesses there, were dissidents. Denial of the holocaust was so prevalent in Germany, that, in 1985, they had to make a law against such denials. If the majority of Germans had not been in denial, they might have joined the dissidents; when dissidence becomes the majority, the authoritarian loses. Unfortunately, in Hitler's dictorship, dissidence was never the majority, and the holocaust occured.

Criticisms of today's regimes sometimes uses the term Nazi: "they're like Nazis." But when someone says this, do they mean they're like Hitler, or like the sycophants, or like the conformists? I belive they mean like the conformists, without whom, authoritarianism is not possible. I've made the mistake of using the term Nazi synonymously with the term conformist, and really offended a Jewish buddy, who was adamant that USA is not near as evil as the Nazis were.

So that's why conformists are my enemy. They allow authoritarians to exist. You conformists with your coats and ties and business haircuts all look alike to me: you look despicable, and you are despicable.

Jesus died to take away your sins, not your nerve. All your geese are already cooked, and there's never mirth nor joy in your laughter, because deep down, you know you are coexisting with evil, and not doing anything about it. But on the surface, you remain in denial, so you can go about with business as usual.

Blind obedience is evil. Conformity is evil. Stop it. Authority must be checked and resisted at every opportunity, or it will turn into authoritarianism. Conformists who never buck the system share the guilt for the crimes of the authoritarian.

Conformity is a sign of authoritariansm. The more you look like your neighbors, the greater the odds that you live in an authoritarian regime.

Freak Out!

Without directly referencing any of your points, I would simply point out that: "Nazism did not die." Before WW2 finally broke out, Ukranians had already solicited the help of German Nazis to fight against their blood-enemy: Russia. And, today, "those 'Real Nazis'" are still there, still fighting against Ukranian people who choose to speak Russian. With artillery.

For those who are interested, may I refer you now to thepostil.com, an on-line imprint of St. Augustine Press. On this scholarly website you will discover a great many things about "this territory which we now loosely call 'Ukraine'" that you probably never wished to know. Yes, there are Nazis there, still to this very day, and they were invited in.

There is far too much material here for me to begin to abbreviate. You simply need to visit the site for yourself. And, plan to spend a couple hours, because as I said these articles are scholarly.

You can also, unfortunately, on other sites also read the story of "Good Germans."

Thank you @sundialsvcs -- I found this thepostil article, but only found it to be neoscholarly, in that, it was inadequately annotated and lacked a complete bibliography (though there were hyperlinks to some sources many of which too lacked bibliographies), and to some videos that are no longer available, but I didn't really want to watch was described anyways.

Nevertheless the article was interesting, just as many of these LQ threads are interesting, yet we're not providing footnotes and bibliographies either in our average lq posts.

Clearly there is incongruity between what is depicted in the article and what is depicted on mainstream media outlets: something to follow up on. Maybe asking that ukrainian slacker who took down ukraine's slackware server about the extent of swastika graffiti in his neighborhood growing up, and other cultural signs that could confirm the article.

Continuing with yesterday's reflections on authority and conformity, I thought I'd interject that I appreciate conformity in manufacturing. I like that multiple types of devices can all share a USB cable, such that my mess of obsolete proprietary power adapters has slowed its rate of increase.

I appreciate the common lisp hyperspec: I want my code to conform to its standard.

I remember when word processors wouldn't open up one another's proprietary formats.

I belive in optional pragmatic sustainability standards. Most industries, such as plumbing, should really improve theirs. Do we really need a separate type of plumbing fitting for every type of application? Pex-A, and Pex-B, Copper, PVC, CPVC, and so on--programming languages and plumbing fittings both keep popping up new instances in a self-obsfucating viscious conundrum.

So I suppose the malignant type of conformity, like that of the 'Good Germans' cited by @sundialsvcs, needs more clarification to distinguish it from this beneficial type of optional conformity to a common sense standard.

Perhaps it is lynch-mob-like levels of pressure to conform that indicate the type of conformity that enables authoritarianism.

History also has taught that by the time those mafias and underground railroads created by dissidents are strong enough to resist or overthrow an authoritarian, they usually have already degraded to their own pecking disorders with their own lead dissidents follwed by sycophant dissidents, followed by conformists who want to be dissidents, such that the authoritarian just gets replaced with a new authoritarian.

However, history does not seem to have an age where all the peons, grunts, privates, rankless, workers of the world who weren't seeking power in the firstplace, could exchange information laterally as equals without having to traverse vertical power totums.

We are now living in an information age in which all of our deepest povs can be shared directly, which, politically, makes representation obsolete. This information age has not yet reached its equilibrium. When it does there will no longer be politicians. They are obsolete, because all earthlings should be able to represent their own pov for all of earth's policies.

It used to be much harder for dissidents to organize, resulting in those vertical totums, and authoritarians could usually murder enough dissidents before they were organized enough to matter.

But today organizational efforts can go viral... today the logistics of dissent can be crowdsourced.

I don't believe in global corporocratic neoscientific authoritarianism.

Do you?