To reiterate, authoritarian theories of metaphysics are philosophic conjectures about the fundamental nature of reality that provide the logical foundation for authoritarian theories of morality, including political morality. There are three basic varieties of authoritarian theories of reality, with each having more than one major characteristic. All of these theories have their own, distinct implications for moral speculation, which are discussed in detail in the study Flowers From the Garden of Evil: Everyone’s Guide to the Elements of Authoritarian Dogma. Here they are briefly delineated preliminary to later posts that will discuss their specific representations in contemporary culture.
The three major metaphysical concepts that provide the logical underpinnings for authoritarian political ideologies are technically denoted Idealism, Materialism, and Heracliteanism, after the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. The fact that a philosopher expounds one or more of these doctrines does not ipso facto mean that this philosopher is a political authoritarian, but these are the metaphysical doctrines that authoritarian philosophers use to provide bases for their political theories.
The technical definitions of Idealism, Materialism, and Heracliteanism can seem abstruse and obscure, in part because of the often furtive manner in which authoritarian doctrinaires employ and express concepts. Roughly though, Idealism represents reality as spiritual or mental in nature, rather than physical, and as created and/or sustained in existence by the consciousness of some mind, or minds. Materialism, Idealism’s ostensible opposite, has two related but distinct metaphysical meanings, and thus can be particularly problematic to define. But broadly, it depicts reality as exclusively physical, rather than spiritual, and says that all events occur as the result of the cause-and-effect processes of purely physical forces. Modern philosophers, however, typically employ this concept (though not necessarily this term) to specify doctrines which assert that human beings are deterministically or mechanistically irrational, and/or immoral, and/or ineffectual, and thus unfit to live in a free (in these pages denoted liberal) society. Lastly, Heracliteanism says that reality and human beings have no stable identity at all, and that all events in the universe occur chaotically and unpredictably because nothing has any causal nature. (Just for the record, there is a second, less influential, and outwardly antithetical facet of Heraclitean metaphysics which says that all events in reality are governed by universal laws prescribed by a divine, rational principle that Heraclitus denoted the Logos).
These metaphysical hypotheses furnish the logical foundations of authoritarian arguments in a variety of disparate ways. The theistic, creationist, and organismic implications of Idealism, for instance, provide the premises for theocratic, that is, for religious pretensions to political authority. Materialism, on the other hand, has the effect of turning people into animals—into things—which may legitimately be brutalized or used as objects. And Heracliteanism leads to the notion that the liberal concepts of rights which protect people from tyrants are baseless, opening the floodgates of philosophic and political villainy. This resource, as time permits, will explore the contemporary manifestations of these ideas; and meanwhile, students of authoritarian concepts should familiarize themselves with their historical representations as outlined in the study Flowers From the Garden of Evil: Everyone’s Guide to the Elements of Authoritarian Dogma.
Authoritarianism 101 