Metaphysics
Authoritarian ideologies work by altering their victims’ understanding of political morality. The victims, in order that they may be politically dominated and economically exploited, must be convinced that their domination and exploitation are not merely excusable, but morally ideal. This requires the canny use of ideas by clever intellectuals and culturally pervasive institutions of intellectual influence.
The principal way in which authoritarian intellectuals convince their victims that their own abuse is moral is by placing them in an artificial environment made out of ideas—a mental matrix or moral Alice’s Wonderland, so to speak—where right is wrong and wrong, right. Once trapped inside this subliminal mental universe victims can’t think straight about issues of morality, justice, and rights.
The job of creating these artificial, authoritarian universes falls upon authoritarian metaphysicians. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality, and a metaphysician is a philosopher or theologian who ponders and hypothesizes about reality’s fundamental nature. Because an artificial, authoritarian reality must be postulated before authoritarian political philosophers can pervert people’s sense of political morality the first steps in the process of hoodwinking people about morality involves hoodwinking them about metaphysics.
Epistemology
But it turns out that snookering people about the fundamental nature of reality isn’t all that easy—and this leads us to a second issue pertaining to how authoritarian ideology works: Before you can successfully lie to people about the whole nature of reality you must first make them stupid. This is the job of authoritarian epistemologists.
Epistemology is another major branch of philosophy—the one concerned with how knowledge is discovered. To make people stupid in the all-encompassing way that allows you to successfully lie about the whole nature of reality you must first con them into adopting methods of acquiring knowledge that effectively turn them into idiots—and you must convince them to refrain from practicing epistemological methods that would allow them to wise up.
The general principles of authoritarian metaphysical and epistemological machination are systematically exposited in Flowers From the Garden of Evil: Everyone’s Guide to the Elements of Authoritarian Dogma. Because this study is addressed to the broad audience of regular citizens whose time and energy are finite, it is necessarily limited to discussions of these principles’ essential elements, and a few famous examples of these elements. But at this website we will have space to scan the wide realm of contemporary culture for the specific manifestations and reverberations of authoritarian ideas in every field of art, science, journalistic punditry and, of course, politics.
Authoritarianism 101 