#and like... YOU are susceptible to falling for authoritarian leaders and absolutely obeying them even if they harm you TOO

[mejomonster]

I may post a bunch about authoritarian thinking later, and how to combat it, but some short important points for anyone: if you think like an authoritarian it means you tend to think in terms of black/white, tend to obey and believe people you consider your leaders and tend to view the world as your own in-group and then outgroups (which you may want dead/not care what happens to them/hate them), you struggle to think critically and empathize, and ignoring the many ways this authoritarian thinking hurts society at large and yourself - importantly, authoritarian thinking leaves you EXTREMELY vulnerable to con artists and cruel leaders because once someone gets into a leadership position in your in-group you tend to trust and obey them. Even if they hurt you, abuse you, lie to you. So a big reason to work on changing your own authoritarian thinking, is to HELP YOU PROTECT YOURSELF and IMPROVE your own safety and situation. You will be able to spot con artists and abusers easier, and protect yourself from them hurting you, if you work on changing your authoritarian thinking a bit. In addition, if you care about your in-group (the group of people you identify with) and your in-group views you as part of it (for example: you're in-group is a church and the church members value your partocipation), then you learning to think in more flexible ways will allow you to both save yourself from abusers AND convince your in-group to stop following an abusive leader and switch to a better one for the group. Win win.

Key ways you can work on your own tendencies toward authoritarian thinking: learn how to empathize with various people, learn how to think critically, and expose yourself to a variety of enviornments/viewpoints/experiences.

For empathy, easy ways to start include: get a pet and practice caring about that pet, read books and practice caring about a character, volunteer in a place outside your in-group (so if you go to church, volunteer at a school or library or theater or fair or daycare or soup kitchen) and practice appreciating the process of helping people outside the in-group. Getting a pet and reading can be some of the easiest initial things you can do. Trying to make new friends and acquaintances with people outside your in-group may also help: talking to a child, coworker, classmate, stramger at grocery store or fair, with respect (such as asking what their favorite toy or show is, why, practicing caring about what makes them happy, practicing interacting with people even when you don't immediately get some tangible thing from them), practice talking with people without arguing or starting a conflict (and if they argue first, it's okay to leave the conversation entirely, at least for a while just try practicing Not Fighting sometimes). Practice listening to people to get to know them (including people in your in-group you may not know well), and be curious about their experiences and the differences/similarity to you as all interesting and not necessarily bad or good (so if you went to public school and they went to private school, hold off on making a judgement about it and just be curious about what their experience was like). On a more surface level, if people like a different musician or actor than you, be curious about what they like and try to imagine why someone might appreciate what they do (you don't have to like that band too, but practice trying to understand why someone else likes it). Its the idea of "imagine you were in someone else's shoes," and having pets, reading about characters unlike you, and getting to know people and their unique experiences helps you practice doing that. Along with practicing holding off on judgement, especially on simple basic things to start: for example trying not to jump to black/white good bad thinking over what people in your group and outside it do... in terms of say what they eat, or the music they like, or their clothes. So if you tend to decide everyone who doesnt go to your church is evil, practice maybe viewing a person with the same religion as you but who goes to a different church as neutral and someone who maybe just never knew your church existed or was raised in a different city and so their life experience may simply have been different - but that doesnt automatically make them evil, just for being born in a different city and not knowing about your specific church existing yet.

To expose yourself to more experiences and people: again consider volunteering at an event outside of your in-group, start a new hobby and join a new discord or fandom group or in-person meet up, go to a new bar or coffee place or grocery store and have small talk, take a class in the community, go to fairs and community events, go to an event in a nearby but different community (like a fair in the next county, a concert, a play you'd like to see). Any new hobby or interest that allows you to meet new people and ask them about their experience with the hobby/interest will help, and you'll help them as you share your own experiences. Even just the act of exploring new possible interests will help you, as you will not have a judgement yet on what you like/dislike and will get to practice deciding what parts of the interest you enjoy and don't based on your experiences. So experience new things, and listen to other people's experiences while being open to letting yourself enjoy things others may dislike, and letting yourseld dislike things others may like. Practice listening to others without automatically assuming their opinion/experience is good/bad (or that there is a good/bad at all, preference for cheeze pizza versus pepperoni can just be two neutral choices which are both fine) or going to be the same for you (you may feel much differently than others and thats fine), practice trying new things where you're allowed to try multiple different ways without any way being particularly good/bad (this is to practice thinking in more varied ways: you're allowed to make 3 different cookie recipes and find each of them yummy and yet not perfect, you're allowed to dislike all 3 recipes but appreciate that your friend loves recipe 1 so you may make it for their birthday, you're allowed to fail the 3 recipes and need to try a few times, you're allowed to make them and decide you don't like making cookies after all and would rather try making a cake next). Trying sports teams may help, hobby clubs, board game tournaments, book clubs (where people have various opinions and you - like them - may have your own unique opinion all of which is fine, no opinion is mandatory or restricted).

To develop critical thinking skills: the two parts above will help somewhat with that. Just letting yourself experience new things, meet new people and hear about experiences different than your own, practicing wondering why someone likes something you may not, practicing liking something because YOU like it after experiencing it and not because someone told you to like it, will all help you figure out what you SPECIFICALLY think. And it will help you recognize that other people all think uniquely, may sometimes disagree, and that thinking differently can be okay. Those are some helpful initial steps to learn to think critically.

Critical thinking skills are important because it helps you figure out what is a fact and real, what is a person's opinion which may be right or wrong or only partly right or wrong or may be something you can't detetmine, how to check if a fact is something you can make decisions with or not explained well enough to rely on. Critical thinking is how you help yourself: if you are abused and your lover hits and punches you, and says "I love you and care about you," critical thinking will help you recognize the fact: you are being injured, help you recognize the actions your lover does of hurting you doesn't match their words that they love you, and helps you make a decision to help yourself - to leave the location where your lover is harming you over and over and go somewhere you are safer and not in danger. Critical thinking, even if you love being in an in-group and love following leadership, will allow you to notice when leaders and in-group members genuinely are helping the group, and when leaders or members are hurting the group. This can allow you to help the group and yourself by recognizing when the group has someone harming others and help you determine how to stop that harm. Even if you think very authoritarian and like that kind of structure in your life, critical thinking skills will help you and those you love.

You can start by figuring out how to make a decision on some basic thing. For example: prepare for the weather today in your city. Look up weather your-city in google, click some weather sites (to check collected data), go outside of your front door and physically feel the weather (data you collect yourself), text a friend who lives somewhere else and ask them what the weather is in your city - and ask them not to check the weather report (get an opinion), perhaps also ask your roommate what the weather is (an opinion from someone with the same ability to literally look outside the window and get their own data in person). From this experience you'll learn that data from a collected organization is probably fairly accurate but not perfect (maybe the weather site said 90% chance rain and when you went outside it was sprinkling but not pouring, and the clouds were dark), maybe your friend's opinion in another town was right or wrong (maybe they guessed and rain was a good guess for a cloudy November in your state) but they couldn't tell you how long until the weather would change, you went outside yourself and that was fairly reliable as you could literally feel the weather (but it cant help you decide if it will still be raining in 8 hours), maybe your roommate's weather judgement was better than the friend in another town but worse than your own judgement of going outside and feeling it. This is an experience to show you how useful facts are versus opinions. If you go outside and it rains on you, it is a fact that it is raining. If your friend in another city says they think the rain stopped, it's their opinion and they may be right Or wrong... you'll have to go outside to find out. The weather report site is somewhat right and can give you estimates of the next several hours of weather so that's helpful, but isn't giving you updates as specific as actually standing outside in the weather on your particular block. You can now see how facts and opinipns are useful, and when they are more or less reliable for making a decision to help yourself. (In this case to prepare to deal with the weathet outside).

Next you can practice critical thinking with less simple questions. You can try to decide "what is the best tires to get for my SUV" or "what coverup will be least likely to give me acne"? You'll look up on google these questions, and see company sites marketing their product and claiming theirs is best. You'll notice a company always says THEIR product is the best, and learn that a company may not give you facts as often as NON company sites that compare many products, or that a company will word facts in a way to imply something that isn't necessarily true. (For example: if a makeup clogs pores, it may not say it does that, it may just not use the word "non comedogenic"... but since you aren't seeing the word "non comdegenic" which means not-pore-clogging, that's a sign the makeup May actually clog pores). You will notice review sites, and reviewers with NO sponsors will tend to be more honest and share personal experience, while sponsored reviews may only mention positives. You will notice more fact based comparison sites, which will list ingredients and what each ingredient does, which will be facts to help you make a decision on which makeup is least likely to give you acne.

You may read articles on certain makeup ingredients and if they're a common allergen, which might explain why some makeup with some ingredients caused you acne before even though none of the ingredients were pore clogging. You are practicing comparing facts, and practicing deciding which sources are reliable or biased (biased sources try to convince you to buy something/believe something), what the bias is about (many articles want you to buy something even though you don't Truly need to buy everything), which reviewers gave biased opinions (if theyre sponsored they get money to convince you to buy something), which reviewers gave personal experiences (and are those experiences useful to you - did the reviewer have similar skin type and issues and allergies?). These are important skills! Learning to do this will help you spend money on things that are more likely to HELP you, to be what you want, and this skill will help you avoid scams and avoid being tricked.

Critical thinking gets much deeper than this, and applies to everything you run into in life - all news articles have biases (they want to convince you of something, there's facts AND opinions and attempts to convince you to do something), all ads are like this (every sponsored post on instagram is trying to convince you to believe and/or buy something), all influencers posts (their job is to convince you to buy products from companies paying the influencer, to get you to invest money in the influencer too - every podcaster/twitch streamer/youtuber/etc), books. All stuff you can find in the world is fact, opinion, some mixture, someone trying to convince you of something, and you using your own experiences to get your own facts (example: its raining on your face when you go outside so fact: its raining) and to decide your own opinions (opinion might be: you like feeling the rain, so you choose not to bring an umbrella, but your lover hates rain so they choose to bring an umbrella for themselves). You use all that information to decide what is fact, what is others opinion and are they trying to convince you of something, what your opinion is, and what to do that will help you.

Here's more information on developing critical thinking skills:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/08/05/13-easy-steps-to-improve-your-critical-thinking-skills/ (this has good basic tips for things you can do daily)

https://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/critical-thinking-where-to-begin/796 (a big website on critical thinking)

https://www.monash.edu/student-academic-success/enhance-your-thinking/critical-thinking/what-is-critical-thinking (this has good step by step instructions on how to start to think critically and practice in depth)