Could it be that authoritarianism is the political expression of narcissism and that there is literally nothing else there?
I believe that this is actually the case. There are plenty of studies showing strong correlation between political ideology and personality traits. In my personal experience, I've yet to meet someone with authoritarian politics who was not also lacking in empathy more generally.
I think that there is even more to it than that, though. There is a really interesting anthropological perspective on this to be had, where we can actually cast the development of authoritarian styles of governance as an expression of narcissism.
When we look at the actual timeline for the emergence of civilization, we see agriculture, then violence (increasingly organized as time goes on) then governance structures that resemble modern states. This is an account of the development of violence in northwestern Europe to help establish that timeline. That paper also cites other papers about the history of violence in other regions. Contrary to the popular narrative (thanks Hobbes /s), we don't actually see much evidence of violence at all prior to the development of agriculture. It is important to note that agriculture was developed about 40k years ago in response to a major worldwide drought that lasted about 1k years. (I would recommend reading "Civilized to Death" by Christopher Ryan for more on this topic.) Most sources arguing that pre-civilized society was terribly violent points at societies that existed in the 20k years between the development of agriculture and the emergence of modern-ish states (which, in some cases, were terribly violent). The traditional narrative about civilization and war would put the emergence of states before the invention of organized warfare, arguing that warfare was a response to the increasing complexity and scale of the conflicts that arose from the increased societal complexity of states. Archaeological evidence refutes this, so what gives?
There's more that makes this weird. We also know some things about how pre-civlized societies handled narcissism. Surprisingly often, these societies actually had a dedicated word for these people. The exact translation and connotation of the word varied from one population to the next, but the stories that they told were basically the same. (For reference, we learned this by interviewing members of indigenous societies that had not yet been heavily influenced by civilization. Some of these societies still existed as recently as a century ago - now there are almost none left.) These were the people who were 'unteachable', 'lazy', 'troublemakers' - they caused drama while contributing next to nothing. When these people didn't improve their behavior (or they did something heinous like commit murder or rape), they were exiled or killed. (Check out literature on 'rape-free' societies if you want to read more about this.) These individuals were pretty rare - around 1% of the population - so what little violence was necessary to keep the peace would not account for the evidence that we see from post-agricultural societies. We've no reason to believe that these pre-civilized societies suddenly stopped policing themselves when they were pushed into agriculture by the drought (and there's even some evidence that they did not - again, see "Civilized to Death"), yet the vast majority of us now live in a society where such a penalty for mere narcissism would be unthinkable.
Here's what I speculate happened. After settling down for agriculture, exile stopped being as lethal as it would have been before. Exiles could practice agriculture on their own and survive, when they wouldn't have been able to before (due to lack of technology, mostly). Also, stationary groups with fields that they can't watch literally 100% of the time and stores of food (they wouldn't have been storing much food prior to agriculture) are much easier to steal from. As such, we started to accumulate a population of these narcissistic individuals. These individuals are inherently self-centered and lazy. If they settled together (which they would have been incentivized to do, for many reasons), they would inevitably try to dominate each other in an attempt to gain power and status and the ability to exploit the labor power of the other exiles for their own personal gain. They would actually have a chance to learn ways of sneaking into other societies and hiding their toxic behavior with clever words. They could actually start working together as a violent force to bully whole other groups into submission, or even claim control of an area. Incidentally, we actually have some evidence that this sort of thing happened pretty early in the game with a riverhead and a group of bullies demanding tribute in exchange for access. These riverheads were an important source of easy food thanks to the salmon that would swim up there to reproduce, so this was a big deal. Here's an interview with an anthropologist who talks about that.
Naturally, these narcissists aren't very good at maintaining power over each other or their less-narcissistic peers in the beginning, but as time progresses, they would get better and better at it. They'd learn to pit different groups against each other so that no one group can get large enough to overthrow the minority that holds power (+ the other still-loyal groups). They'd learn that growing their population as fast as possible gives them a major edge over other societies, as it is far easier to bully other groups into submission when you outnumber them. Pretty much every major development in human history related to governance and economics gets cast in a new light with this perspective. Money becomes an ingenious solution to the problem of redistributing tribute/favors to one's cronies in order to keep them under control. The state monopoly on violence is the perfect hypocrisy for protecting one's own power with force while denying anybody else's right to do the same, regardless of where the threat to their power comes from. Not only does this allow you to crush any direct rebellion before it happens, but it also allows you to interfere in the development of various political groups, allowing you to maintain control over the entire political playing field. Capitalism becomes a brilliant way of taking power away from more rigid power structures like the church or the throne without needing to foment a violent rebellion.
A few other fun things result from such a narrative. The cause of sexism and the general disrespect for the rights and intelligence of children becomes obvious. Since all power ultimately comes from the use of force, women and children are at an inherent disadvantage compared to men due to their smaller size and lower physical strength. Forcing women to be breeders for that sweet sweet population growth was also a major contributor to their objectification. Agriculture was hard work, and the narcissistic men didn't want to do it, so their wives/children became de-facto slaves. (Note: Slave labor would not have existed prior to the development of these narcissistic societies.) Religious and racial discrimination is fundamentally about preventing foreign powers from interfering with local affairs, while also providing a convenient justification for using those out-groups as additional sources of slave labor. Also, we realize that literally no form of governance that has ever been invented since the development of the state has ever been designed to actually serve the people. They've always been various forms of compromise designed to consolidate and maintain power for the few while preventing the many from organizing a competent rebellion. The only form of governance that has ever existed to serve the people is anarchism, in the form of the aggressive egalitarianism practiced by pre-civilized societies. This isn't to say that we should go back to doing things exactly like we did in the stone age, but it does turn a lot of long-standing cultural assumptions about the nature governance and modern society on their head.
I could keep going, but I'll stop for now. This perspective is a real mind-bender, but way too many things fit into place when you think about history this way. It also makes sense that authoritarianism would be an invention of narcissism generally if authoritarianism was simply the political expression of narcissism on the individual level.
I love it when people start asking the right questions. I think the absolute mess of responses just goes to show that this is an avenue of discussion that hasn't been pursued nearly enough in leftist circles.
We've interacted before - you may remember my comments on an earlier post of yours. I am generally of the position that narcissism lies at the core of all of the issues that anarchism is fundamentally trying to solve. If we can solve the issue of narcissism in society, then everything else more or less falls into place (though there are a lot of misconception about what is and is not hierarchy that gets in the way of seeing that for a lot of people, apparently - I'll try to address some of that).
Since we can reduce our political/social problems down to this particular psychological problem (or at least I claim that we can, more or less), then we can try to understand hoe we might address those political/social problems by understanding how one addresses this psychological problem. Unfortunately, we immediately run into a bit of a trouble. There is no known effective treatment for this personality type/disorder. When we consider that we're talking about trying to change a person's personality, this sort of make sense, and it make additional sense when we consider that impaired empathy generally shows up on a brain scan as a sort of brain damage. In other words, our options are severely limited at the individual level. We also know that this personality type is extremely stable over the lifetime of the individual.
There are lots of things we might be able to argue from that position, but one point that I really want to highlight is that we cannot expect that we can make this problem go away simply by changing the material or social conditions of these people. Even a dedicated therapy effort doesn't really work. While we can largely prevent the creation of these individuals in the first place if we were to create the right social/cultural environment (most are made as infants and children by a variety of bad parenting practices), we cannot completely prevent them from occurring (some are simply born this way - about 1% of the population as I had said before). As such, the solution to this problem isn't going to be a simple change in initial conditions, but rather an ongoing process that is baked into the fabric of society itself.
Let me touch on the issue of how we went from a bunch of societies that existed for millions of years while reliably and robustly preventing these people from gaining power and making a mess of things to a society that is basically run exclusively by these people and seems designed to empower them. As you know but others may not yet be aware, I have a hypothesis about how hierarchical civilization came to be. What's important to observe about this narrative is that the peaceful egalitarian societies did not voluntarily become hierarchical. They were coerced/conquered by hierarchical societies that formed from the aggregation of their exiles. This story of hierarchical societies devouring egalitarian ones via conquest and subjugation then repeats itself over and over again throughout history. A question for the room: Is there any documented instance of an egalitarian anarchist society voluntarily reforming itself to become hierarchical?
My basis for anarchism is fundamentally founded in this perspective that narcissism is the root problem to address. IMO, the indigenous people largely did a good job - they just made the mistake of externalizing their narcissism problems, and then the additional mistake of failing to prepare for the consequences of that decision. We just need to learn from their mistakes, and do what they did not: In addition to aggressively policing the narcissists that emerge from within, we need to account and prepare for the external threat represented by narcissistic individuals that exist outside of our society. Even a society that solves the exile problem for itself will still have to deal with the exile problem from others, and that generally means maintaining a strong military or otherwise maintaining some mechanism for defending itself against organized threats from hierarchical societies.
Identifying these bad behaviors is both easy and hard. If you know what to look for, it's really easy. If you don't, you're liable to fall for their manipulation. Simply learning about the various manipulative behaviors that narcissists engage in is the conceptually most straight-forward way to address this problem, and it is certainly effective. There are other ways, though. One thing that I've noticed is that narcissists will pretty reliably violate the rules of epistemologically sound argumentation whenever they start to try something funny. Simply educating people about logic (and logical fallacies) and the burden of proof would go a long way toward making them resilient to narcissistic manipulation. If we also teach people to take such violations very seriously, rather than just dismissing it with a simple "everyone is entitled to their own opinion", we would catch a lot of bullshit very early and stop a lot of narcissistic machination before it has a chance to gain any real traction. If you think about it, tolerance of unsound argumentation is a necessary condition for a society to be vulnerable to non-violent manipulation from bad actors of any sort.
I'm seeing a lot of people in the comments conflating centralization with hierarchy, and vice-versa, and this is a big problem. I want to make something very clear: Centralization does NOT imply hierarchy. This is very important to understand, as discarding the useful tool that is centralization out of fear of creating the horrible monster that is hierarchy will cripple our ability to achieve anything at all. But what is centralization? What is hierarchy? Why do people conflate the two?
Centralization is simply what happens when coordination or decision-making is delegated to a subset of the group. These coordinators or decision-makers take on apparently central roles because everybody needs the information/instruction that they provide in order to avoid doing redundant or pointless work. Centralization is desirable, because it means that people can specialize. Not everyone has to be involved in every process. Decisions can be made by those who are most qualified to make them, and everybody else can get on with their work without being interrupted about every little detail.
Hierarchy is what you get when you define an up-and-down axis of power. Some people are above others. Some people are below others. The people above have the power/authority to coerce the people below. Subordination is a crime that is basically defined as an individual defying the directives of an individual above them in the hierarchy. The existence of hierarchy does not strictly depend upon the existence of a particular social or governance structure within a group.
That said, hierarchies naturally tend to concentrate decision-making power in the hands of a few, and that's why hierarchy always seems to imply centralization in practice. It's hard to find examples of centralization that do not come with the trappings of hierarchy and coercion - you basically have to study the inner-workings of some worker-owned co-ops to find good examples. Combined with the fact that coercion is a concept that isn't part of common discourse (though I think that is starting to change), and it becomes easier to see why people might struggle to separate the two concepts.
We can have all of the benefits of centralized coordination without any of the drawbacks of hierarchy. We just need to establish a binding social contract that outlaws coercion, and aggressively enforce it. With these tools in hand, building public institutions or even a powerful military capable of rivaling modern civilization's best is all comfortably within the realm of possibility.