Very interesting take. This reminds me of Bob Altemeyer's work. He summed up his decades of research on authoritarianism in a free ebook at https://www.theauthoritarians.org/ .
I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important work of political science / social psychology I've ever read.
Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social dominant" map to Graham's "passively conventional" and "aggressively conventional." The latter also tends to correspond to what psychiatrists would describe as narcissist, anti-social and possibly psychopathic traits.
For example, he conducted experiments as role playing games, like a model United Nations. When he removed the few "social dominants" from the player pool, the game ran smoothly, there was peace and everyone went to Alpha Centauri or something.
But when he added a few social dominants, things went to hell quick, and nuclear war broke out. Note that social dominants / narcissists are typically at most a few percents of the population.
I'm sure many people have noticed the phenomenon in any organisation: when a narcissist gets a modicum of power, they can destroy an organisation from within.
I believe Steve Jobs was a narcissist or had some of those traits, but he did just the opposite. It's not necessarily true that narcissists are destructive. I think they are a mixed bag. Sometimes they are constructive and work within the system to improve things, even if it's ultimately to improve their own standing in the world.
Altemeyer should be viewed with some suspicion: He thinks left-wing authoritarianism is a "Loch Ness monster", and in talks with David Friedman couldn't comprehend why eg. labor unions could constitute an authority to a person - he viewed union membership purely in transactional terms with little ideological content.
His scale may identify a certain kind of authoritarian, but his work is almost assuredly blind as a bat to others and not a comprehensive take.
This is textbook ad hominem. His work stands regardless of ideology.
But you're also wrong on two counts:
First, he wrote this and did most of his work at a time when power structures were clearly right wing. But the mechanisms he describes are universal and independent of the labels used by those in power: authoritarians will strongly conform to the dominant ideology, and social dominants will pretend to adhere to it to gain power. He just used the labels reflecting the situation at the time.
Second, he specifically points out that authoritarians in the Soviet Unions were nominally left wing.
Consider that this kind of shift in dominant ideology is a slow process, on a period longer that one academic's career.
I invite everyone to read this, this is the single most important work of political science / social psychology I've ever read.
Two categories he identifies, "authoritarian" and "social dominant" map to Graham's "passively conventional" and "aggressively conventional." The latter also tends to correspond to what psychiatrists would describe as narcissist, anti-social and possibly psychopathic traits.
For example, he conducted experiments as role playing games, like a model United Nations. When he removed the few "social dominants" from the player pool, the game ran smoothly, there was peace and everyone went to Alpha Centauri or something.
But when he added a few social dominants, things went to hell quick, and nuclear war broke out. Note that social dominants / narcissists are typically at most a few percents of the population.
I'm sure many people have noticed the phenomenon in any organisation: when a narcissist gets a modicum of power, they can destroy an organisation from within.