While these neural maps help guide us through our daily life—as the “fast-thinking” processes identified by Daniel Kahneman (2011)—they can also lead us astray. Most importantly, these maps are big and complex. According to Damasio (2021, pp. 35-36):
Explicit human intelligences are neither simple nor small. Explicit human intelligences require a mind and the assistance of mind-related developments: feeling and consciousness. They require perception and memory, and reasoning. The contents of minds are based on spatially mapped patterns that represent objects and actions. (pp. 35-36)
Damasio (2021, pp. 142-144) goes on to identify the impressive span of universes contained in each image:
The image contents of minds hail largely from three principal universes. One universe concerns the world around us. . .. . The second universe concerns the old world inside us. . . . A third universe of mind also pertains to a world within the organism but involves an entirely different sector: the bony skeleton, the limbs and the skull, body regions that turn out to be protected and animated by skeletal muscles.
While the first of these universes plays an important role in all of our lives, the second university (the old world) is likely to be particularly important in the life of the authoritarian. They long for the “good old days” (that probable never actually existed). The third universe—which relates directly to the somatic template that Damasio identified in his earlier publication—seems to also play a particularly influential role in the life of the authoritarian if they are always under stress (threatened by many enemies) and finding little in their life to enjoy.
With all of the challenges that we can gleam about the authoritarian from what Damasio has identified, there is a real “ringer” that Damasio offers near the conclusion of Feeling and Knowing He provide an insight that speaks directly to the rigidity of a unifying authoritarian perspectives (Damasio, 2021, p. 150):
The fact that the organism owns the mind has an intriguing consequence: all that occurs in the mind—the maps of the interior and the maps of the structures, actions, and spatial positions of other organisms/objects that exist and take place in the surrounding exterior – is constructed, of necessity, by adopting the organism’s perspective.
Based on Damasio’s observations, we can conclude that the authoritarian has adopted a specific integrative map. This map provides a perspective that unifies their feelings and thoughts – as well as their fundamental sense of being. While all human being, according to Damasio, build maps that help to orient their life, the authoritarian has built their map on the basis of an unclear (and often VUCA disrupted) sense of self. The bridge they build between being and thinking is composed of destabilizing feelings such as fear, anger and envy—that arise in turn from anomy and alienation.
These feelings further distort not only the authoritarian’s sense of being, but also their thoughts – and ultimately the map they construct. We would propose that their maps remain firmly in place (despite their misalignment with reality) because elements of the map are reinforced by the distorted thoughts and suspicion-filled feelings that form the basis of the map. Put simply, the maps constructed by authoritarians are both self-fulling (self-justifying) and self-sealing (shared only in authority-dominated silos and echo-chambers).
