Socio-Astrology

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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Man has been so often denned that there can be no harm in adding another definition, and calling him the animal who invented the future.Squirrels, chipmunks, and other hoarding animals seem moved by some vague awareness of a future, but the nobler quadrupeds live simply in the present. Man however, has never taken the poet's advice seriously, and corpe diem remains among the most unheeded of aphorisms. There are, indeed, various ways of being concerned about the future. Farmer, stockbroker, and dic-thrower are interested in knowing what lies just ahead. But there are also men who are troubled over a future so remote that they can never hope, at least as mortals, to know whether or not they have successfully called the turn. Their thirst for fore knowledge absolute is not to be slaked by any piddling guess about tomorrow. They will be right for a century or a millenium; and there are those whose future must be cast in astronomical spans, who worriedly count the billions of years this earth is going to take to freeze into uninhabilability. This concern is certainly often genuinely impersonal, philosophical,theological. At any rate, it is probably wise to accept it as one of the given things about human beings. Here, as so often,the utilitarian explanation is. for the true believer, a mere verbal answer. No doubt the prophet of the distant future feels thai he has in his Tightness made himself one with the cosmic process; has found the clue to past, present, and future; has placed himself, at least, comfortably in the Universe. His belief is of some use to
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, him, even though he can never test it experimentally; but so too are all metaphysical and theological beliefs, the essence of which is that they set themselves above experimentation. Mr. H. G. Wells is as right as Isaiah. Mr. Wells, however, has talked a good deal about Science, a word which tbe makers of the King James version did not find in Isaiah. Now it is true that men we commonly call scientists have done a lot of predicting. The astronomers, notably, have done some fairly exact and long-range predicting, and so far the comets and the eclipses have behaved admirably for them. Some element of prediction is implicit in all scentific attempt to establish laws ot uniformities. From astronomers through physisists and chemists to biologists and physical anthropologists, however, there runs a descending scale, not only as to the accuracy of thdr predictions but also as to their range in time. No reputable physical anthropologist would dare attempt to predict the average height or the degree of blondness of Americans five hundred,or even one hundred, years from now. He might,in his more journalistic moments, hazard a guess, but he would be under no illusions as to its scientific accuracy. It should be clear that in social sciences-politics, economics, sociology-the possibilities of accurate long-range prediction are very slight indeed. It is in just these fields, however, that human beings are most anxious to look into the future, and we should be unpleasantly censorious if weblamed the social scientist for attempting to satisfy so universal—in these days at least—a cutiosiiy. We are, however, fully justified in classifying their efforts with magic, metaphysics, theology, and other necessary but unscientific pursuits. Since Mr. Sorokin' himself has coined the magnificent phrase "physico-psycho-sociological questions" we may permit our-selves a single hyphen, and refer to his and others' studies in the field of "soci-astrology." No less a word would do justice to Socio/ and Cultural Dynamics. Mr. Sorokin himself somewhat grudgingly admits that critics may not unfairly call his work a philosophy of history, and his publishers have evoked the names of Vico, Buckle, Spengler, and Pareto. His three volumes are to be followed by a fourth in which all loose ends are to be tied together,and the final wotd said on the methods of general sociology. In the mean-
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, time, these three volumes constitute a complete philosophy of history, an attempt to plot the who whole past, present, and future of mankind. They make hard reading. Mr, Sorokin has plenty of fire and enthusiasm, but he lacks the best gift of the writer—the ability to stop writing. Grace of style, a feeling for form, a willingness to compress, are, however not often to be found among philosophers of history and sociologists. Certainly Pareto, with all his other gifts, was lacking in these. Mr. A. J. Toynbee's three volumes on A Study of History are to be followed by ten more. Mr. Sorokin has plenty of company, and in these days of big books, will doubtless have plenty of readers.The peg on which he contrives to hang his 2,100 pages is a simple one. Men in society, according to Mr. Sorokin, have always oscillated and apparently always will oscillate, between what he calls Ideational and Sensate culture-mentalities. One of his less endearing traits in this book is a militant insistence on his own absolute originality, and he will have it that no one has ever cast a generalization in quite this mold. His system, he maintains, has nother in common with systems which divide the history of m;ankind into stages, like Comte’s ; or which see cyclical growth, like Spengler's spring-summer-autumn-winter of a culture; or which discern curves, pulsations, rhythms, swings,like half-a-hundred others. Nevertheless, to the sceptical critic, his formula seems a variant of the pole-to-pole alternation which is one of the commonest forms of the genre and which is seen in a classical instance in Vico’s Scienza nuova. Mr. Sorokin, it is true, offers a very sophisticated variant, with complicated internalrhythms and intermediate stages, and with no fancifully exact periodic recurrences. His Ideational and his Sensate he admits can and do exist in all sorts of mixed and impure forms, but he insists they are there, and comes back to them after each of his excursions into the complexities of recorded history.At the very beginning, he announces that he will, in defiance ofBaconian scientific method, begin with deductive definition of his general terms, and only later have recourse to induction. As so often throughout the book, his iconoclasm here seems a bit less than shattering, for one had gathered that Poincare, Mach, and other respectable theorists of scientific method hdad left Baconian induction rather far behind. But we may let
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, that pass, and come to grips with the Ideational and the Sensate seen as characteristic human mentalities. The Ideational mind in its purest form, that of the Ascetic Ideational, completely repudiates what philosophers have called the external world, and simple men have called reality, or nature, or facts. The Ascetic Ideationalist will not believe his senses. Everything he sees, hears, smells, touches is subject to change, is hopelessly and radically ephemeral. But Truth be knows to be eternal, unchanging, absolute, because he feels within himself a desire for the eternal, the unchanging, the absolute. He will,therefore, yield as little as possible to the demands of his body and this world, its transitory environment. A Christian hermit, he will edge suicide by starvation to come closer to his God; a Buddhist mystic, he will seek in Nirvana that ecstatic extinction of desire in which all desire is fulfilled. Such minds, Mr. Sorokin admits, are always rare, and always complete and universal prevalence would obviously put an end to history, and to social and cultural dynamics. In human societies, the Ideational mentality more commonly assumes a less pure form, that of the Active Ideational. The Active Ideationalist believes almost as strongly as the Ascetic Idea-tionalist in the existence of eternal forms, scorns as thoroughly the lying evidence of his senses. But he is anxious to lead his weaker fellows intothe good life of his ideals, and knows that to do this he must compromise with their world to the extent of administering for them the eternal laws. He becomes, then, the great religious organizer, the conservative statesman, the upholder of God’s word on earthl. St. Paul, St. Gregory, and St.Benedict, even St. Augustine himself, were of this type. The Sensate mind is in every respect the logical opposite of the ideational. The Sensatist ( a neologism which makes even Mr. Sorokin uncomfortahle that he explains he prefers to use "Epicurean" in quotation marks as a synonym) is wholly immersed in the changing world he comes to know from the “telegraph messages” his senses send him. Hewill have nothing to do with eternity, perfection, the absolute. He is so immersed in Becoming that he is never aware of Being. He is all for development, science, progress, change. The Active Sensatist is seen in inventors, warriors, pioneers, revolutionists, reformers. Obviously the last few hundred years have been grand times for the Sensate mentality.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Mr. Sorokin lists several other combinations. We don't really knowmuch about the mentalities of the masses of mankind, but Mr. Sotokinfinds it convenient to classify them, in most periods of history, as PassiveIdeationalists, men who ate too limited by poverty, ignorance, and suffering to do more than accept the forms of Ideational culture as a kind of compensation. Their senses are, apparently, not sufficiently satisfied and sharpened to make them Sensatists. The Passive Sensate mentality is that of "eat, drink, and be merry," of "wine, women, and song," of what has come to be known as the Epicurean outlook on life (Epicurus himself was not an Epicurean). The Passive Sensatist is as contemptuous of absolute truth, ideals, eternity as the Active Sensatist, but he lacks the energy, the positive faith in science, progress, bigger and better things that characterize his Active brother. Finally, there is the Cynical Sensatist, a veryunpleasant fellow indeed. He is really a Passive Sensatist at heart, butat certain periods and in certain environments he has only been able toget his wine, women, and song more or less on the sly by pretending tobelieve in some current Ideational system. He is the genuine hypocrite, the man who can put his ideals on and off like clothes. Talleyrand must have been a Passive Sensatist, and Machiavelli and Mandeville were even capable of erecting this shameful attitude into a philosophy. There is also Fideism, a rather pathetic mentality illustrated in William James’s last phase. The Fideist wants to believe, wants to raise himself to the heights of Ascetic Ideationalitm. But somehow lack the genuine depth and capacity necessary for thisachievement. His is the “will to believe, “ not the power.All these mentalities exist, in a more or less pure or mixed form, in any given society. Apparently Mr.Sorokin would even grant a mixture of the mixed. This particular review of his work, one may hazard, would in his own terminology be the result of an impure mixture of the Activeand the Cynical Sensate mentality. He finds that one mixture, however,achieves a real purity, becomes a genuine synthesis instead of a hash, andis perhaps the highest and most fortunate position humanity can attain.This is Idealism, in which only the best of the Ideational and the Sensatecome together, so that the Idealist has the best of both worlds. It is Mr.Sorokin's own position.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, Now these mentalities are not simply individual traits, the concern of me psychologist. They are also group traits, culture traits, and sobecome the concern of the sociologist. Thanks to the records of history,art, learning, religion, politics, economics, we can determine fairly accurately the position of a given group. In his first volume, "Fluctuationsof Forms of Art," Mr. Sorokin decides what is Ideational art and whatSensate, and traces their ups and downs primarily in the Western Worldfrom the Greeks to the present. In his second "Fluctuations of Truth,Ethics, and Law," he applies the same process to the achievements ofWestern dvilization in theology, philosophy, and jurisprudence. In histhird, "Fluctuations in Social Institutions, War, and Revolution," hestudies more directly the actual mechanics of social change.V^ Scornful though be is of what his fellow social-scientists regard as■■scientific methods.'" he attempts to trace by methods elaborately—ano"perhaps a"little decqii ivcly- ■ -quantitative the course of these fluctuations.It will perhaps be sufficient if we content ourselves here with followinghim briefly through his first volume, since this gives a quite adequatesample of his work. He has first to decide what recorded facts to take asindications of the existence of Ideational, Idealistic, and Sensate in art.(Art, of course, he takes in the widest sense, to include architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and literature.) Ideational art in its purest formis supersensory and immaterial. Its design is purely symbolic, and it makesno attempt to be "realistic" or "natural." The anchor, dove, and olivebranch of early Christian art are typically Ideational. They have norelation to the objects they depict, but stand for "ideational phenomena"quite different from these objects. Allegorical art is a less pure form ofIdeational art. At the opposite pole, Sensate art is visual, tries to catchthe fleeting impressions made on the senses, tries to see what the eye ofthe camera sees. French Impressionism of the nineteenth century is aperfect example, Idealistic art is simultaneously Ideational and Visual.It seeks to base itself on visual reality, but it "idealizes, modifies, typifiesand transforms visual reality in conformity with its ideals and ideas."Fifth-century Greek art and thirteenth-century medieval art are happilyI (lea! i -lie.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, This is perhaps a little vague for statistical purposes, but with somehelp from more specific indicators Mr. Sorokin manages a whole series ofgraphs. An example of a more specific indicator is nudity in painting and sculpture. Nudity is patently Sensate, never Ideational. If then we countthe proportion of nudes in surviving paintings and statues, we have a grandmeasure of the degree of Sensatism in a culture. Similarly with the representation of "feminine" women. Ideational art scorns women as weak andpresumably incapable of proper merging with the Infinite. Idealistic art willshow women, but always masculine women; it idealizes them, takes awaytheir feminine weaknesses. Sensate art, however, glories in their curves,emphasizes their sex or their "prettiness." Here again is a measurableindicator.With music, Mr. Sorokin has a harder time finding anything as tangibleas nudity. He decides, however, that Ideational music tends to be "inner,”while the Sensate is "theatrical and external." Ideational music is simple,disdainful of enormous choruses or larger and complicated orchestras. It is"pure," and characteristically anonymous, for its creator does not care foradvertising, is a collectivism not an individualist. The Gregorian chant isIdeational music. Sensate music goes in for large orchestras, for stunningeffects, for bird songs and programs, and is always the work of an individual who glories in it as a form of self-advertising. Wagner's music is clearly Sensate,In literature, the Ideational deals with the invisible world of eternalvalues, does not attempt to cater to vulgar tastes, is lofty, pure, idealistic,Sensate literature tries to entertain, to reflect the passing world. It runsto satire, the picaresque, to criticism, to art for art's sake. Idealism heretoo has the best of both worlds. Dante is an Ideationalist, Sinclair Lewisa Sensatist, Milton perhaps an Idealist, Sophocles certainly.From all this, and a good deal more, there emerges finally ampleevidence, Mr. Sorokin concludes, that the facts confirm his deductivereasoning about social and cultural fluctuations. Early Greek civilisationwas predominately Ideational, with some Sensate currents fluctuations in the work of men like Thales, By the fifth century B.C. the rising Sensateand the declining Ideational had merged to form in Periclean Athens oneof the two great Idealistic periods in the history of the Western World
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, since 600 B.C. With the fourth century B.C., the Sensate becomes dominant,and what we call the Hellenistic or the Alexandrian period is typically Sensate-n its last years decadenlly so. Rome went through a similar cycle,becoming thoroughly Sensate with Catullus and Horace. But a new Ideational culture was rising with Christianity, clear also in certain phases ofpagan Stoicism. From about 300 a.d. to 1200, the medieval world was inits Ideational phase. In the thirteenth century, the great age of thecathedrals and of Thomist philosophy, there occurred a second Idealisticculture, the brief and perfect meeting point of Ideational and Sensate.With the Renaissance this world triumphed, and Western culture enteredinto a Sensate phase which seems to have culminated in the nineteenthcentury. We are now living in a decadent Sensate period, marked by theunrest, the searching for new ideals, the social, artistic, and economicinstability characteristic of such a period.From this analysis of the past, it follows inevitably that a newIdeational culture is on its way up. We shall not live to see it. Our lot isthe unhappy one of human beings who must go through the travail fromwhich a new culture is born. We have lived through the most bloody ofwars and one of the most violent of revolutions. We are going to livethrough—or die in—more and worse ones. But sunrise awaits our children, "However profound the contemporary crisis may be—and it is infinitely deeper than most people recognize—after a trying transitoryperiod, there looms not an abyss of death, but a mountain peak, of life,with new horizons of creation and a fresh view of the eternal heavens."Mr. Sorokin's third volume, "Fluctuations of Social Relationships,Wars, and Revolutions," as an attempt to show how violence Isrelated to changes in cultural forms, it is integrated with the whole schemeof his work, has a good deal of interest quite apart from his general thesis.By detailed analyses of wars and civil disturbances in the Western Worldfrom 600B.C. to the present, he endeavors to show that a certain amountof violence is endemic in all societies. Relying on accepted historicalauthorities 'or the different periods, he attempts a numerical evaluationof the seriousness of each war and disturbance, measured by length, extentof penetration into the lives of different classes, intensity, violence, andso on. Here are typical examples of civil disturbances in English history:
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, The troubles over Magna Charta in 1215-1117 are worth 42.21 points;the attempts of Perkin Warbeck, pretender, in 1495, 7.65; the GreatRevolution in 1641-1640, 77.27; the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820,3.91; the Chartist troubles in 1839, 9.66. In wars, Mr. Sorokin estimatesthe number of the armed forces and the casualties for each separate phase,and comes out with results like these for England: The war with Spain,1585-1600 (The Great Armada), armed forces—16 years with an averageforce of 20,000 a year—320,000, casualties 16,000; War of the SpanishSuccession, 1701-1713, armed forces 1,170,000, casualties 210,000;Napoleonic Wars, 1803-1814, armed forces 420,000, casualties 50,400;World War, 1914-1918, armed forces 7,500,000, casualties 3,070,000.Put in the form of a graph, the World War sends the curve in the twentiethcentury skyrocketing at a great rate.From all this Mr. Sorokin concludes, not only that we are in a verybad crisis of all kinds of violence marking the end of a Sensate period,but that there isn't the slightest foundation for the naive belief of our"liberals" that peaceful methods of settling internal and external difficulties have, over the last three thousand years, been gradually making headway against violent methods of settlement. One of the strongest emotionalbiases in this book—and it is full of them—is a boiling fury at the thoughtthat there are still on earth misguided people who believe in progress, inlinear evolution, in the inevitable achievement of peace, prosperity, democratic freedom, an economy of abundance . Gloatingly Mr. Sorokin piles statistics on statistics to prove that since about 1900 wars and revolutions have been getting bloodier and more extensive, art filthier, more precious,more futile, philosophy more desperate, morals more decadent, sciencemore barren. But he insists he is—in the long run-no pessimist. Only to “champions of the over-stuffed, after-dinner utopia” can hi stheories appear pessimistic. Out of the present evils he prophesies a glorious future, “the rise of anew magnificent Ideational culture, society and man.”Detailed criticism of this tremendous work would be out of place here and would, moreover, require an omniscience equal to the omniscience of its writer, an omniscience which the critic may well leave to more crea-
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, tive souls. The book lacks stylistic distinction. Mr. Sorokin is prolix and a repetitious, and exceeds even his fellow sociologists in the number and a lextent of his neologisms. His use of quotation marks seems on the masterly use Mr. Robert Benchley makes of this convenient form of punctuation. His irony is of the lumbering kind that goes caricature some half-a-dozen better. He is too emotional, however, to fall into the droning dullness of so much sociological writing. He suffers to the bursting point over the narrow concept the modern Sensatist has for men of other mentalities, and at moments his prose bursts up completely. Herbert Spencer and Pareto infuriate, him, much as Pope and Voltaire infuriated Words- worth. Indeed, Mr. Sorokin is, in the bad sense the word undoubtedly possesses, a_poet. He has to the full that contempt for his predecessors in the previous generation which seems to be a characteristic of the history of art and letters. Perhaps the history of science is not altogether free from this sort of contempt, and certainly many a scientist has freely admitted other scientists were damned fools. On the whole, though, science seems to have built on its past more continuously, and certainly less acrimoniously than have art and letters. Mr. Sorokin, howecer, produly lifts himself above the limitations of science, and would doubtless find this criticism less than biting. In general Mr. Sorokin appears to have been most consientious about his facts. He has gone to experts, mostly to historians, and has listed his authorities carefully. It is true that in the writing of history it is a rare field that boasts of but one expert, and that here is eslewhere experts frequently disagree. An expert not adopted by Mr.Sorokin could no doubt demolish quite completely some small portion of his grand edifice. There is also a general difficulty which faces all social scientists who try to base their work on a long span of history. The data, incomplete for ancient and medieval history, become inconeniently abundant as one approaches the present day. It is, for instance, almost mopossible tolearn anything at all accurate about Greek music. the great paintings of antiquity have perished. Not until modern times did men acquire statistical habits. We assume that the figures Herodotus gives for the Persian army under Zerzes-a round million-are grossly exaggerated, but we do not know their real number. All of Mr. Sorokin's graphs and tables, lean at the start.
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, get very fat indeed towards the end. Some of them, like those based ondiscoveries and inventions, jump upwards at an astonishing rate about1800, and after a peaceful and almost horizontal progress, climb suddenlyin the direction of infinity, and disappear quite off the paper.These are, however, the common trials of all social scientists, andMr. Sorokin faces them bravely and knowingly. The problem of the actual destructiveness of wars and revolutions in the last few millenniums is well worth trying to answer. Mr. Sorokin is quite right not to be deterred by the knowledge that an indisputably correct answer is impossible. After all, as he points out, interpolations and guesses are not unknown in thebetter-established natural sciences. A more legitimate criticism, however,may be made of the actual results of his quantitative study of wars and revolutions. In his desire to prove his points- the endemic nature of these .troubles, and especially their very heavy concentration in the period1900-1922-he falls into exaggeration. Among revolutions he lists, andweighs disproportionately, many disturbances hardly more serious thanan undergraduate rag. Louis Napoleon's comic opera Putsch at Strasbourg rates 2.46 on a scale that makes the February Revolution of 1848 worth 20.32. The two events are simply incomparable. There is no moresense in saying that the February Revolution was ten times more seriousthan Louis Napoleon's attempted coup than there would be in saying thatthe Pulitzer prizes are ten times more important than the World's Series.The Cato Street Conspiracy gets 3.91, which is about one-eighteenth ofthe value of the whole Civil War from 1641 to 1649. Now the Cato StreetConspiracy is at the level of the latest Charlie Chan case, and has nothingin common with the Civil War. Similarly in his treatment of wars, Mr.Sorokin's figures make the World War altogether too horrendous. Allsorts of incommensurables enter into the destructiveness of wars. TheWars of the Roses may have been mere professional tournaments, butthey destroyed the old English nobility. There are good grounds for believing that the Thirty Years' War exhausted Germany in a way no powerwas exhausted by the late war.Throughout the work, Mr. Sorokin is engaged in a hot struggle withthe doctrine of linear evolution as exemplified by men like T. H. Huxleyand Herbert Spencer. Both these gentlemen are dead, and their doc-
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Several book reviews bound together in a red book entitled Sorokin Reviews, trines very dead. Mr. Sorokin exhausts what is, eyen for a sociologist,undue energy in battering down open doors. Few thinkers now hold thatthere is a universal process from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous,from militant society to industrial society, from authority to freedom,and our generation hardly needs- to be reminded that the British Constitution is not an end term in political development. The World War andthe Russian Revolution are very much on our minds, and we scarcelyneeded Mr. Sorokin to discover them for us.Indeed, the whole elaborate attack on "Sensate" conceptions of scientific method, an attack which occupies pages of the first volume of Socialand Cultural Dynamics, is based on a notion of scientific method neverheld by its best practitioners. It is perhaps true that for Spencer (as forMarx) Science with a capital letter sometimes stood for a kind of materialistic theology, and scientific laws were the rigid decrees of Nature-God. It is certainly true that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries therewere many plain people who like Flaubert’s Mr. Homais, made of whatthey called science a set of narrow and rather ugly dogmas which left noroom for either beauty or doubt. Such people are still with us, but they nolonger set the tone of our culture, if they ever did. The best Scientists havea key to all human experience. Even Pareto, to whom Mr. Sorokin is quite unfair, and who he seems wholly incapable of understanding, was quite willing to admit that art, theology, philoso phy, and a good deal else are quite outside the scope of science. Pareto simply insisted that science has a method of its own, and that within itslimitations, that method could be tested by its positive achievements.Mr. Sorokin's contempt is all the more unjustified, sincein very important matters they are in substantial agreement. Pareto, likeMr. Sorokin, had certain notions about the future of our society, thoughhe expressed them much less lyrically and much more tentatively. He,too, thought that the twentieth century, though barely begun, had leftthe linear evolutionists in the lurch. He, too, was contemptuous of the"religion of progress." He held that nineteenth-century society had carried inventiveness, expansion, individual liberty, experiemtn, adventure, novelty, to a point beyond which society could not hold together, and that therefore a reaction towards stability, order, authority, collectivism, was

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