Allan Milne Lees
1 min readOct 14, 2019

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From my own experience over 60 years, many different organizations, and over 20 different countries I’ve come to believe that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient condition for psychological flexibility. This is because ambiguity requires more cognitive effort than simple black/white up/down polarities. It’s not surprising therefore that those most drawn to authoritarian ideologies are also those who tend to fall on the left-hand side of the Gaussian distribution of intelligence. That said, the various factors involved in personality also play a large role and thus even nominally highly intelligent people do sometimes gravitate towards authoritarian positions, only less frequently than those who are more cognitively constrained.

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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