cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/17079522
To keep it short the reason why some people are ok with authoritarianism is because most structures that we deal with on a daily basis are authoritarian.
Here is evidence that shows a significant amount of people are ok with authoritarianism:
This should be concerning.
And the thing is that it makes sense once you look at what are the most common systems that people interact with the most.
A clear example would be the Boss-Worker relationship. The boss creates a set of objectives/tasks for the worker and the worker sees them out. Rarely does the worker get the chance to set the higher level direction of what they are supposed to be doing with their time leaving them obedient to the boss and their demands.
Another example would be some Parent-Child relationships. Some parents treat their children as people that should show absolute respect towards them just because they are the parents not because they have something that is of value to the child (experience).
Even in the places where we do make democratic decisions those are usually made in ways that are supposed to be supplemental to authoritative decision making. An example would be how we don’t vote on decisions but instead how we vote on others to make decisions for us.
Once you add up all the experiences that someone has throughout their whole life you will see that most of them come into direct contact with authoritarian systems which means it makes that kind of way of thinking familiar and therefore acceptable.
Unlike democracy which is an abstract concept and something we only really experience from time to time.
If we want people to actually stop thinking authoritarianism is ok then we as a society are gonna have to stop using these kinds of systems / ways of thinking in our daily lives.
There's one huge problem with your critique: You are conflating heirarchy with authoritarianism. The structures you described above are all heirarchies, but are not always, and should not be, authoritarian.
I think your insights are cogent; but you need to separate out the two concepts to get to the heart of the discussion.
I've saved this post and will come back to it when I have get off work; thanks for starting an interesting conversation.
Thanks for your response. Also I sort of didn’t separate the idea of hierarchy and authoritarianism on purpose because I think it is more about the structure of how decisions get made that is important.
If in most cases an individual isn’t making certain decisions and instead those decisions are being handled by others then people aren’t going to have the capacity to make those kinds of decisions themselves.
And with the kinds of hierarchy that we see in our daily lives are stifling our ability to make the decisions that would also be removed under an authoritarian political system.
So it’s more about making it more familiar rather than the actual systems that we have now being completely authoritarian already.
There's a reason for that: Making decisions is exhausting. Contemporary adults in our very individualist society often complain of decision fatigue, and whole books have been written about the invisibility of cognitive labor.
Now I'm not saying the cute for that is authoritarianism, or even heirarchy in general. It's perfectly possible to divide up decision-making, cognitive labor, in an egalitarian manner, and whole books have been written about that, too.
But we as humans are just not equipped to make all the decisions about our own lives. We can do any of them, probably, but not the whole set. Whether we receive them from our superiors (parents telling kids what's for dinner) or delegate them to our subordinates (restaurant patrons telling the waitress "surprise me") or share them with a partner or partners (housemates taking turns planning meals), we need to spread it around or we burn out.