To make sense of what is happening right now, we first must define terms:
Authoritarian: a style of leadership which, as Fromm puts it, cannot endure freedom. To understand what we mean by freedom, I will use the logic of Jean Paul Sartre. We cannot understand the figures, movements, and followers of the authoritarian style until we understand what freedom is and what it means to fear it.
According to Sartre, we are "condemned to freedom." Even if we choose not to choose, we are determined by our choices, the concrete form of exercising freedom. If I say, I don't care; I won't vote, our choice both has an external effect (as in the US where low voting rates means Republican victories) and an internal, as we are shaped not by some mythical fixed human nature, as defenders of authoritarianism, like Machiavelli and Hobbes (and the Christian tradition) believed, but rather by our decisions, which, in turn, shape our fate and character.
On the larger level of history, our collective fates are not written in stone (for most of humanity's existence, there was no private property, no greed, no war, no violence) but are a result of our history which is a series of overlapping choices. Black swans and unintended consequences may pay a large part, but they do not negate our freedom but rather highlight that when we choose, we cannot alway control the results. This in no way refutes the existential fact that we have no choice but to choose.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853. In it, he describes a clerk at a Wall St firm who at first works very hard, then suddenly stops and when told to go to work, replies only "I prefer not to." This story pinpoints the fact that those trapped in slavery, whether chattel or the modern version of the Dilbert cubicle minion whose tasks are repetitive and meaningless to him personally, can only assert their freedom, by saying "No." Only through negation can they claim their existential freedom.
Children, dependent from birth, learn this at an early age and thus the terrible three's etc, when life is made living hell by a tiny creature bellowing NO repeatedly. Karl Marx recognized this enslavement of the human spirit in his recognition of the key role of alienation in the transformation of robust human beings into commodities, tools of their exploiters, and he found the solution, as did Camus later in a revolution which unites people in saying NO together.
When the only way to assert our freedom is to say NO, we have transcended the bonds which hold us down and keep us isolated. Camus, in the Rebel, asserts that only when we say No within an oppressive environment, do we reclaim our human dignity and create values, ie, positive principles which affirm rather than deny our existential freedom, which is the flame that lives within and is either smothered with authoritarian treatment or rebels, at great risk, since full human freedom is the one grave threat to all systems of oppression or tyranny. When we say NO more, we draw a line which establishes values and connections with the oppression of others. The Camus concept can be boiled down to:
No matter how smothering any situation, we have a choice. Even if you believe you do not, you have chosen not to choose and thus used your freedom to enslave yourself in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even in the most extreme situation, as when we die, we choose how we die, how we die, in fear or with acceptance.
In the Myth of Sisyphus, Camus charts out the experience of individual rebellion, but in the Rebel, he extends it in the direction of collective action and solidarity, of activism in concert with others. This is the key to understanding his statement:
"I revolt, therefore WE are"
In individual rebellion (I wear tattoos, I refuse to follow social norms, etc), the freedom of rebellion is isolated and allows only temporary moments of freedom, as when Sisyphus, after pushing the rock up the hill for the thousandth time, reaches the top and watches it fall to the bottom but refuses to be sad and instead rambles down with a rebellious happiness and laughter. In the Rebel, the assertion of freedom transcends (and at the same time fulfills) the individual by bringing solidarity with others in saying NO to political tyranny and other forms of oppression (like Bartleby, trapped in the basement of a Wall St. firm, shuffling papers. Thus revolt is the individual experience of what we can experience only with others in revolution, a collective NO, which then creates new values beyond the oppressive norms that slowly deprive us of our humanity.
In every circumstance of human oppression, there is, then, an authoritarian oppressor, a boss who can banish you or fire you and who deprives you of any positive freedom, leaving only the freedom of passive aggression, the silence, the stonewalling, the refusal to engage because: "I prefer not to."
This background allows us to have a perspective on the authoritarian personality and the followers, who seem opposites (one demanding, the other obeying) but in reality, as Fromm realized, both are rooted in the same fear of human freedom.
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