THE AUTHORITARIAN CHARACTER

There is a pattern that keeps resurfacing across the political and cultural landscape of European and Neo-European societies, one that is difficult to name but impossible to ignore. The same individuals who express fierce admiration for strongmen and self-made millionaires and billionaires tend to reserve an equally fierce contempt for those they perceive as weak, unsuccessful or insufficiently disciplined. The same communities that pledge loyalty to a charismatic leader or a financial ideology will turn aggressively on anyone who questions it. This is not a coincidence, nor is it simply a matter of bad character. It is, as the psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm argued, the expression of a specific psychological structure, one that modernity itself produces, and one that becomes more visible the more unstable the world around us grows. Fromm called it the authoritarian character.

Why This Matters

To understand why this concept is relevant today, it is sufficient to look at the defining social and political tendencies of the present moment. European and Neo-European societies are experiencing a degree of internal fragmentation that would have seemed unlikely just two decades ago. Political polarisation has reached a point at which shared deliberation across ideological lines has become structurally difficult. Extremist movements, once marginal, have entered mainstream political discourse. The demand for strong leadership — for figures who promise clarity, decisiveness and the restoration of order — is growing across the political spectrum, and it is being met.

Alongside this, there is a marked resurgence of traditional and rigidly prescriptive lifestyles, particularly among younger men. Movements organised around strict hierarchies, defined gender roles and a sharp distinction between the disciplined and the weak are gaining considerable cultural traction. Economic competition has intensified, and with it, a social logic in which one’s worth is increasingly measured by visible markers of success, productivity and financial achievement. Those who meet these standards are celebrated; those who do not are, in the dominant cultural language of these communities, simply not trying hard enough.

These tendencies are not unrelated. They are, this paper argues, expressions of the same underlying psychological structure, one that emerges not from strength, ambition or ideological conviction, but from fear.

What The Authoritarian Character Is

Erich Fromm developed the concept of the authoritarian character primarily in his 1941 work Escape from Freedom, in which he attempted to understand, on a psychological level, how large populations could willingly submit to fascist regimes. His central argument was that this submission was not the result of coercion alone, nor of cynical self-interest. It was, rather, the expression of a specific psychological orientation toward the world, one shaped by the unbearable experience of isolation, powerlessness and the absence of meaning.

The authoritarian character is defined by two tendencies that appear to be opposites but are, in fact, two sides of the same psychological structure. The first is the masochistic tendency: a drive toward submission, toward dissolving the self into something larger and more powerful. This can take the form of devotion to a political leader, absorption into an ideology, identification with a strong group or the subordination of one's entire life to an external authority, whether that authority is God, the nation, the market or a cultural ideal. The individual does not experience this submission as a loss. On the contrary, it is experienced as relief, a release from the burden of having to define oneself, to make decisions, to exist as a separate and responsible subject in an uncertain world. The second is the sadistic tendency: a drive toward dominance, towards exercising control over those perceived as weaker. This manifests as contempt for the unsuccessful, the indecisive or those who fail to submit to the same authority. It appears as aggression toward outsiders, as mockery directed at vulnerability, and as a persistent need to establish and enforce hierarchical distinctions between the strong and the weak.

What makes this structure analytically powerful is that these two tendencies do not simply coexist, but are mutually dependent. The more completely an individual submits to a higher authority, the more intensely they need to assert dominance over those below them. Submission upwards and contempt downwards are not contradictory impulses; they are a closed psychological system. The individual moves permanently along a hierarchy, defined entirely by their position relative to others: admiring those above, despising those beneath. The self, in this structure, has no independent foundation. It exists only in relation to power. This also explains the characteristic emotional volatility of the authoritarian character. Admiration for the strong can shift rapidly into hatred if the authority figure shows weakness or fails to deliver. Loyalty is not unconditional; it is contingent on the continued perception of strength. Similarly, contempt for the weak can intensify dramatically when those individuals resist the hierarchy or refuse their assigned position within it. The authoritarian character does not tolerate ambiguity about where power lies.

How This Character Is Formed

It is essential to understand that the authoritarian character does not emerge from malice, an innate desire for power or ideological conviction. It emerges from fear, specifically from the fear that accompanies the loss of orientation, belonging and meaning in conditions of genuine uncertainty. Fromm's argument, which this analysis has traced across previous essays in a different register, is that modernity produces this fear structurally. The dismantling of traditional communities, inherited roles, religious worldviews and stable social hierarchies expanded individual freedom in its negative form, freedom from external constraint. What it did not provide was a corresponding framework for positive freedom: a substantive sense of how that freedom might be exercised, what values it might serve and what kind of life it might be used to build. The individual was emancipated, but not oriented. Freed, but not directed. This combination, liberation without orientation, generates a specific kind of anxiety. The individual finds themselves responsible for constructing a life and an identity without the structural supports that previously made this manageable. The self feels isolated, exposed and insufficient. And it is precisely at this point that the authoritarian solution becomes psychologically compelling. If the burden of selfhood is too great to bear alone, the most immediate relief is to surrender it, to align oneself with a power that is larger, more certain and more stable than the isolated individual could ever be. The self is not destroyed in this process; it is merged. And in that merging, the anxiety temporarily subsides.

This is why the authoritarian character is not a political phenomenon in the first instance; it is a psychological one. It can attach itself to a political leader as easily as to a financial ideology, a fitness philosophy, a religious movement or a cultural community. What these objects of attachment share is not a specific content, but a specific function: they offer certainty, hierarchy and the promise that submission will be rewarded with belonging and significance. In the language of the previous analysis, the Calvinist God and the ideal of financial freedom operate by the same logic, and they attract the same psychological structure.

The two-sided nature of the authoritarian character also becomes legible from this perspective. The contempt directed downwards is not a separate impulse from the admiration directed upwards; it is its necessary complement. To maintain the psychological coherence of the system, the hierarchy must be constantly affirmed. Those who submit to the authority must distinguish themselves from those who do not, because the value of submission depends on the existence of those who are too weak, too undisciplined, or too irredeemable to achieve it. The financial ascetic needs the financial failure. The follower of the strong leader needs the weak and the disloyal. Without the lower tier, the hierarchy collapses, and with it, the psychological security it provides.

Conclusion: The Necessity Of Normative Reorientation

The authoritarian character, as this Essential has attempted to show, is not a pathology of particularly damaged individuals. It is a predictable psychological response to structural conditions that leave individuals without orientation, belonging or a meaningful framework for positive freedom. Where those conditions persist and intensify, the authoritarian character will continue to be produced, and the political, cultural and economic tendencies described at the outset of this piece will continue to gain ground.

This is precisely why a diagnosis, however accurate, is insufficient on its own. Identifying the mechanism does not dissolve it. What is required is a normative reorientation, a structural shift in the conditions under which individuals form their identities and relate to the world. As we have argued in previous analyses, the expansion of negative freedom was a necessary but incomplete project. The phenomenon of FOMO, the rationalisation of powerlessness through financial asceticism and the psychological structure of the authoritarian character are all, at their root, symptoms of the same unfinished transition: a modernity that liberated individuals from traditional authority without furnishing them with the conditions for genuine self-determination.

The approach developed at Essydo moves in this direction. Devletism, as a postmodern normative principle, is premised on the recognition that structural conditions and normative orientation are not separable. A society that systematically forecloses positive freedom will systematically produce individuals who flee from it. The alternative is not a return to the certainties of the pre-modern world, nor a further expansion of negative freedom alone. It is the construction of conditions under which the development of genuine personality becomes structurally possible for the many, rather than the privilege of the few. The authoritarian character is, in the end, not a character at all. It is the absence of one.