In order to fight authoritarianism, you must become a beacon of its antithesis: liberty. Securing personal freedom and autonomy only makes you a liberated person. To be a liberation advocate, you must actively fight to secure the liberty of others. The most difficult part of this process, which most people will not ever get past (especially since we want people to trust our vision as a form of self-validation), is killing their inner cop.
“Fuck you, I’m not a cop!”
No, that’s not what I mean. Chill out for a minute and let me explain…
Liberation is not just about securing more liberty for yourself and compatriots; it is also about reducing the proliferation of authoritarianism in whatever way we are able. When we claim liberty for ourselves, it becomes an ethical duty to secure and preserve it for others. We tend to focus this fight outward, in our opposition to oppressive social institutions. For all the good this does, though, we tend to ignore the (critical) inner dimensions of our ego and identity.
No matter how much we believe in and prize freedom and egalitarianism, our ego has an innate drive to enforce itself and it’s identity on the world around us due to conditioning of the environment (western liberalism) in which it has developed. In other words, the world that shaped us has taught us that self-actualization comes through objectively imprinting your “mark” on the world — domination, expansionism, imperialism — whether this is as a militant colonizer nation or a cutthroat Wall Street shark makes no difference. This is the life we’re supposed to want in the modern neoliberal west.
The ego’s strong attachment to our identity in the world means that any perceived attack on that identity — our emotions, ideas, and opinions, or our reason, logic, and wisdom; that is, our subjective and objective conception of the world — is taken as a personal attack. The perception of an attack then results in the conception of a conflict and the ego seeks to assert itself and its truth. The act of enforcing its opinion and ideas on the outside world without giving the options for “compromise,” “opting out,” or “agreeing to disagree,” becomes a de facto authoritarian dynamic… your inner cop has come out to assert how big he is.
This builds society in an intrinsically hierarchic way. Where your ego triumphs, you are “above” those people; where it submits, you are “below.” When everyone in a community is stuck in this arrogant and self-righteous cycle of trying to assert themselves as individuals, the community cannot help but tend towards vertical organization. This means that those “below” are naturally positioned to oppose those “above,” and society becomes conflict-oriented and authoritarian organically.
It is, therefore, imperative that we learn to recognize authoritarian tendencies in ourselves, and have the objectivity and humility to call ourselves out. We are responsible, first and foremost, for ourselves. If we cannot embody the behaviors of a liberator, nobody has any reason to believe liberation is possible.
And, crucially, this is not a one-time process. It’s something we must be actively engaging in — every moment of every day. Be mindful of your actions and thoughts — police them yourself (so other people don’t have to, and so you don’t get tempted to police other people). Cultivate humility. Learn to be accepting of failure and faults, and seek compromise and cooperation — always — instead of conflict, schism, and war.