Shifting to External Locus of Control
First, there is the negation of one’s own sense of self-effectiveness and control. Fromm suggests that we escape from the responsibilities of freedom by giving up the independence of our own individual selves. As I just noted regarding the dynamics of a numinous enthrallment, the external takes control of the internal. We are no longer the “masters of our own souls” but have instead assigned this responsibility to some other persona or agency. As Christopher Lasch (1984) would suggest, under these conditions we diminish our sense of self (soul and all). We become a “minimal” self with very little in the way of a personal sense of identity or worth. We are ripe for authoritarian rule by an external entity that we perceive as being much bigger and more powerful than we are (a numinous authority).
Returning to the concept of locus of control, we find a clear and profound shift from an internal locus to an external locus. There is often an almost mythic sense that some powerful force in the world (or outside the world) is now propelling our personal and collective fate. Jung’s archetypes come to play again. We are aligned with some primate image (archetype) to which we donate our personal agency and soul. In the loss of our sense of internal control, we are led to the diminution of our own sense of self and look instead for an externally-derived sense of a collective self—a widening of the pathway to authoritarianism.
Abandoning Individual Identity
The second element leads directly from the first. As I just noted, there is the projection of one’s own power onto another. Having abandoned our own individual identity, we fuse with the identity of a leader, a group, or an institution. This may be a church, an educational institution, a philosophy, a political party, or a national leader. During the early years of World War II, Fromm focuses, in Escape from Freedom (1941), primarily on the authoritarianism of Nazi Germany. His analysis was still appropriate in 1960, when Fromm (1996) was writing about American culture, and in the early 1990s, when considering the reformation of authoritarianism in Russia and many other countries following collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his later work, Fromm (1960) recognizes that the authoritarian dynamic is not restricted to right-wing politics—though he seems to have had something of a blind spot regarding the authoritarian orientation to be found in many socialist and communist regimes. The issue of political orientation and authoritarianism has been a source of considerable debate among social scientists since Fromm first described the authoritarian personality in 1941.
