Let’s go back to a small scale. The family must certainly have existed before the city, state, or any form of institutional authority. Patriarchy as an example is cited as a historical and modern phenomenon, and is often experienced most clearly at home, with parents and children. Imagine the consequence of even subtle disenfranchisement of a mother as it affects the family. Rules for the father affect everyone, as do rules for the children. Standards are agreed in any healthy relationship, and those standards and responsibilities evolve as more people are included. Fair resource allocation in a family is by the standards. With double standards there is patriarchy and other problems. Authoritarianism at home regards the father or leader of the family as both in charge and forceful with his will over the family. Authoritarianism at large regards responsibility as held by an external validating authority, versus not being responsible ourselves.
Does trust extend far into your life and community or, in your view, in the aggregate? The issues of fascism, totalitarianism, and authoritarians did not arise with the Greek states, but it didn’t begin to end there either. Slavery, the disenfranchisement of tribal rights and native cultures in the Americas and around the world, profitable wars — each is an imposition or matter of will and force. In a situation where working together, living on a prairie or field, simply the real virtue of things is trust and sharing the things we would rely on, like a cave in winter where your family stays. The replacement system of precedent and consequence create an authoritarian framework. Modern agreements predicated on that system can be called free, but in context are authoritarian, with the impositions of our society accepted and profitable.
What is the point of a relationship, an agreement, or a pact? Where is each person coming from and is the priority going to have repercussions for how we react and treat each other? Is the meaning of society to help each other, or to create precedents, classes, and categories for understanding authority? Some might say both, but to seek a world without authoritarianism is to eliminate it entirely, not to live inside it comfortably. Looking to where in our personal social agreements we have given a tacit approval to less responsibility is the guide for what threads of authoritarianism exist in our lives.
