The Authoritarian Default

Psychology, dynamics, definition

Consider the shape of human political history from a height. Sumer crowned god-kings. Egypt deified its pharaohs. China ruled by the mandate of heaven, Rome by the divinity of emperors, medieval Europe by the divine right of kings; the Aztecs, the Inca, the Khmer, the Ottomans, the politburos of the twentieth century — very different societies repeatedly produced authority concentrated above, submission expected below, and dissent treated as disease. The recurrence is broad, though neither every society nor every period fits one design.

The liberal package defended here — individual authorship, authority answerable to the governed, criticism protected against decree — appeared late and incompletely as a durable institutional combination, though practices of consent, dispersed authority, resistance, and deliberation are older and wider. Liberal orders require maintenance; authoritarian recovery after collapse is a recurrent risk, not a law that erases counterexamples.

A recurrence that broad demands explanations at more than one altitude. Institutions, material conditions, war, technology, and particular ideologies matter; so may psychological tendencies that travel across them. The hypothesis of this chapter is that authoritarian coordination often comes cheaply, exploiting ready cognitive and social responses, while liberal order is a precious, fragile achievement that has to be built and maintained. Default names that recurrent risk, not a universal state installed identically in every person or culture.

The Instinct for Submission

Six forces, supported at different levels and interacting differently across populations and institutions, can converge on the same output. They are recurring human susceptibilities rather than defects unique to one group.

Hierarchy sometimes paid. Humans evolved in varied small-group environments where coordination under scarcity and threat could reward rapid deference as well as deliberation, coalition-building, and resistance to bad leaders. One plausible contribution to present psychology is therefore a mix of biological and cultural selection for context-sensitive hierarchy: under perceived danger, closing ranks can be locally advantageous. That is a hypothesis about recurring pressures, not a finding that efficient hierarchies universally outlasted deliberative groups or that evolution optimized a single objective called group survival. The narrower inheritance is enough for this argument: threat can make submission feel protective rather than alien.

Thinking is expensive, and outsourcing it is cheap. Autonomous agency demands constant vigilance, cognitive effort, and emotional resilience — every decision owned, every belief audited. Human cognition economizes with heuristics, and the grandest heuristic of all is authority: accept the prescribed beliefs and norms, and an enormous portion of life’s decisions are precomputed. The savings are real, and they grow with stress. In uncertain or threatening environments, when cognitive resources are most taxed, the shortcut becomes most attractive — which is precisely when authoritarians come recruiting.

Conformity polices the group from inside. Conformity bias and in-group favoritism run deep. In many ancestral environments, exclusion carried severe costs, so aligning with majority opinion or authority could protect access to cooperation and survival. Authoritarianism can leverage those tendencies rather than create them from nothing. Rigid conformity can strengthen cohesion, make internal disagreement costly, and simplify social interaction into a test with one approved answer.

Certainty is a consumer good. People often seek epistemic security — clear, comforting, unequivocal accounts of the world — and recoil from ambiguity. Authoritarian narratives can sell exactly this: absolute truth, fixed moral clarity, an answer for everything. The alternative defended here — that interpreted claims depend on conditions open to re-examination — is demanding. Under stress, comfortable certainty can outsell accurate uncertainty. Dogma has some of candy’s advantage over medicine.

Fear is easily weaponized. A credible coercive threat exploits the deepest aversion an organism has. Faced with it, submission is at first a calculation, then a habit, and finally something worse: internalized, so that the subject polices himself and calls it loyalty. This is the self-reinforcing dynamic that lets authoritarian systems economize on enforcement — the fear does most of the work, and after enough time the fear is no longer even experienced as fear.

Agency is a burden as well as a good. Autonomy entails continuous personal accountability, and the weight of it — every outcome traceable to one’s own choices — can be crushing. By centralizing agency in a figure or an institution, authoritarianism relieves the individual of responsibility for his own life. Every abdication is also an acquittal: whatever happens next is no longer your fault. The trade is emotionally appealing and ethically ruinous, and it is offered fresh every day.

Put the six together and notice what they share: each can discount part of the cost of being an agent. Hierarchy discounts coordination, authority discounts thought, conformity discounts conflict, dogma discounts doubt, submission discounts fear, and abdication discounts responsibility. Authoritarianism need not be an alien imposition on human psychology; under some conditions it can become a path of less resistance, a point missed by theories that treat tyranny only as something done to populations. A strongman can be met partway by followers whose needs his offer fits like a key. Nor does the pattern require a strongman at all: the same psychology, operating at low intensity through ordinary institutions, can supply the willing personnel of The Censorship Machine — no commissars needed, just people choosing certainty and safety one referral at a time. At full dose, submission helped make the regimes anatomized in Against Communism administrable alongside violence, surveillance, patronage, and ideology.

The practical inversion follows. Liberal, autonomous, critically rational life cannot be treated as a condition that maintains itself. It is a cultural and institutional project that must be re-argued, re-taught, and re-defended against recurrent pressures. The work does not become obsolete merely because one generation built safeguards.

The Cycle

If the pull is recurrent, it should be visible inside liberal orders too — not only as coups, but as a pattern in ordinary politics. One testable version is that political actors have stronger incentives to champion liberal constraints when out of power than when those constraints limit them in office.

The mechanism is that the principles are held instrumentally. To a faction out of power, universal liberal values — free speech, individual autonomy, tolerance — are the best tools available. They build the broadest possible coalitions, win public sympathy, and indict incumbents by standards the incumbents profess. But the moment the faction gains authority, its priorities shift from coalition-building to coalition-maintenance, and the same values change sign. Free speech now protects the opposition. Tolerance now shelters the rival. Limited government now limits us. Principles that were load-bearing on the way up become obstacles at the top — because they were rented for the climb, never owned.

The risk crosses factions, and that symmetry is diagnostic. Parts of the left have abandoned free expression while holding institutional power, rationalizing censorship as necessary combat against harmful and dangerous ideas. Parts of the right have abandoned limited-government commitments when dominant, citing social stability or national security. Each side can document the other’s betrayal while experiencing its own as an unfortunate necessity. Fear supplies the emergency, certainty supplies the justification, and conformity supplies the applause. Weaponized fear needs an enemy, and an opponent’s real excesses can supply one.

Notice what the rule buys you: a forecasting question. Betrayals need not arrive at random; transitions into power change the costs of tolerating opposition. That recurrent incentive makes a movement’s manifesto weak evidence by itself about behavior in office. A stronger forecast reads both commitments and incentives: ask what professed values will cost once the coalition holding them becomes the governing one. The observer who catalogues the other side’s betrayals while trusting his own side’s promises has still misunderstood the risk — the incentive is not a fact about them.

That is the equilibrium a society risks when the cycle runs unopposed: competing authoritarianisms, each justifying its abuses by citing its opponents’ excesses. Each faction’s overreach becomes the other’s recruiting poster; each round of retaliation licenses the next; and the contest stops being between liberty and control and becomes a contest over whose control. The machinery need not reverse itself merely because its costs become visible; actors can remain locally responsive to incentives that sustain it.

What interrupts the ratchet is a different kind of actor. Principled behavior — upholding the same values in power and out of it, regardless of short-term advantage — is inherently costly. It means sacrificing expediency, enduring discomfort, and tolerating dissent one has the means to silence. Because it is costly, it is rare; because the cycle cannot be broken any other way, it is indispensable. Principled actors are what make a liberal order more than a truce between authoritarianisms waiting for their turn: they stabilize expectations, reduce the transactional friction of politics, and keep norms of accountability and transparency alive by observing them when observation hurts. Breaking the authoritarian cycle requires valuing liberal principles as terminal goals — things held for their own sake — and not as instrumental tactics. What that commitment looks like as a working discipline of governance is the subject of Centrism as a Discipline.

Three Axes

Andrew Doyle has argued¹ that authoritarianism is humanity’s default state, and that liberalism is not truly an ideology at all but the absence of ideological dogmatism — a method for negotiating our flawed and uncertain condition. This chapter defends a bounded version of the first claim: recurring pressures can make authoritarian coordination cheaper unless institutions resist them. The second half is nearly right, and getting it exactly right requires saying what the two orientations actually disagree about. The opposition runs along three axes.

Authority versus autonomy. Authoritarianism centralizes decision-making in hierarchical authorities — political, cultural, or religious — and demands submission and conformity toward them. Liberalism takes individual autonomy as foundational: agents own their own lives, and self-determination is not a means to some further political end but the end itself.

Coercion versus consent. The authoritarian project inherently runs on coercion; the credible threat of harm is not a regrettable last resort but the ordinary instrument of rule. Liberalism inverts the burden: it treats every act of coercion as standing in need of justification, and builds its institutions on voluntary consent and negotiation instead. It does not pretend coercion can be abolished outright — the conditions under which it survives the justification test are the business of The Grey Zone — but it insists that coercion is always the thing on trial, never the judge.

Dogmatic certainty versus conditional epistemology. Authoritarianism insists its truths are fixed, immutable, and non-negotiable. Liberalism is epistemically humble: truths are conditional, context-dependent, and permanently subject to scrutiny and revision. This third axis is the deepest, because the other two follow from it. If your doctrine is infallible, then dissent is simply error, error has no rights, and coercion in truth’s service is a favor to its victims. If instead all truth is conditional, then you need institutions that keep revision possible — free speech to surface criticism, consent to register values, revocable authority to correct mistakes. The politics falls out of the epistemology.

State the axes that starkly and an objection arrives on schedule: liberal societies also want order. They have laws, police, courts, hierarchies of their own. Doesn’t everyone want stability? Yes — and the shared goal is precisely where the distinction sharpens rather than blurs. Both orientations aim at social coordination. Authoritarianism treats top-down coercion and overridden agency as ordinary instruments; liberalism places coercion under continuing justification and builds more heavily through consent, reciprocity, and rights. Order is not the differentiator. The technology and burden of proof for producing it are.

The same clarification disposes of law. Authoritarian states have law in abundance — rule by law, the statute as an instrument of power, binding subjects but never rulers, applied arbitrarily and read most creatively against enemies. Liberal societies uphold rule of law: a universal constraint, uniform, predictable, and impartial, that limits even — especially — those in power. The presence of a legal code tells you nothing about which order you are living in. The test is whether the code binds the men who wrote it.

So Doyle’s formulation can be sharpened. Liberalism is not merely an absence of dogmatism, as if it were defined by what it lacks. It is the political embodiment of a definite epistemic position: that human knowledge is fallible, that every truth is conditional, and that a decent political order must therefore be built to survive being wrong — criticism legal, authority revocable, cooperation voluntary. That is not the absence of conviction. It is a conviction about human fallibility, held firmly enough to build institutions around, and it is what makes liberalism uniquely suited to navigating an uncertain world without surrendering autonomy or reaching for the whip.

The picture, assembled: a default and a discipline. The default is the cheaper recurrent risk — six tendencies that institutions can amplify, restrain, or redirect, and that factions in power have incentives to exploit. The discipline must be learned, argued for, and paid for by every generation, and its rarest and most essential input is people who hold its principles when holding them hurts. That much helps explain why liberalism is often embattled. It does not yet explain why liberal institutions can forfeit constituencies to ideologies with worse records and better stories. That is the subject of Why Liberalism Loses.