CONCEPT
Authoritarian Escape
The first of Fromm's three classical escape mechanisms — submission of the individual will to an external power — and the structural template for the accelerationist who surrenders judgment to the logic of technological progress.
The authoritarian escape is the first mechanism Fromm identified for fleeing the burden of freedom: the submission of the individual will to an external power. It takes two complementary forms. The first is the desire to dissolve the self into something larger — a leader, a movement, an ideology, a cosmic order that provides meaning the autonomous self would have to generate. The second is the desire to absorb the other into oneself — the sadistic counterpart in which the individual achieves a sense of power by reducing others to objects of control. Both forms respond to the same underlying condition: the isolation and powerlessness of the individual confronted with the full weight of autonomy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Fromm developed the authoritarian escape in detailed analysis of Nazi psychology, drawing on the data his Frankfurt School colleagues had gathered in the early 1930s and on his own clinical experience with patients whose character structures