Marching with the Winners

I. Three Acts

There is a pattern that runs through the centuries like a red thread — no, like a blood-red one. It consists of three acts, and it repeats itself with a reliability that makes every theory of humanity's moral progress look like a farce.

Act One: Someone comes to power. Immediately a circle forms around him — people whom nobody forced, nobody threatened, who come of their own free will to serve. They rush ahead. They anticipate wishes that haven't even been uttered. They outdo each other in zeal. No order was necessary. No threat. Not even a hint. They submit before anyone demands it. The Germans have a word for this — vorauseilender Gehorsam, anticipatory obedience — and it has made its way into international political science. But the word conceals what it describes: it sounds like caution, like prudence, like adaptation. What actually happens is something else entirely. It is devotion.

Act Two: Power falls. The ruler is overthrown. And suddenly the enthusiastic followers transform into victims. They were coerced, they say. It was duress. Their lives were at risk. They had no choice. Germany's Federal Court of Justice established in dozens of post-war trials that actual duress — a real, present danger to life and limb in case of refusal — was absent in the vast majority of cases. It almost never existed. But the legend of duress is indestructible because it serves a psychological function: it retroactively transforms voluntary devotion into forced obedience. It saves the self-image.

Act Three: New masters arrive. And the same people who just claimed they had been victims offer themselves up to the new rulers — with the same eagerness, the same servility, the same anticipatory submissiveness. The turncoat doesn't even turn. He never turned. He merely points in a different direction.

II. The Oldest Diagnosis

Étienne de La Boétie was eighteen years old when he wrote the sharpest analysis of voluntary servitude ever composed, in 1548. His Discours de la servitude volontaire poses the one question that remains without a satisfactory answer to this day: Why do the many submit to one, when they wouldn't have to?

La Boétie's answer is disturbingly simple: Because they want to. Not because they must. Not because they can't do otherwise. But because servitude satisfies a need that runs deeper than the desire for freedom. The subjugated have forgotten what freedom is. They have grown so accustomed to their bondage that every alternative way of life seems suspect to them. Worse still: they defend the system that oppresses them against anyone who questions it. And they aspire to become petty tyrants themselves — overseers, block wardens, department heads who kick downward what they endure from above.

La Boétie described this in sixteenth-century France. He could have been describing twentieth-century Germany. Or the twenty-first.

III. The Psychology of the Subjugated

Four hundred years after La Boétie, Erich Fromm delivered the psychoanalytic explanation. In Escape from Freedom (1941) — written in American exile, aghast at the success of National Socialism — he described the "authoritarian character": a person who admires authority and strives to submit to it, but who simultaneously wants to be an authority himself and bend others to his will.

The crucial point in Fromm's analysis is not submission itself — that can be coerced. The crucial point is the gratification the subjugated person derives from submission. By becoming part of a power he perceives as invincibly strong, he shares in its strength and glory. He marches with the winners. He belongs. The humiliation of obedience is offset by the elevation of belonging.

This explains why anticipatory obedience is so much more enthusiastic than commanded obedience. Those who obey because they must do the minimum. Those who obey because they want to exceed every expectation. The historians Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat demonstrated that large parts of the National Socialist machinery of destruction were not set in motion by direct orders from Hitler, but by what Ian Kershaw called "working towards the Führer": functionaries at every level who anticipated what the Führer might want and executed it before he spoke. The cumulative momentum of anticipatory obedience was more murderous than any single command.

IV. The Double Lie

The real scandal, however, is not the first act — voluntary submission. It is the connection between the first and second acts: first serving freely, then claiming coercion.

Duress as a legal concept requires that the person receiving an order faces a present danger to life or limb if they refuse. Post-war trials demonstrated repeatedly that this danger did not exist in the vast majority of cases. No member of the Einsatzgruppen was demonstrably executed for refusing to participate in shootings. Transfers, yes. Career disadvantages, possibly. But mortal danger?

The Federal Court of Justice ruled that the assumption of duress is contradicted when the recipient carried out a criminal order "with willingness, devotion, determination, without hesitation" — or when he did more than was expected of him. In other words: precisely the devotion that characterises anticipatory obedience legally excludes duress. Whoever marches enthusiastically with the winners cannot afterwards claim he was driven there at gunpoint.

But that is exactly what happens. Again and again. The psychological function is clear: the retroactive construction of coercion saves the self-image. For the truth — that one participated voluntarily, out of the pleasure of belonging, out of fear of freedom, out of convenience, or out of enthusiasm — is unbearable. The invented duress transforms the accomplice into a victim. And victims may be pitied. Including by themselves.

V. The Seamless Conversion

The third act is the most revealing. For if the submission had truly been coerced — if it really was duress, mortal fear, no choice — then one would expect the liberated to embrace their freedom with relief. To breathe easy. To never want to serve a master again. The opposite happens.

1945: The same civil servants who checked Aryan certificates yesterday issue denazification certificates tomorrow — for themselves and their colleagues. Konrad Adenauer's Chancellery is run by Hans Globke, the commentator on the Nuremberg Race Laws. The judiciary of the Federal Republic is riddled with judges who passed death sentences under the swastika. Nobody forced them to serve in the new republic. They pushed their way in.

1989: The Wall falls. SED functionaries who yesterday defended the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart" become overnight democrats, market economists, Europeans. Some find themselves in new parties. Others in business. The speed of adaptation is breathtaking — and revealing. For whoever switches convictions that quickly never had any. He only had masters.

The present delivers its own variations. In the United States, we observe how universities, media organisations, and institutions vacate positions in anticipatory obedience that nobody demanded they vacate — self-censorship as an act of submission to a power that hasn't even threatened them. In Europe, we watch heads of state realign themselves with every change of power in Washington, as though they had no position of their own, but only a compass that always points toward wherever power currently resides.

VI. The Anatomy of Enthusiasm

What makes anticipatory obedience so seductive? Fromm identified three escape mechanisms from freedom: the flight into authoritarianism, the destructive impulse, and automatic conformity. All three play a role. But the most powerful mechanism is the first: the fusion with power.

Whoever fuses with power solves several existential problems at once. He overcomes his isolation — he belongs. He overcomes his powerlessness — he shares in the strength of the whole. He overcomes his fear of decisions — others decide for him. And he overcomes his moral uncertainty — what power does is right, because it is power.

This is why the enthusiasm is genuine. It is not hypocrisy. The follower does not pretend to be enthusiastic. He is enthusiastic. The submission feels like liberation — liberation from the burden of having to be an autonomous self. This is Fromm's deepest insight: the flight into unfreedom is experienced as freedom.

This is precisely why the second act — the claim of coercion — is such a profound lie. For it denies not only the action but the experience. It claims suffering where there was pleasure. It claims resistance where there was devotion. It claims victimhood where there was complicity.

VII. The Servant as Servant of Servitude

La Boétie's most radical insight was that the tyrants are not the real problem. The real problem is the five or six people immediately around the tyrant who willingly serve him. And beneath these five or six, there are six hundred who profit under them. And beneath the six hundred, six thousand. Tyranny is a pyramid of voluntary complicity. Everyone in this pyramid is simultaneously servant of those above and master of those below. Everyone passes on pressure that nobody exerted on him. Everyone reproduces the system he endures because he simultaneously enjoys it.

This explains the third act: when the pyramid collapses and a new one is erected, everyone seeks his place in the new order — not because he must, but because he cannot exist without a place in a hierarchy. It is not his master who changes. His need for a master remains. The turncoat is not a cynic. He is an addict.

VIII. One Syllable

Immanuel Kant observed as early as the eighteenth century that the German submits "most easily and most durably among all civilised peoples to the government under which he lives." He also noted the pedantic tendency to construct a ladder between those who rule and those who obey, "on which every rung is marked with the degree of respect it commands." This is the perfect description of the winners' parade: not anarchy, not revolution, not resistance — but a ladder on which everyone knows his place and accepts it.

Montaigne recalled a remark by Plutarch about La Boétie: that the people of Asia were slaves to an autocrat because they could not pronounce a single syllable — namely no.

The pattern of anticipatory obedience, invented duress, and seamless conversion to the next master will repeat itself until enough people learn this one syllable. Not as a heroic act of resistance. Not as martyrdom. But as the self-evident utterance of a person who knows who he is — and who therefore has no need to march with the winners.

Whoever blurs the distinction between coerced obedience and voluntary servitude does not protect the victims. He protects the accomplices. And he prepares the ground for the next parade — under whatever banner may come.