Sado-masochistic character explains submission to power without property fixation.

Evidence

A particular disquiet and rage were caused by his hypothesis that cruelty is not committed by cruel individuals, but by ordinary men and women trying to acquit themselves well of their ordinary duties; and his findings, that while cruelty correlates but poorly with the personal characteristics of its perpetrators, it correlates very strongly indeed with the relationship of authority and subordination, with our normal, daily encountered, structure of power and obedience. ‘The person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault, may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority. Behaviour that is unthinkable in an individual who is acting on his own may be executed without hesitation when carried out under orders. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 434 (#expands, via linked claim)

Proulx’s concern with the economic conditions of these lives underpins her work. She is not a romantic, or given to the pathetic fallacy; these stories are never sentimental or elegiac. The characters are not doomed, they are harassed, disregarded and gnawed by chronic anxiety about the basics of existence. If the natural order is indifferent to them, so is the free market. They live in that kind of economic insecurity, without reserves, where the least piece of ill luck can break them. — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 525 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Authoritarian forms of society, so termed by Fromm with reference to the widespread discussion which had been going on since the late 1920s about an authoritarian, total state, were characterized by the way in which every member of society was incorporated into a system of dependency relations with those above and below. For Fromm, this represented a precondition for the existence of functional interplay between the sado-masochistic character and the authoritarian form of society. We have attempted to show', he stated in conclusion, that the authoritarian structure of society both creates and satisfies needs which develop on the basis of sado-masochism.’ The expressions sadomasochistic' and authoritarian’ thus became synonymous for him. But in the term authoritarian' the relation to instinctual structure and psychosexual development, and thus to a dimension whose development in response to society would require explanation, was no longer explicitly addressed. Authoritarian’ related instead to a certain type of society or state. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 616 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Duty-driven obedience, not personality, predicts cruelty under authority — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 434; Material and economic precarity, not fate, drives a character’s suffering — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 525; Fromm conflated sadomasochistic character with authoritarian society, losing the psychological dimension — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 616

Broader Connections

• Duty-driven obedience, not personality, predicts cruelty under authority #expands (0.85) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 434
• Material and economic precarity, not fate, drives a character’s suffering #complicates (0.80) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 525
• Fromm conflated sadomasochistic character with authoritarian society, losing the psychological dimension #responds-to (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 616