User:Aiblinger/Vorauseilender Gehorsam

"Vorauseilenden Gehorsam" is a German phrase which is difficult to translate literally. It is variously translated as "anticipatory obedience" ,"preemptive obedience" or "pre-emptive subservience", with the implication that it can only be largely speculative, in that the follower is obeying the leader before the latter has even expressed his wishes explicitly. It describes a freely-chosen attitude which is assumed to be desirable in the context of group dynamics. One obeys then, not as a result of peer pressure or social control, but rather from a desire to avoid these pressures entirely.

Possible explanations
The origins of this form of obedience are emotions, diffuse anxieties or low self-esteem in the face of presumed authority, which require such deference. In reality obedience includes limits imposed by society, for instance in the context of command authority in the military. The inherent boundlessness of this phenomenon (that is, the lack of limits anchored in either the individual or society) means that it can become a danger to society.

A person acting out of vorauseilender Gehorsam can preserve the illusion that he acts or acted of his own free will. In this way he can avoid the possibly humiliating experience of having been forced to do something against his will. Because the experience of one's own powerlessness is so stressful, the individual fancies himself instead to be acting on his own initiative (see also Identification with the Aggressor.)

Both models lead to one's own exaggerated actions being oriented to the presumed, unexpressed requests, wishes, instructions and orders of other persons, in order to avoid vaguely perceived possible conflicts, or in the hope that one's own scope for action will be viewed favorably. Such exaggerated action can often be accompanied by an excess of self-confidence - in an effort to protect one's own vulnerability (by analogy, through the wearing of sunglasses to protect from the sun.) In the context of expression in the media, vorauseilender Gehorsam is a form of self-censorship. It also makes possible totalitarianism, in which connection it is less a form of cowardice than a lack of moral courage.

Example: The National Socialist Regime
Scholars of National Socialism such as Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat, sometimes called Functionalists because of their view that the regime was characterized by improvisational decision-making and successive radicalization of competing groups in the complete absence of central planning or direction from above, explain the Holocaust as a self-reinforcing dynamic, in which Hitler's anti-semitic rhetoric resulted in a complex network of vorauseilender Gehorsam, domestic politics and self-imposed constraints.

British historian Ian Kershaw, in his two-volume biography of Hitler (1998, 2000) explains Hitler's rise with Max Weber's model of "'charismatic leadership' - a notion that looks to explanations of this extraordinary form of political domination primarily in the perceivers of 'charisma', that is, in the society rather than, in the first instance, in the personality of the object of their adulation." . In this view, Hitler's power was due to the willingness of his followers and large segments of German society, even without direct orders, in the words of Nazi official Werner Willikens, "to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him"

In the context of the National Socialist regime, vorauseilender Gehorsam is often considered to be self-Gleichschaltung.