Here are some interesting notes on overt vs. anonymous authority and corporate control of the individual. It's from Erich Fromm's 1960
forward to A.S. Neill's "Summerhill" - the school Neill founded in 1921 in Britain for progressive education. I think programs use both overt and anonymous authority.
........but the idea of freedom has almost always been perverted. To discuss this matter clearly we must first understand the nature of freedom; and to do this we must differentiate between overt authority and anonymous authority.[1]
Overt authority is exercised directly and explicitly. The person in authority frankly tells the one who is subject to him, "You must do this. If you do not, certain sanctions will be applied gainst you."
Anonymous authority tends to hide that force is being used. Anonymous authority pretends that there is no authority, that all is done with the consent of the individual. While the teacher of the past said to Johnny, "You must do this. If you don't, I'll punish you"; today's teacher says, "I'm, sure you'll like to do this."
Here, the sanction for disobedience is not corporal punishment, but the suffering face of the parent, or what is worse, conveying the
feeling of not being "adjusted," of not acting as the crowd acts.
Overt authority used physical force; anonymous authority employs psychic manipulation.
The change from the overt authority of the nineteenth century to the anonymous authority of the twentieth was determined by the
organizational needs of our modem industrial society. The concentration of capital led to the formation of giant enterprises managed by hierarchically organized bureaucracies. Large
conglomerations of workers and clerks work together, each individual a part of a vast organized production machine, which in order to run at all, must run smoothly and without interruption. The individual worker becomes merely a cog in this machine. In such a production organization, the individual is managed and manipulated.
And in the sphere of consumption (in which the individual allegedly expresses his free choice) he is likewise managed and manipulated.
Whether it be the consumption of food, clothing, liquor, cigarettes, movies or television programs, a powerful suggestion apparatus is at
work with two purposes: first, to constantly increase the individual's appetite for new commodities; and secondly, to direct these appetites into the channels most profitable for industry. Man is transformed into the consumer, the eternal suckling, whose one wish is to consume more and "better" things.
Our economic system must create men who fit its needs; men who cooperate smoothly; men who want to consume more and more. Our system must create men whose tastes are standardized, men who can be
easily influenced, men whose needs can be anticipated. Our system needs men who feel free and independent but who are nevertheless willing to do what is expected of them, men who will fit into the social machine without friction, who can be guided without force, who can be led without leaders, and who can be directed without any aim except the one to "make good." [2] It is not that authority has disappeared, nor even that it has lost in strength, but that it has been transformed from the overt authority of force to the anonymous authority of persuasion and suggestion.
In other words, in order to be adaptable, modern man is obliged to nourish the illusion that everything is done with his consent, even though such consent be extracted from him by subtle manipulation. His consent is obtained, as it were, behind his back, or behind his consciousness.
The same artifices are employed in progressive education. The child is forced to swallow the pill, but the pill is given a sugar coating. Parents and teachers have confused true nonauthoritarian education with education by means of persuasion and hidden coercion.
Progressive education has been thus debased. It has failed to become what it was intended to be and has never developed as it was meant to.
