In my work on courageous followership and intelligent disobedience, I have often reflected on the conditions that allow tyranny to take root—and, more importantly, how we can prevent it. The genesis of my work was my grandmother’s loss of her family in the Holocaust. Why do people follow destructive leaders and support destructive systems and how can this be done differently?
While my professional focus has been on leader-follower social psychology, I find a deep resonance with the political and economic theories of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Their powerful critiques of centralized authority and their staunch defense of individual liberty offer essential lessons for followers navigating the ethical dilemmas of modern institutions and governments.
Mises made clear that central planning, however well-meaning, requires a suppression of individual autonomy. In Human Action and Socialism, he showed that the attempt to direct economic behavior from the top down not only fails economically but undermines the moral agency of individuals.
Moral agency is central to ethical followership. Old-school models of organizational behavior portrayed followers as the object of leader behavior, thereby excluding followers from moral accountability. A contemporary understanding of this relationship shows that there is mutual agency and each party is accountable for the choices they make.
Friedrich Hayek carried Mises’s insight further in The Road to Serfdom. He warned that even democratic societies can slide into tyranny if they surrender decision-making to centralized authorities in the name of efficiency or equality. What struck me in Hayek’s writing is the danger not just of a despot, but of a bureaucracy that gradually erodes liberty through a thousand small concessions. He, like Mises, understood that the preservation of freedom requires more than good institutions—it requires citizens who will not quietly obey when their conscience calls for resistance.
Societies are largely organized around relationships that instill obedience from the earliest ages. Fail to obey primary school teachers and the system comes down on you forcefully. This is not an approach for building self-responsible, ethical citizens willing to question illegitimate authority.
When people willingly enter into a compact to achieve a purpose, their loyalty is correctly given to the purpose. This does not mean they are to abandon their own self-interest. It means they are to manage their self interest so that it is not sacrificed on the altar of some communal endeavor, but neither does it eclipse or thwart that endeavor.
Mises and Hayek addressed the structural dangers of concentrated power, which I agree with wholeheartedly. At the same time, I focus on the human mechanisms that allow that power to inappropriately consume the legitimate self interest of the people in its orbit—or resist it. My concept of courageous followership begins with the premise that authority in large societies is necessary but not infallible. Leaders must be supported when trying to serve the group well, but challenged when undermining the interests of the group and its individual members. Systems thrive, not when everyone agrees, but when disagreement is voiced constructively and ethical boundaries are protected at many points in the system.
In The Courageous Follower and Intelligent Disobedience, I outline ways in which followers can take responsibility for the integrity of the organization, even when it means opposing those in power. The metaphor I use—drawn from guide dogs trained to disobey dangerous commands—is not simply about rebellion. It is about discernment, about learning when to say “no” in service of a higher “yes”: the preservation of values, ethics, and integrity. In my latest book, To Stop a Tyrant, I move these dynamics onto the larger canvas of political systems while avoiding partisanship.
Hayek once warned of the “fatal conceit” of believing that any one person or group has the knowledge or virtue to direct society from above. I would add: it is a fatal mistake for followers to believe they are absolved of responsibility for what happens below. In any society or institution, it is not only the leader who must be courageous. It is also the follower—clear-eyed, morally-anchored, and willing to act when silence would be complicity.
