“Do not obey in advance” is the opening lesson from historian Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” describing a behavior called anticipatory obedience — when people or institutions preemptively give up rights, principles, or resistance to a more repressive authority before they’re actually forced to. Snyder argues this voluntary self-limitation, rather than force alone, is what has historically allowed authoritarian power to consolidate quickly. Understanding the concept — and the arguments both for and against it — helps explain why it’s become a widely cited framework in discussions of political resistance.
What Anticipatory Obedience Means
Anticipatory obedience is the act of preemptively conforming to what people believe an authority figure wants, without being explicitly ordered to do so. It can also show up as a refusal to challenge a demand even when challenging it remains genuinely possible. Snyder’s core argument is that this behavior teaches those in power what they can get away with — each act of voluntary compliance signals that further, more restrictive demands will likely also be met without resistance.
The Historical Case Snyder Makes
Snyder, a historian specializing in fascism and the Yale Law professor who wrote On Tyranny, points to specific historical moments to support his argument. He describes how, after the German elections of 1932 that allowed Adolf Hitler to form a government, and after Czechoslovakia’s 1946 elections brought a communist victory, the critical next step in both cases wasn’t overt force — it was anticipatory obedience. Because enough citizens and institutions voluntarily extended cooperation to the new leadership, Snyder argues, both regimes recognized they could move quickly toward consolidating full control, and “the first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.”
He also draws on Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments, in which a majority of participants were willing to administer what they believed were painful or dangerous electric shocks to another person simply because an authority figure instructed them to. Milgram’s own conclusion — “I found so much obedience that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany” — is cited by Snyder as evidence that this willingness to defer to authority isn’t a trait unique to any one culture or historical moment, but a broader human tendency worth actively guarding against.
Why Proponents Argue It Matters
Advocates of this framework argue that resisting anticipatory obedience matters because authoritarian power, in this view, is largely “freely given” rather than simply imposed. If citizens, companies, and institutions decline to preemptively adjust their behavior based on what they guess a more repressive authority might want, the argument goes, that authority has to expend more effort and take more visible, riskier action to achieve the same result — action that’s easier to recognize and resist collectively. Some contemporary commentary applying this framework has pointed to examples like companies or public figures making conciliatory gestures toward a political leader before being compelled to, framing this as a modern illustration of the same dynamic Snyder describes historically.
The Counterargument: Isn’t Some “Obeying in Advance” Rational?
Not everyone agrees the concept should be applied as a blanket rule. Journalist and author Masha Gessen, while broadly sympathetic to Snyder’s warning, has argued that Snyder’s framing can make anticipatory obedience sound irrational when, in practice, individuals and institutions that voluntarily cede power to emerging authoritarian pressure are often acting on what feel like reasonable arguments — not simply fear. According to this critique, people who comply early frequently do so believing they’re protecting their organization, their employees, or their ability to keep operating and doing some good under difficult circumstances, rather than as an act of blind submission. Gessen’s counterpoint, though, is that regardless of how reasonable any individual instance of early compliance may feel, the cumulative effect is the same: anticipatory obedience functions as a key building block of authoritarian consolidation, whatever the intent behind any single decision to comply.
Applying the Concept Day to Day
Writers building on Snyder’s framework have suggested that resisting anticipatory obedience in practice involves a few consistent habits: knowing your own values clearly enough that you can recognize when a request crosses a line, questioning instructions rather than automatically complying with them, and being willing to be the person who doesn’t go along with the crowd. Notably, replications of obedience-style experiments have consistently found that a meaningful minority of participants — sometimes 10-30%, occasionally more — refuse to comply with troubling instructions even under social or authority pressure, suggesting that resistance to this pattern, while not universal, is a realistic and demonstrated human response rather than a purely aspirational one.
Join The Discussion
Snyder’s framework has become a widely referenced lens for thinking about political resistance, but it also raises genuinely difficult questions about where reasonable caution ends and problematic compliance begins. What’s your take on the tension between Snyder’s warning and Gessen’s point about the rational reasons people often have for going along with pressure? Share your thoughts, historical examples you find illuminating, or how you think about applying this concept in everyday decisions.
