Micro-Authoritarianism: “Karen-ism” Reveals Society’s Instinctive Obsession with Policing Others — Recruiting Soldiers Shouldn’t Be Hard The Karens Are Foot Soldiers

 

Let’s drop the polite lies. Western society is not anti-authoritarian. It is saturated with micro-authoritarianism. What people call “Karen-ism” isn’t a meme or bad manners—it’s a social reflex. An instinct. A learned behavior. 

The urge to police others, demand compliance, call authority, escalate, punish. And once you see it clearly, one uncomfortable truth becomes unavoidable: a society like this does not struggle to recruit soldiers. It is already training them daily.

“Karen-ism” is not about hairstyles, race, or individual entitlement. 

That framing is a distraction. 

What it actually reveals is how deeply enforcement culture has sunk into ordinary civilian life. The Karen does not act because she loves chaos—she acts because she worships order. 

Rules, norms, boundaries, “how things are supposed to be.” She feels morally obligated to intervene. To correct. 

To report. To summon power. She does not question authority—she auditions for it.

This is micro-authoritarianism: authoritarian behavior without uniforms, without formal rank, without state salary—yet fully aligned with state logic.

People like to pretend militarism begins with boot camps and propaganda. That’s nonsense. Militarism begins when obedience feels virtuous and deviation feels threatening. It begins when civilians internalize the idea that order must be enforced by someone, and that “someone” might as well be them. Once that psychology is normalized, handing people a badge, a uniform, or a rifle is not a leap—it’s a promotion.

Look around. People film strangers. 

Police tone. 

Call authorities over nothing. 

Demand compliance from the powerless while deferring upward to institutions they claim not to trust. They do not resist power; they cosplay it. 

They crave proximity to it. 

They feel anxious without it.

 And most importantly, they believe punishment equals safety. 

That belief alone is enough to staff armies.

This is why the myth that “people don’t want hierarchy anymore” falls apart on contact with reality. People don’t hate hierarchy—they hate being at the bottom of it. 

Give them even a symbolic rung above someone else, and they’ll enforce rules they don’t understand for systems they didn’t design. 

That’s not rebellion. That’s readiness.

Historically, states had to work hard to convince civilians to become enforcers. Today, the work is crowdsourced. Corporate compliance culture, online call-outs, neighborhood surveillance apps, workplace HR rituals—these are not neutral developments. 

They are behavioral training grounds. They teach people that monitoring is participation, reporting is responsibility, and punishment is care. That is soldier psychology stripped of camouflage.

So when institutions complain about recruitment crises, understand what they really mean: the story needs updating. 

The raw material is already there. 

Once you provide a clean narrative—security, civilization, threat, defense, emergency—the same people who police parking spaces and tone violations will line up to police borders, bodies, and beliefs. Not because they are evil, but because they have been conditioned to see enforcement as moral duty.

This is the most dangerous part: most foot soldiers do not see themselves as violent. They see themselves as stabilizers. 

Karens don’t think they’re oppressors. Soldiers don’t either. Both believe they are “keeping things from getting out of hand.” Both confuse control with safety. Both rely on authority to resolve anxiety rather than confronting structural causes.

So no—recruiting soldiers isn’t hard in a society like this. The uniforms are optional. The mindset is already mass-produced. Micro-authoritarianism has done the heavy lifting. The Karens are not an aberration. They are the prototype.

The real question isn’t where will the soldiers come from?
It’s how many already think like them—and don’t even realize it.