Fawning and the Machinery of Capitalism

Since publishing The Politics of Fawning, I’ve been struck by how many people recognize themselves in the idea once they encounter it, how deeply the reflex to submit to power shapes both personal and collective life.

A striking puzzle is how rarely we talk about fawning, given how many recognize it once they learn the concept. Fight, flight, and freeze appear constantly in our discourse about trauma and survival. But fawning lives in quieter corners, mentioned less often despite being perhaps the most pervasive response of all.

Perhaps we don’t talk about fawning because it’s the survival response that serves economic systems best.

The Reflex That Produces

Watch what happens when the body’s survival responses meet the demands of an economic system.

Fight burns resources. It disrupts workflow, slows production, and threatens hierarchy. Flight withdraws labor altogether. Freeze halts output.

But fawning? Fawning runs the machine.

It anticipates demand, manages emotion, and absorbs tension, smoothing conflict by suppressing the self. In a system that prizes productivity, efficiency, and compliance, fawning doesn’t just survive; it thrives. It’s rewarded with praise, security, and approval, the currency of modern obedience.

The body’s contribution to capitalism is simple: a reflex that turns fear into function, self into subjugation.

You can see it anywhere work happens: the assistant whose body tenses before the supervisor even speaks; the manager who hears their own voice soften before they realize they’ve done it; the employee whose ‘yes’ escapes before they realize what they’re agreeing to. These aren’t just professional skills. They’re nervous system adaptations that preserve stability in systems that punish disruption.

Philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls the modern workplace a “private government,” a sphere where citizens become subjects, where obedience is enforced not by law but by culture and paycheck. Within that order, fawning isn’t pathology; it’s policy. The body translates hierarchy into physiology, reading power as threat and compliance as safety.

The Invisible Hand and the Watchful Eye

The story of fawning is older than capitalism, but capitalism transformed it into an economic engine.

Adam Smith, often called the father of modern economics, understood something fundamental about human behavior. Before The Wealth of Nations, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he explored the emotional fabric beneath market life. “Man naturally desires,” he wrote, “not only to be loved, but to be lovely”—to be seen favorably in the eyes of others.

For Smith, that desire was the glue of moral order. We regulate our impulses because we internalize what he called the “impartial spectator,” an imagined witness whose approval we crave and whose judgment we fear.

But Smith also saw how this reflex could turn corrosive. He described what he called “this disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition”—the way hierarchy warps moral sentiment. Smith was diagnosing, in 1759, the same poison that saturates our current moment: the reflex to defer upward, to seek approval from power, to mistake proximity to wealth for worthiness itself.

What begins as social harmony curdles into moral hierarchy. The impulse to connect becomes the instinct to defer. The impartial spectator becomes the boss, the institution, the state—the watchful eye that trains the self to perform not just competence, but compliance.

From Sentiment to Exploitation

A century later, Karl Marx examined the same pattern from below. Where Smith saw moral sentiment as the foundation of social order, Marx saw exploitation as its engine. Capitalism, he argued, doesn’t just extract labor—it disciplines bodies. It teaches workers to internalize control, to anticipate demand, to police their own resistance before it even forms.

Marx called this the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” the quiet pressure that shapes behavior without needing overt force. You don’t need surveillance when self-surveillance has become reflexive.

This is fawning at scale: the nervous system’s compliance turned into labor discipline. The worker who stays late without being asked, the employee who never uses sick days, the professional answering emails at midnight — not because anyone demanded it, but because the system has taught them that visibility equals value and absence equals risk.

Between Smith and Marx, you can trace the full evolution — the instinct to please becoming the ethic of productivity, the nervous system’s accommodation becoming the economic logic of a civilization.

But this economic logic doesn’t discipline all bodies equally. Women are taught that fawning is care. People of color learn that safety depends on managing white comfort. Working-class communities learn that access requires deference to those who hold power over their lives.

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Why Fawning Hides

This may be why fawning remains so unspoken. It doesn’t disrupt like fight. It doesn’t retreat like flight. It doesn’t halt production like freeze. Instead, it oils the machinery.

Fawning looks like virtue. It sounds like teamwork. It feels like safety. But underneath, it remains what it has always been: the body trying to stay alive by giving itself up in a system that punishes refusal.

So we rename it. We call it professionalism, emotional intelligence, or being a team player. We train people to perfect it through customer service seminars, executive coaching, and personal branding. We make it the emotional infrastructure of the economy, so pervasive that questioning it feels like questioning reality itself.

That is the genius of fawning as an economic strategy. It enlists the body’s protective reflexes in service of its own subjugation. The same instinct that once kept us safe from interpersonal danger now keeps us compliant within institutional power. Because it feels internal, even natural, it hides as virtue while functioning as control.

What Comes Next

Once we recognize fawning not just as personal adaptation but as collective architecture, the question becomes what to build in its place.

Naming fawning does not make it safe to stop performing it. For many, refusal still carries real consequences. But naming is a beginning. Recognition is the first act of resistance. It opens a thin gap between reflex and choice, between compliance and consciousness. That gap is where agency begins to return.

Awareness doesn’t free us from the system, but it changes how we move within it. The same gestures that once came from fear can, with consciousness, become acts of care, strategy, or quiet refusal. Each moment of awareness turns fawning from an unconscious submission into a deliberate negotiation — a place where we start to reclaim choice.

The task isn’t to fix fawning, but to build systems that no longer depend on it — workplaces, schools, and institutions where safety and belonging are not earned through subordination.

Fawning may be capitalism’s most profitable reflex. Awareness is its interruption. Choice is where that interruption begins to become freedom.