We were told to read an article by Erich Fromm and then elaborate on the questions ask at the end of the article.  Well the story that I just read, surprisingly, had a lot in common with what I have gone through in the past 5 years of my life.  Fromm says that disobedience is the first step into independence and freedom.  What would society be like today if man hadn't stood up against dictators and extremist or openly voiced their own ideals and opinions towards their way of life.  We would probably be in a very strict and controlled world where you couldn't do anything unless told to do so.  Fromm was trying to say that your first step towards how you want to live your life is to disobey the teachings of others, that is, if you disagree with their ideology. He means for you to break away from the general public and try and make things run the way you want them to.  Everyone has a human right to do so.  

Fromm also thought that history began with an act of disobedience and will likely end with one too. He means to say that someone, somewhere, at some point in time, had to have disobey a law or rule.  I kind of think that this is like the butterfly effect, that someone's actions had drastically changed history, and without this person's disobedience that our society might be a lot different than it is today.  I think that the world will eventually come to an end, not as in an end to humanity, but an end to the civilized world we live in today, with an act of disobedience.  The great powers of the world struggle in an endless game to try and make the world a decent place to live in.  But there are always going to be people that disagree with the consensus of the general population.  So he means to say that there will be a time in which society will be hit with a life altering act, which is hard to say what that will be at this point, but Fromm does believe that it will happen at some point.   

The differences between heteronomous obedience and autonomous obedience is that one means to follow the ideals of others and the other is to revolt or be disobedient to the ideals of other.  I think that most of civilized society is heteronomously obedient because we all follow laws.  For the most part that is.  But we all stop at red lights and we don't go and steal things from stores.  There are laws.  We know what is right and what is wrong.  We follow a set of rules made by the opinions and thoughts of others high up in the food chain.  Now autonomous obedience is the opposite of that.  To be autonomous obedient means that you want to do things your way and your way only.  The rules don't apply to you.  You don't like the way things are functioning so you set your own set of rules to follow.