The one and only time I put a knife in my pocket heading out to church was on Sunday, December 13, 1981. My mother, a single parent, was working a night shift, and my job at age eleven, in a true latchkey-kid fashion, was to get myself and my seven-year-old sister to holy mass.

That was far from unusual. I was in charge on most Sunday mornings at that age. I’d usually wake up early, turn on channel one (of two), and watch cartoons for a few minutes before anything else. That morning, instead of a Soviet-made animation, I saw a man in dark glasses and a military uniform. We were at war, he said, or so I thought, since “state of war” is the direct translation of the Polish phrase for martial law. I took a few minutes to orient myself. I could stay home, or, in my mind, risk my and my sister’s lives to do what my mother and the Almighty desired. I was more concerned about Mom than God. The kitchen knife, wrapped in paper to prevent it slicing through my pocket and into me, gave me the courage to leave the house that day.

Autocracy. It isn’t hard to understand when it’s imposed by a foreign power, as it was in Poland from 1947 to 1989. But, somehow, humans surrender their freedom to demagogues over and over again of their own volition. Some in the United States, usually on the right, tend to conflate political and economic systems. The economic system is immaterial. Authoritarians have come to power in capitalist and socialist economies. Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general who assumed power in Poland on the Soviet Union’s behalf in December, 1981, is an example of an imposed autocrat. We, in the United States, are in danger of elevating an autocrat ourselves. An own goal, so to speak.

Martial law in Poland was suspended in 1983 and abolished in 1989, when the Solidarity labor union movement forced the Soviet-aligned government, including Jaruzelski, into a power-sharing agreement. From there, further reforms followed, and today Poland is a strong democracy in the heart of Europe.

Our American would-be autocrat recently promised his backers that, if elected, he would make voting unnecessary. He would “fix it so good” in the four years in power that no one would “have to” vote ever again. His word salad masks existential danger to American democratic traditions. If he and his running mate are elected, it will likely take us longer than Poland’s eight years to emerge from full-bore dictatorship.

My novel, Controlled Conversations, is many things, since humans are driven by complex forces. It is a love story, no, in fact, two love stories, straight and queer. It is literary in its style. Much of it reads like a thriller, and some like a historical novel. But most of all, Controlled Conversations is a story about regular people placed in the crucible of authoritarianism and forced to make their way through life in it. In their place, what would you or I do?

I fervently hope that come November, we aren’t forced to consider our answers to that question.

Karol Lagodzki, a native of Poland, is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His stories have appeared in many journals, and he has won Panel Magazine’s Ruritania Prize for Short Fiction. Controlled Conversations is his debut novel. He lives halfway down an Indiana ravine with his family, including a large dog. Find him: @ klagodzki.com.