The difference is forcing people do do something vs giving them options and letting them decide. I don't know how many more times I need to explain myself. People have agency. Authoritarianism denies our agency and defies us to use it. That is how you treat cattle, not human beings.

Liberalism at least in its modern technocratic version isn't any different. You're offered an illusion of choice and then you're 'incentivized' (every policy makers favourite word in the free world) to choose the correct thing. The beauty of it is of course that it, in contrast to authoritarianism, obfuscates existing power relations, because if you have choice there's nobody you can attack or hold responsible, you're always responsible yourself.

In that sense authoritarianism actually treats you less like cattle, because authoritarians think highly enough of their subjects to actually perceive them as a threat. The modern western technocrat on the other hand pretty much just thinks everyone's a number in an excel sheet.