Striking, intelligent book from 1941 that explores a repeated societal paradox throughout history: giving people freedom actually makes them suffer, which makes them reject that very freedom.
Freedom may be something we say (and believe) we want, but when the chips are down we too often promptly give it right back. And while the 20th century featured the most egregious and blatant examples of Fromm's paradox, judging by what we've seen so far in the 21st century, we'll be breaking that record soon. Perhaps we already have.
Escape from Freedom covers a lot of ground, drawing from a wide range of historical epochs, psychology, religious history, human evolution and even child development. The book takes a sobering and penetrating look at how the civilizations we build can so easily and quickly take our hard-won freedoms away. It's most sobering of all, however, to see how we as individuals are willing agents of our own bondage.
I'd also like to cite a specific section on the book, pages 185-206, that offers a tremendously insightful discussion of pseudo-thinking and pseudo-will: this single passage is one of the most useful things I've read all year.
Finally, a criticism. While the author has a tremendously helpful diagnosis of the problem, his solution (which he reveals in the final pages) is a catastrophe: somehow he believes a fully planned society and economy would somehow "free" the individual.
Sometimes you need one doctor to tell you what's wrong, but a totally different doctor to help you fix it.
Notes: [Once again, a friendly warning: this list of notes is too long, and they're really only here to help me order my understanding of the book, to note and quote the things that strike me, to help me better remember what I've read, and to give me a digital place where I (and perhaps other equally obsessive readers) can refer back to this book in the future. Save yourselves and skim only!]
Introduction:
1) "It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternative[s] he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission or to advance the full realization positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man."
2) "Although this book is a diagnosis rather than a prognosis--and analysis rather than a solution--its results have a bearing on our course of action. For, the understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces."
Ch 1: Freedom--a Psychological Problem?
3) "In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended." [Holy cow do we ever see this over and over throughout history: the revolutionary class--if it's successful that is--becomes the next "establishment" and thus inevitably does whatever it can get away with to remain in power.]
4) Note the fact that World War 1 "was regarded by many as the final struggle and its conclusion the ultimate victory for freedom" [the author is addressing here the collapse of the last powerful monarchies, that existing democracies appeared strengthened. etc]. "But only a few years elapsed before new systems emerged which denied everything that men believed they had won in centuries of struggle. For the essence of these new systems, which effectively took command of man's entire social and personal life, was the submission of all but a handful of men to an authority over which they had no control." You escape one feudal system only for another to take its place!
5) Then, people blamed this victory of authoritarianism on the madness of just a few individuals: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, etc.; or smugly believed that Italians are Germans lacked sufficient training in democracy; or that Hitler gained power over state with cunning and trickery; all fallacies: "In the years that have elapsed since, the fallacy of these arguments has become apparent. We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it; but instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it; that other millions were indifferent and did not believe the defense of freedom to be worth fighting and dying for."
6) "We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a peculiarly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state." This author saw this in 1941. (!!!)
7) "Nor does it matter which symbols the enemies of human freedom choose: freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism or in that of outright Fascism." [Sound familiar? We are using this exact rhetoric today (e.g. :Antifa") to abrogate freedoms all over again.]
8) "Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? ...Is there not also, perhaps, besides an innate desire for freedom, an instinctive wish for submission? Is there a hidden satisfaction in submitting, and what is its essence?"
9) The illusion that humans transcended all their weak and sinister lust for power a long time ago: that those people from centuries ago were not characteristic of modern man. "When fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission." Exceptions among modern thinkers could include Nietzsche or Marx, who remained aware of these traits of humans, also Freud. [Probably worth thoroughly reading works of all three to prepare for the coming crisis era!!]
10) Freud believed man to be fundamentally antisocial, and human nature to be capable of evil, thus society must "domesticate" man and thereby check his basic impulses. He also probably used the word "sublimation" to explain this transformation of suppression of antisocial behavior into civilized behavior.
11) Society has both a suppressive function and a creative function.
12) "Why do certain definite changes of man's character take place from one historical epoch to another? Why is the spirit of the Renaissance different from that of the Middle Ages?" [It's interesting: we think in the modern era that we're somehow superior to people of prior eras, but of course a mere cursory reading of key works from the Roman era or the Ancient Greek era gives the lie to this. But, yes, it's clear, our character changes from epoch to epoch, and it's not always improvement.]
13) On people's dynamic adaptation to social groups (or their cultures) as opposed to a static adaptation like learning to use a knife and fork (say, if you come to the west from China). You eat with new tools, but your character structure remains the same. In contrast, dynamic adaptation would be a boy committing to his threatening and strict father "to be a good boy" while remaining unaware or unable to express hostility to his father about this unhealthy relationship dynamic; this hostility will come out in some other way; thus presence of strong destructive or sadistic impulses in a large social group may produce examples of dynamic adaptation of people to that culture, so they themselves also become sadistic or destructive.
14) Also note that most of the factors of the social system in which a person needs to live are unalterable by that person; likewise we all have a need to relate to the world and people around us and the need to avoid aloneness. Note also that author distinguishes between physical aloneness and moral aloneness: a person can be surrounded with others and yet be utterly isolated, without relating to the values and social mores of the people around him; likewise a person can be completely alone like a monk in a cell and not feel alone in the moral sense. Further, religion, or nationalism, or even "absurd or degrading" beliefs and customs are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.
15) "...the main theme of this book: that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an 'individual,' has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroy his freedom and the integrity of his individual self." [I think one conclusion here is if you are successful in nudging a culture towards a certain level of alienation or atomization, it becomes easier and easier to produce people very happy to give away their freedom in the instinct to avoid aloneness in its various forms. Think about the ways you can do this: political divisiveness, abrogating peoples' medical autonomy, pornifying/pozzing the general media with dyscivic propaganda, encouraging consumerism/escapism, ruining/inflating the money through monetary repression, etc. It would be child's play in the modern era!]
Chapter 2: The Emergence of the Individual and the Ambiguity of Freedom
16) Addressing a preliminary premise: "the concept that freedom characterizes human existence as such, and furthermore that its meaning changes according to the degree of man's awareness and conception of himself as an independent and separate being."
17) On the development of self-consciousness; on developing "separateness" from nature with the cognitive sophistication of a human brain; also the idea that individuation seem to have reached its peak in the centuries between the Reformation and now; likewise we see the same in the development of human beings from childhood. It's interesting that human development and civilizational development are sort of fractals of each other.
18) Thinking of it like a type of umbilical cord fastening a person to the outside world, to the extent that this cord is there you lack freedom, but the ties give you a feeling of security, belonging and rootedness. "Primary ties."
19) Given the nature of a society, there are certain limits to the individuation of an individual, beyond which it cannot go. Note also how we grow more alone as we individuate; Separateness implies aloneness and therefore it is threatening and dangerous. Sort of an "ignorance is bliss" kind of thing here, but unfortunately you can't go back! Yet: "Impulses arise to give up ones individuality, to overcome the feeling of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the world outside."
20) Also it's interesting to think about the ramifications of average cognition declining over time and what this implies about people's individuation, and their ability to balance these forces. It's not looking good.
21) Interesting connections here with the I/thou concept of Martin Buber.
22) Conceptually, freedom has connotation in the sense of "freedom to do things" but also in the negative sense of "freedom from," as in freedom from instinctive determinism of one's actions, thus it's "an ambiguous gift."
23) "One particularly telling representation of the fundamental relation between man and freedom is offered in the biblical myth of man's expulsion from paradise." From a place of harmony and, notably, no choice and no freedom--and also no thinking (!) this first act of freedom is to disobey a specific command (to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil). "From the standpoint of the church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom. Acting against God's orders means freeing himself from coercion..."
24) Note also a type of fractal of the Reformation, which gave people some new freedoms but also new sufferings as well; thus the 15th and 16th centuries are an important period to look at (in the next chapter). The author argues here that "there is probably no period since the 16th century which resembles ours as closely in regard to the ambiguous meaning of freedom." [He's referring to considerations of the wickedness and insignificance of the individual, and also the necessity for the individual to subordinate himself to a power outside himself, and also the unworthiness of the individual; Note also his need to submit to the tremendous economic and social changes that happened at the same time, which also gravely threatened people. In the same way, today, the middle class is threatened by the power of pseudo-capitialist monopolies, neo-feudalism and "bullshit jobs" (see David Graeber's useful book by the same name), all of which magnify the individual's feelings of aloneness in our era.]
Chapter 3: Freedom in the Age of the Reformation
Part 1: Medieval background and the Renaissance
25) The author cites the clear lack of individual freedoms in the medieval period and the plethora of freedoms in the modern period, but he also cites the modern era's isolation and lack of social connections, contrasting it with the clear social structure and non-isolation of the medieval era.
26) Note also the freedom of the modern era, which offers unrestricted choices among many possible ways of life, is a freedom of choice which is largely abstract. It's also a lot easier to find meaning in a world that is smaller/relatively easy to understand (like the medieval world).
27) Yes, in the medieval era there was a type of bondage for most people, but nothing like the type of bondage of authoritarian societies in the 20th century. Note also that the individual did not exist in the medieval era in the sense that it exists today in the modern "individualistic" era.
28) Italy as "the first-born among the sons of modern Europe" per Burckhardt, as in the first "individuals" in the modern sense; medieval society broke down earlier in Italy than in Central and Western Europe: it was on a major trade route, there was political fighting between Pope and emperor, there were a great number of independent political units (city-states etc), birth and origin became less important than wealth driving fewer class/caste distinctions. See also Johan Huizinga for contra-arguments against Burkhardt, including the contention that individuality was only one among many traits characteristic of Renaissance culture and that the Middle ages did not lack individuality to the degree Burkhardt argues, thus contrasting between the modern and the medieval era on this basis is incorrect.
29) [As I read Fromm describing the "new elites" of the Renaissance, they sound just like the "Davos class" elites of today!] Elites of the Renaissance era as incredibly wealthy, objectifying their fellow man if they were of different classes, relentlessly seeking power and wealth; see also this period's increase in isolation and anxiety; also, interestingly, a passionate craving for fame (!): "If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts." Fame of course can only be possible for people who are in a potential position to achieve fame, with the wealth and means of gaining fame. Thus this is not an option for the powerless masses in that same culture.
30) Contrast this with the Reformation which "was essentially a religion of the urban middle and lower classes, and of the peasants." The author argues "that Protestantism and Calvinism, while giving expression to a new feeling of freedom, at the same time constituted an escape from the burden of freedom."
31) Labor: On the security and mutual cooperation of the guild system and the stability it provided for craftsmen; this system was slowly undermined in the late Middle Ages and then completely collapsed in the 16th century. [The author's discussion of the collapse of the guild system rhymes historically with the growth of modern monopolistic capitalism today--the dominance of a few gigantic extremely powerful companies in another "go big or go home" business era.] Also, international commerce started to grow in parallel with this winner-take-all trend among the guilds during the 14th and 15th centuries. "Although historians disagree as to just when the big commercial companies started to develop, they do agree that in the fifteenth century they became more and more powerful and developed into monopolies, which by their superior capital strength threatened the small businessman as well as the consumer. The reform of Emperor Sigismund in the fifteenth century tried to curb the power of the monopolies by means of legislation. But the position of the small dealer became more and more insecure; he 'had just enough influence to make his complaint heard but not enough to compel effective action.'" [Sounds just like today, the typical small business owner or consumer attempting to compete with or get treated fairly by megacorporations.]
32) See also Luther's commentary in his pamphlet "on trading and usury" complaining of all the tricks and techniques used by the large monopolies against small merchants. "These words of Luther's could have been written today. The fear and rage which the middle class felt against the wealthy monopolists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is in many ways similar to the feeling which characterizes the attitude of the middle class against monopolies and powerful capitalists in our era." [Remember, this book was written in 1941: imagine if the author saw the current era!]
33) See also the German Hoerige class (of small land-owning middle class peasants) who were the backbone of all the agrarian uprisings, who lived in a semi-independent community near the lord's estate, but were subject to land dues: note that the increase of land dues transformed them into a state of "practical serfdom" all over again. [This sounds a lot like modern debt peonage!!]
34) The development of a modern concept of time towards the end of the Middle ages (clocks have been striking the quarter hours since the 16th century), leading to an ideal of efficiency as a moral virtue, also leading to the social/moral ideal of hard work: but these collective changes both socially and in commerce and industry destroyed the stability and security of the medieval social system that had protected the individual in that era. "...all classes of society started to move... The individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status."
35) Markets became larger, more distant, more abstract, and involved less direct contact between producer and customer, thus more unpredictable [probably with more and more international/inter-regional trade, you'd need more and more intermediation with brokers, shipping, etc., between producers and the ultimate customer]. Also competition became a larger factor, adding still more uncertainty; this was much less of a factor in medieval guild-based society. On some level everyone became a competitor, economically speaking.
36) In Fromm's era of "freer" markets and capital, the individual had more freedom to try his luck, there was more risk but potentially more gain, leading him possibly to economic independence. This is another example of the "ambiguity of freedom" discussed before. The individual is freed from bondage and has no fixed economic and political ties, but at the same time those ties where what gave him security and a feeling of belonging: "the world has become limitless and at the same time threatening." This new freedom creates deep feelings of insecurity, doubt, aloneness and anxiety, feelings which "must be alleviated if the individual is to function successfully."
Part 2: The Period of the Reformation
37) The author goes on a few tangents here:
* on certain fractals (I'm using this term, not the author) seen in the founder of a new religious doctrine and the followers to whom it appeals (the psychology of both will be linked and similar;
* see also an intriguing sidebar on Luther's personality: he both loved and hated authority, he rebelled and submitted to it; his being was pervaded by fear, doubt and isolation; he became a champion of social groups that were in a similar situation psychologically.
* on the paradox of Luther's view of both fear- and love-based submission to God
* on the continuing debate over free will vs. predestination hashed out by Aquinas, Luther, Duns Scotus and others.
* on the buying of indulgences, something Luther criticized harshly.
38) Interesting footnote here where the author compares the Pope as a type of "monopolist" of an immense quantity of "moral capital," selling it to customers for their moral advantage to share in the merits of heaven, offering freedom from punishment at a cost. A weird but interesting common on a type of capitalistic tendency of the church beginning with Pope Clemens VI (ca. 1343).
39) Note also that Luther gave men independence in religious matters by taking away the Church's authority and giving it to the individual; likewise by placing his faith in salvation based on a sort of subjective individual experience "in which all the responsibility is with the individual and none with an authority which could give him what he cannot obtain himself." If you want to go to heaven, brah, it's on you.
40) At the same time there is a paradox in Lutheran and Calvin doctrine on the fundamental evilness and powerlessness of man: "God-ward man has no 'free will' but is a captive, slave, and servant either to the will of God or to the will of Satan." But then Luther resolves this with his revelation in 1518 of salvation by faith. The author makes a very interesting leap here discussing the apparent contradiction between Luther's earlier doubts of salvation and his resolution of it with faith (and even more than that: as a subjective experience from and by the individual); the author views it as a resolution of "the irrational doubt which springs from the isolation and powerless of an individual whose attitude toward the world is one of anxiety and hatred." Suddenly Luther becomes an integral part of a meaningful world because of a "compulsive quest for certainty... rooted in the need to conquer the unbearable doubt." [Heavy: you can make meaning out of nothing, cure unbearable doubt (in this case about your chances to get into heaven) with an idea based on faith and subjective experience.]
41) A cleaner way to put this is: "Luther's solution is when we find present in many individuals today, who do not think in theological terms: namely to find certainty by elimination of the isolated individual self, by becoming an instrument in the hands of an overwhelmingly strong power outside of the individual." [Goddamn. Sounds a lot like the cult of a 20th century tyranny. Thus in the 20th century we arrived at a bastardized version of Lutheran "salvation by faith alone" by turning it into "faith" in some autocracy, some ideology, or some charismatic dictator. Kind of a pathetic form of compensation if you think about it.]
42) "It is particularly important to understand the significance of doubt and the attempts to silence it... it has remained one of the basic problems of modern man."
43) Modern attempts to silence doubt:
* A compulsive striving for success
* The belief that unlimited knowledge of facts can answer the quest for certainty
* The submission to a leader who assumes the responsibility for certainty
"... All these solutions can only eliminate the awareness of doubt. The doubt itself will not disappear..."
44) Luther had some interesting and somewhat inconsistent politics per this author: he had a love and awe of authority that showed up in his political convictions. Luther: "God would prefer to suffer the government to exist no matter how evil, rather than allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so." Interesting.
45) "In the chapter which deals with a psychological mechanism of escape we shall show that this simultaneous love for authority and the hatred against those who are powerless are typical traits of the 'authoritarian character'."
46) See John Calvin's teachings that we should despise this world in order to prepare for the next, that one should not feel that he is his own master. Note also Fromm criticizes John Allen's translation of Calvin, saying he softens the doctrine: "the spirit of an author is 'modernized' and colored--certainly without any intention of doing so--just by translating him."
47) Fromm asserts that Calvin's theory of predestination was used by Nazi ideology as a sort of "just so" explanatory justification for the fundamental inequality of men: they are created unequal, some are damned, some are saved, thus "equality of mankind is denied in principle."
48) Note also the paradox of Calvinist thinking where if you know you're either damned or not and there's nothing you can do to change it you would think this would make people defeatist: in reality Calvinists did the opposite: they worked frantic activity, an idea that Max Weber took up in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Fromm calls this effort and activity not the result of inner strength and self-confidence but "a desperate escape from anxiety." "...the individual has to be active in order to overcome his feeling of doubt and powerlessness." Furthermore this work/activity signaled you were part of the elect.
49) [The author seems to torture aspects of Calvinism and Lutheranism to fit into his model of cultural change, and he also seems to torture assumptions about how individuals operate in these religions as members of respective classes in participating and reacting to the economic changes he describes in prior chapters, this chapter is not as compelling.]
Chapter 4: The Two Aspects of Freedom for Modern Man
50) "The structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other."
51) "...conventionally we think in non-dialectical terms [meaning: failing to see contradictory or paradoxical or oppositional effects of a given phenomenon] and are prone to doubt whether two contradictory trends can result simultaneously from one cause. Furthermore, the negative side of freedom, the burden which it puts upon man, is difficult to realize, especially for those whose heart is with the cause of freedom." [Essentially our egos don't want this to be a second order effect of freedom, it also requires a capacity for abstract thought to perceive these negative effects, while at the base of it all we don't want anything negative result from our idealized ideas about "freedom"!]
52) Another category error we all make: we throw over old forms of authority, and then naturally assume that limits to our freedom were eliminated and freedom was therefore automatically gained; instead, "although man has rid himself of old enemies of freedom new enemies of a different nature have arisen..." [Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.]
53) Here's a great example of just this problem. "We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what he thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally..." [It's also fascinating to think about free speech through the lens of modern technopolies that can easily censor or deplatform dissenting voices--and hardly anyone notices or even cares]
54) On the paradoxes of economic "freedom" produced by capitalism: "The individual was no longer bound by a fixed social system... with a comparatively small margin for personal advancement" yet this comes with a tradeoff: "...at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness." See also tradeoffs of individualization: "freedom from" ended up severing ties (making people mobile, you move away from your family, etc). See also how Protestantism made the individual face God alone. [I don't agree with this: it's a narrow way to think about Protestantism, honestly the author just seem to quite "get" Protestantism.]
55) One nuance between the medieval system and the modern system: "In the medieval system capital was the servant of man, but in the modern system it became his master."
56) "Economic activity and the wish for gain for its own sake appeared as irrational to the medieval thinker as their absence appears to modern thought." [I wonder to what extent Fromm idealizes what he assumes to be the medieval mindset; further, I wonder if it occurs to him that this economic "medieval mindset" might still exist in the modern era as a tool to use--see for example the FIRE movement. All you have to do today is reject consumerism, but of course this requires you to be somewhat "alone" on some level...]
57) The author argues that Luther and Calvin softened the ground for capitalism on some level by preparing man for submission to "the system" in some form; nothing was further from Luther's or Calvin's mind of course, but yet they did lay the groundwork for teaching man that is life, his "self" was insignificant and subordinate to purposes which were not his own. And thus the individual is sort of set up as either servant to an economic machine or--if necessary--a Führer. (!!!) It is interesting--disturbing actually--to think through these unintended cultural effects of the Reformation.
58) On the intricacies of the problem of selfishness: how modern man can believe he's serving his own self-interest but objectively he's a servant to ends which were not his, while subjectively believing himself to be motivated by his own self-interest.
59) See also how we treat each other with "a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality" in the modern era. [See parallels here with treating people or things as "equipment" an "I/it" relationship addressed in a profound way in Michael Buber's book I and Thou as well as Katsuki Sekida's excellent book Zen Training. In the modern era of the market this seems to be how most people treat the things around them, particularly the people: characterized by some level of "mutual human indifference." Maybe another way to think about this is to argue that some level of depersonalization may be necessary in order for civilization to scale to the level it has reached...but at the same time it is disturbing to look at the narcissism with which we treat each other in the modern era, and also the self-absorption of our consumerism; these are two clear and painful examples of treating people and things as "mere equipment" in the Zen sense.]
60) [You can see how the author idealizes the medieval era, how he dislikes the modern capitalistic era with its landscape of employers and employees (see also his still-uglier idea that an employer employs a human just like it "employs" a machine; and of course both parties use each other for their economic interests. This is true as far as it goes, but the author describes this against an idealized medieval-era backdrop: as if there were some magical era in the past where exploitation never happened, where guildmasters and journeymen loved each other as brothers and worked in some perfected medieval utopia. Likewise a one can easily ask: if Fromm sees only a cynical vision of customers/businessmen, employees.employers manipulating each other for their own ends, is there no possibility of actual true value exchange, ever, among any of these parties? Can all exchange be nothing but selfish and zero-sum?]
61) [Another thought I couldn't help but have on Fromm's paradox that, yes, you do get freedom from a "freer" economic environment but it's paired with less security and less "clarity" (of your place in society, your social role, where you stand in the heirarchy, etc.), and this lack of clarity makes one a "bewildered and insecure individual." But then doesn't all of this boil down to the agency and volition and courage of the individual? You choose your place, you choose your reaction to your life situation, you choose to be a "bewildered and insecure individual" ...or not! Further, if you don't have agency, volition and courage (note that these are choices; it's a choice to choose to have no agency), then clearly freedom is not for you. You've already given it away anyway! What a paradox.]
62) Fromm goes on to say that the self or the self-esteem of this bewildered and insecure individual could be supported or inflated by his possessions, property, prestige or power; note these are partly the outcome of the possession of property, but they can also be the outcome of results or success in fields of competition.
63) These freedoms evolved during the recent monopolistic phase of capitalism, and per Fromm, the environment in monopolistic capitalism is where the individual was subject to gigantic forces in a situation resembling the 15th and 16th centuries all over again. [Thus our modern term "neo-feudalism" to describe today's late-stage, hyper-monopolistic capitalism.]
64) [The author gives an interesting (and actually incorrect) pair of examples of economic freedom in the fight against large corporate monopolistic competitors, describing a traditional example of a small business like a grocer or a tailor that was a business that required "a good deal of knowledge and skill" per the author. And then he compares it to his era's standard small business: a gas station which sells one product and requires practically no knowledge or skill. The irony here is that a tremendous act of knowledge, skill, innovation, creativity was exactly what happened to gas stations--when they introduced stores, service bays and other ancillary businesses alongside the base business of selling gas. The author is wrong on multiple levels here! One of the key points here: when you live as a small player in an ecosystem you have to be flexible and move quickly; you have to be like a small mammal not a Tyrannosaurus Rex or Brontosaurus. Not to take away from this highly insightful book, but it's clear this author has never run a business, possibly has never made an investment, and when you hear the author's description of what he believes is a typical large corporation, you wonder if he's ever had a job.]
65) [The author is also "doubtful" of the opportunities for development, initiative and intelligence of the white collar workers working in larger companies. The author sees the white collar worker "in fierce competition with hundreds of others," "part of a vast economic machine," and "mercilessly fired if he falls behind," "turned into a cog," Yet another very harsh irony: shortly after this book came out we started to see the deeply insightful works of Peter Drucker celebrating the growth and opportunities available to a vast white collar "managerial class: across the United States, thanks (even more ironically) to the platform of large companies and the interesting problems and opportunities that these companies presented.]
66) Rather, see how today customers have now been "turned into cogs" with impersonally gigantic corporations, rather than a bygone era where you would actually know the owner of a retail store for example. It's funny also because the author is decrying the onset of the "large" department store in 1941, whereas someone in 1941 couldn't possibly have any conception whatsoever what it would be like to have a customer service problem with Amazon or Google!
67) In this section (page 127-128), where the author talks about advertising and how it plays on emotions, it's almost as if the author doesn't believe humanity has any agency at all. If they're so easily manipulated by a pretty girl selling cigarettes in a magazine ad, what volition do we really have?
68) When you see the author's examples of advertising from large businesses, on the mismatch between individual customers and the large companies they do business with, on political advertising, etc., a lot of these can be thought of as scale problems: various types of freedom and power inevitably scale away with size. See also: labor markets and unions suffer from scale problems; even war, which scaled to a level beyond comprehension in the 20th century.
69) "The style of the whole period corresponds to the picture I have sketched. Vastness of cities in which the individual is lost, buildings that are as high as mountains, constant acoustic bombardment by the radio, big headlines changing three times a day and leaving one no choice to decide what is important, shows in which 100 girls demonstrate their ability with clock like precision to eliminate the individual and act like a powerful those smooth machine, the beating rhythm of jazz--these and many other details are expressions of a constellation in which the individual is confronted by uncontrollable dimensions in comparison with which he is a small particle. All he can do is fall in step like a marching soldier or a worker on the endless belt. He can act; but the sense of independence, significance, has gone." [I do wonder if you really think this way you should just pack it in, you don't have the stones to live in this era.]
70) The author cites Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as philosophers who foresaw this environment; as well as kafka's work, The Castle for example. [I would also add Kafka's The Trial which was a very disturbing book about the powerlessness of the individual.]
71) The normal person papers over his fear and powerlessness with "the daily routine of his activities" (and other distractions like having fun, going places, etc). "But whistling in the dark does not bring light." [That's a quote to file away and re-use right there] "The principal social avenues of escape in our time are the submission to a leader, as has happened in fascist countries, and the compulsive conforming as is prevalent in our own democracy." The next chapter deals with "how, in our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns."
Chapter 5: Mechanisms of Escape
72) [I would argue this chapter unnecessarily lengthens the book. The author feels it necessary to prove aspects of his psychological thesis, but it really is a tangent, particularly because in modernity one sees these things far more automatically than perhaps readers of his era. This chapter is interesting but a time constrained reader could safely skip it with the exception of pages 187-206, which discuss pseudo-thinking and pseudo-feeling in a tremendously insightful and useful discussion.]
73) This chapter is an exploration of "the validity of our psychological premises" dealing "with unconscious forces and the ways in which they "find expression in rationalizations and character traits." The author sort of psychoanalyzes modern man here to understand and distinguish between "motives by which people believe themselves to be motivated" and the actual motivations.
74) There's a quick interesting tangent here of neurotic versus normal personalities and how (in contrast with how a psychiatrist or psychologists would look at it) a well-adapted person is often less healthy in a modern environment than the neurotic person (in terms of human values) because the well-adjusted person "has given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be." [Fascinating!] Whereas "the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who is not ready to surrender completely in the battle for his self." [See also the many lectures and talks of dissident doctor Peter Gotszche, where you'll hear discussions of how psychiatric medicine as practiced in the modern era is often simply a mechanism of indirectly enforcing compliance.]
75) Long money quote here: "Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to 'positive freedom'; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. This second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he emerged as an 'individual,' for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities."
76) Three "mechanisms of escape" note that the author ignores mechanisms used by individuals with mental or emotional disturbances, he's discussing mechanisms which are culturally significant and part of a social phenomena that we see in the fascist system or in modern democracy:
1: Authoritarianism
77) To give up one's independence and "to fuse one's self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual is lacking" "secondary bonds as a substitute for the primary bonds which have been lost."
78) Masochistic strivings versus sadistic tendencies; belittling oneself or having a marked dependence on powers outside oneself; people or institutions vs making others dependent on oneself so that they can be instruments; or to exploit or steal from others (literally, emotionally or even intellectually) or an instinct to impose suffering or humiliation or embarrassment on others, sadistic tendencies are less conscious and more rationalized "for obvious reasons" per the author. [It's quite striking how both of these conditions as described by the author look a lot like codependency-type relationships]
79) The riddle of masochistic behavior: why would someone want to belittle and weaken themselves? A discussion of the sexual "perversion" of masochism (per Freud) or the rational aspect of masochism (per Adler).
80) Fromm sees both sadism and masochism as striving to escape unbearable feelings of aloneness and powerlessness "to get rid of the burden of freedom"). Another example: to unite with millions of others in submission to a leader in fascist ideology where one gets security against the torture of doubt.
81) Sadism and masochism as a type of symbiosis; again he's getting at the idea of codependency and presaging the language of later psychologists.
82) The author goes so far as to say that in "great parts of the lower middle-class in Germany and other European countries, the sado-masochistic characteristic is typical... it is this kind of character structure to which Nazi ideology had its strongest appeal."
83) Note the author's interesting perspective on religious experience as a component of authoritarian experience; original sin is something man can never escape; religion as a faith that he's stuck with; man's own sin as a type of shackles, the author's perspective on religion here is actually somewhat sadomasochistic to be honest, I'm not sure how accurate it is.
84) [It's extremely interesting to see how authoritarianism has sort of co-opted elements that this author would consider outside of the authoritarian character: for example, the concept of equality, or racism/anti-racism, both of which are instruments of the authoritarian left today; they are both the opposite and at the same time the same instruments used by authoritarians from Erich Fromm's era.]
85) The "magic helper" relationship, a type of authoritarian codependency that you would see between a person and his God-conception; or that you might see between a partner and spouse or a patient and a psychoanalyst; it can also be a minister or a teacher, a type of symbiotic drive based on the dependent's "inability to stand alone" and "wish for guidance and protection."
2: Destructiveness
86) The author describes this as "I can escape the feeling of my own powerlessness in comparison with the world outside of myself by destroying it. To be sure, if I succeed in removing it, I remain alone and isolated, but mine is a splendid isolation in which I cannot be crushed by the overwhelming power of the objects outside of myself. The destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it."
87) This destructiveness is present everywhere in social reality, but rationalized in various ways. It can involve either destroying others or destroying oneself.
88) See also the author's "thwarting of life" example: where a person loses inner security and spontaneity, but then applies taboos (like those found in religion or the social mores of the middle class) to block the sincere/spontaneous expression of his personality. Maybe it's more descriptive to call this "thwarting of self" or "self-repression" or something like this.
89) Hostility and destructiveness in proportion to the degree to which expansiveness of life is curtailed in a person's life--also you can think of this in terms of an entire social class's (see for example middle class hostility "disguised as moral indignation" for example), "the thwarting of the whole of life"... "Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life." [This does help explain why people seem to develop tremendous rage in middle age, the age at which it starts to become painfully obvious that a lot of the things you wanted to do, to become, to achieve will never happen.]
3: Automaton Conformity
90) Before getting to this mechanism of escape the author notes other minor modes that are not so important culturally, such as withdrawal from the world (not that an extreme example here would be a psychotic state); inflation of oneself psychologically (as in grandiosity, such that "the world outside becomes small in comparison") and so on.
91) "[Automaton conformity] is the solution that the majority of normal individuals find in modern society. To put it briefly, the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be. The discrepancy between 'I' and the world disappears and with it it conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness." Think of it like a camouflage that animals assume, or a herd that animals can hide in and feel comfortable in: the automaton is surrounded by others just like him and as a result no longer feels alone or anxious--but he does this at "a high price the loss of the self."
92) [It's fascinating to consider what would be today's "automaton conformities": see for example the "pronouns in bio" phenomenon, obligatorily flying the Ukrainian flag, the "I support the current thing" phenomenon. Also the "NPC" phenomenon makes a lot more sense when looked at through this lens too: if people adopt a set of programmatic behaviors while thinking they are thinking for themselves, this literally is a type of automaton conformity that happens to also give the illusion of asserting selfhood. We'll shortly get into the concepts of pseudo-thinking and pseudo-will.]
93) The author asks series of interesting questions, and then arrives at the thesis of the chapter: "What is the self? What is the nature of those acts that give only the illusion of being the person's own acts? What is spontaneity? What is an original mental act? Finally, what has all this to do with freedom?" "In this chapter we shall try to show how feelings and thoughts can be induced from the outside and yet be subjectively experienced as one's own, and how one's own feelings and thoughts can be repressed and thus cease to be part of one's self."
94) On the concept of saying "I think" as an unambiguous statement: not whether it's right or wrong but whether I think it. "Yet, one concrete experimental situation shows at once that the answer to this question is not necessarily what we suppose it to be." The author goes on to cite examples of hypnosis and then posits a third person observing the situation of the hypnotized person saying what he thinks and feels but not seeing the fact that the hypnotist put those things into that person's mind, the hypnotized person clearly has these thoughts, but anyone who had seen the actual act of hypnosis would have a completely different perspective on the validity or originality of those thoughts of the hypnotized person.
95) [One takeaway I derive from these hypnosis examples is: if you heatedly believe something or become argumentative about a belief you have, this is a cue that you should back down and rethink what you're saying and doing: your egoic attachment to your views is the cue. I sure hope I can remember this the next time I "heatedly believe" something!!]
96) The author goes still further. "The fact that the contents of our thinking, feeling, willing, are induced from the outside and are not genuine, exists to an extent that gives the impression that these pseudo acts are the rule, while the genuine or indigenous mental acts are the exceptions."
97) [***Ruminate more on the next ten bullet points or so: note how common pseudo thinking is with epistemically overconfident statements about COVID, novel biotherapeutic mRNA injections, about "how well the Ukraine conflict is going," about macroeconomic policy, the stock market, etc. Watch for when you do this.] A discussion here of the difference between genuine thinking and pseudo thinking: Fromm gives examples of different people with different levels of expertise commenting on the weather:
* a fisherman with long experience who is aware of the forecast but aware of other conditions that might impact that forecast and quotes them all as potential components of his opinion,
* a tourist who knows that he knows nothing about the weather and just says "this is all I heard from the radio," and
* a third person who thinks he knows a lot about the weather but actually knows very little, but who then tells us "his" opinion which is identical with the radio forecast.
Note that the third man's behavior is identical to that of the fishermen's. "Feeling compelled, however, to have his own opinion about it, he forgets that he is simply repeating somebody else's authoritative opinion, and believes that this opinion is one that he arrived at through his own thinking." This is an example of a pseudo opinion based on pseudo reasons which make "his opinion appear to be the result of his own thinking." [Furthermore, note that none of us has to do with the "rightness" or "wrongness" of the opinion itself! It only pertains to the credibility of the person and the originality of the thought: note that you can use somebody else's thinking to find a stock that goes up, just don't confuse this with it being "your idea."]
98) [One possible cue here to use (let's call it "an espistemological safety procedue") is to automatically assume the most egoically uncomfortable/emotionally uncomfortable conclusion: "most certainly my thoughts are not my own; moreover they are likely wrong in some way." Then iterate from there.]
99) Based on the next paragraph in the book The author more or less seems to agree with me:
"The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought. The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside of himself. Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself [bolding is mine here]. Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one's own wishes with existing reality."
100) See also pseudo feeling: "With feeling as with thinking, one must distinguish between a genuine feeling, which originates in ourselves, and pseudo feelings, which is really not our own although we believe it to be."
101) The author takes this yet one step further with the notion of will: that just as with thinking and feeling we can actually have pseudo will, believing that it's our will but it's actually not. "Most people are convinced that as long as they are not overtly forced to do something by an outside power, their decisions are theirs, and that if they want something, it is they who want it. But this is one of the great illusions we have about ourselves. A great number of our decisions are not really our own but are suggested to us from the outside; we have succeeded in persuading ourselves that it is we who have made the decision, whereas we have actually conformed with expectations of others, driven by the fear of isolation and by more direct threats to our life, freedom, and comfort." [Wow]
102) [You have to admit: it's devastating to think humbly and sincerely about all the instances where I thought I was thinking for myself, or I thought I was acting on my own will, when it was neither. I wouldn't be surprised if I weren't alone in my denial about these things.]
103) On the will to get married: this is an amusing example, you can't ever admit to your spouse that your will to get married was pseudo will, can you? :))
104) "We could go on quoting many more instances in daily life in which people seem to make decisions, seem to want something, but actually follow the internal or external pressure of 'having' to want the thing they are going to do. As a matter of fact, in watching the phenomenon of human decisions, one is struck by the extent to which people are mistaken in taking as 'their' decision what in effect is submission to convention, duty, or simple pressure."
105) Another money quote here about the actual self versus the pseudo self. "The original self is the self which is the originator of mental activities. The pseudo self is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play but who does so under the name of the self... for many people, if not most, the original self is completely suffocated by the pseudo self."
106) "The automatization [he means here "making into an automaton"] of the individual in modern society has increased the helplessness and insecurity of the average individual. Thus, he is ready to submit to new authorities which offer him security and relief from doubt." [Another huge takeaway: work on your ability to tolerate and sit with doubt, to tolerate egoic discomfort, to not need to be so sure of yourself all the time, but yet to continue, to keep learning and keep taking action, keep moving forward and keep getting reps; this is a set of superpowers for the modern era]
Chapter 6: Psychology of Nazism
107) Applying the idea of "methods of escape" from the prior chapter to psychological types (e.g.: mapping the authoritarian character to the automaton) to help in the understanding both the problem of the psychology of Nazism and the problem of modern democracy.
108) Two views of Nazism
1) It was a combo of economic dynamism (German expansionism/imperialism) plus a political phenomenon: basically elites/industrialists and Junkers (wealthy landed Prussians) "tricked" society into following them along.
2) Nazism can be explained only in terms of psychology or psychopathology: Hitler was a madman, his followers were all equally mad, etc.
The author doesn't agree with either of these explanations
109) The author cites an "inner tiredness and resignation" of the German working class, of German liberals, as well as the Catholic bourgeoisie of Germany, thus these tranches of society (except for a very small minority) didn't give any resistance at all to the Nazi regime.
110) The author goes on to psychoanalyze different tranches of German society during and after the revolution of 1918, the collapse of the monarchy, then of course the collapse of everyone's savings due to the 1920s hyperinflation which culminated in 1923, led to a brief recovery... and then another collapse and depression in 1929. The middle class was squeezed [just like they're being squeezed right now thanks to our inflation today]. The German cultural principle of thrift was one of the reasons why the inflation was so devastating.
111) All of these factors (the collapse of the old order, the collapse of the money, the collapse of literally anything stable) let also to a kind of pozzing of the culture, a period of libertinism, an inversion of the wisdom of the elders who were completely bewildered by these new conditions. Note also the younger generation handled the inflation as well as this cultural libertinism much better, leading them to feel superior to their elders--and then basically they didn't take them seriously anymore... likewise "the economic decline of the middle class deprived the parents of their economic role as backers of the economic future of their children." Yet another ding to your credibility as a wise elder! You've lost all your money (so you can't help your kids and grandkids anyway), why should I listen to you or look back at the wisdom of generations before me? [This is a good example of how an inflation tears society apart, splitting generations and families, dividing peoples' outcomes (some people get rich during inflationary eras), causing the up-and-coming generation to naturally assume their elders are slow idiots who have no useful wisdom, etc.]
112) All of these social frustrations and social unmoorings was translated to the national defeat and to the Treaty of Versailles as primary symbols.
113) Hitler as "an efficient tool because he combined the characteristics of a resentful, hating, petty bourgeois, with whom the lower middle class could identify themselves emotionally and socially, with those of an opportunist who was ready to serve the interests of the German industrialists and Junkers." [Basically combining into a political bloc the elite landowners and capitalist/industrialists with the lower classes they literally exploited! Heavy.]
114) "Nazism resurrected the lower middle class psychologically while participating in the destruction of its old socioeconomic position." [Note certain parallels by the Western world's elites in this era.]
115) A quick review statement here of the essence of the authoritarian character: containing "...the simultaneous presence of sadistic and masochistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory. Both the sadistic and masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness."
116) Per Hitler in Mein Kampf: "...the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it..." [Again there are weird, striking parallels today with our monoparty (with an illusory two choices) and how it brooks only "approved" dissent or "approved opposition."]
117) Note also the justification of sadism comes from Nazi propaganda; how the German people were the innocent victims of other countries, thus leading to the common rationalization of the sadist to say "it is you who have sadistic intention."
118) [Interesting to think about other parallels over the past century or so: after World War I we had tremendous number of stateless people throughout Europe (per Hannah Arendt), and "abused" states like Germany wanted to reunify their people; this led to the idea of reunifying the Sudetanland, the Czech crisis in 1938, etc. Russia has a similar legacy since the 1990s Soviet collapse in that it has stateless people throughout the former Soviet Union, Crimea and the Donbas regions are good examples of this... There is an urge to protect your own people even if they're outside of your country by its current borders.]
119) "The love for the powerful and the hatred for the powerless" as a structural characteristic of Nazism, but also of many other people's throughout history: thus if you are a suppliant they hate you more.
120) Note also that both Hitler's and Mussolini's revolution "happened under protection of existing power."
121) Money quote here: "The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms. Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible."
Chapter 7: Freedom and Democracy
1: The Illusion of Individuality
122) The last chapter discussed specific conditions in Germany which made it "fertile soil" for the authoritarian system, but what about ourselves in the USA? Unfortunately we see the same fertile soil here in the form of "the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual." [And we are seeing it again right now in the USA.]
123) "...economic conditions that make for increasing isolation and powerlessness of the individual in our era" along with the psychological wish to escape or conform, leading to an isolated individual who loses his self (by gaining a pseudo self) "and yet at the same time consciously conceives of himself as free."
124) A brief but deep insight on American education here: in our culture education "eliminates spontaneity" and substitutes "original psychic acts by superimposed feelings, thoughts, and wishes."
125) The author goes through an amusing example of "the commercialization of friendliness" at Howard Johnson restaurants. "To be sure, in many instances the person is aware of merely making a gesture; in most cases, however, he loses that awareness and thereby the ability to discriminate between the pseudo feeling and spontaneous friendliness." [One thing that's striking about this book is how the author thinks so little of the average person, his tone actually sounds like Hitler's referring to "the masses" in Germany! Then again, what is the nature of condescension when you're trying to explain a problem that people don't want to be true about themselves?]
126) On a discussion of the truth and how even in the 1940s there were plenty of movements toward regarding all truth as "relative"... furthermore that era's power structures in some cases benefited from efforts to "befog" the truth.
127) "Truth is one of the strongest weapons of those who have no power." [And likewise, those who have power may not be interested in truth]
128) Smokescreens used to "befog" truth:
* "The problems are too complicated for the average individual to grasp" and only a specialist or expert can understand them, thus we "discourage people from trusting their own capacity to think about these problems" themselves. We are thus forced to defer to experts, and collectively we develop a sort of paradoxical twofold intellectual behavior of "a scepticism and cynicism toward everything which is said or printed" coupled with a "childish belief in anything that a person is told with authority. This combination of cynicism and naivete is very typical of the modern individual." This is just like the postmodern era where everybody "knows" that the media is full of shit, but then we still have a Fromm-style childish belief in what experts tell us about Ukraine, inflation, medical interventions like novel biotherapeutics, etc. Super interesting.
* Note modern media, like radio and moving pictures, where you might have an announcement of the bombing of a city followed by that same authoritative voice advertising soap or wine: "the same speaker with the same suggestive, ingratiating, and authoritative voice." "Because of all this we cease to be genuinely related to what we hear" and there is "lacking any sense as a whole" in our informational landscape, reality just gets bewildering and meaningless. Today I think we would use the phrase narcotized dysfunction. Parallels here also with Walter Lippmann's book Public Opinion.
129) We never ask the fundamental premise under our wants: are they really our wants or just pseudo wants? "All our energy is spent for the purpose of getting what we want, and most people never question the premise of this activity: that they know their true wants. They do not stop to think whether the aims they are pursuing or something they themselves want." [Holy cow, if you can remember to stop and think "who really has these wants? Is it definitively me?" consistently you will play life on a much easier setting.]
130) "'Is it really I who wants all this? Am I not running after some goal which is supposed to make me happy and which eludes me as soon as I have reached it?' These questions, when they arise, are frightening, for the question the very basis on which man's whole activity is built, his knowledge of what he wants. People tend, therefore, to get rid as soon as possible of these disturbing thoughts." [This is why nobody can consistently do this.]
131) ".. modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want."
132) "Because we have freed ourselves of the older overt forms of authority, we do not see that we have become the prey of a new kind of authority." In this era the self is weakened and has lost genuine relatedness, everything is become instrumentalized and to deal with our aloneness and alienation we adopt the will of the collective while believing that will is ours (or the will of our political party, or leader, etc.) The author is getting at how little genuine original thinking we do while thinking we are thinking for ourselves, and this is the problem of perceiving that we have freedom when we really don't take that freedom into our own hands. I think in this era we can also look at things like self-censoring as a good examples of pseudo thought and pseudo will: in the case of speech controls and self-censoring, we are literally thinking and saying what we are supposed to think and say.
133) "We have seen how the doubt about one's own self started with a breakdown of the medieval order in which the individual had had an unquestionable place in a fixed order. The identity of the individual has been a major problem of modern philosophy since Descartes. Today we take for granted that we are we. Yet the doubt about ourselves still exists, or has even grown... This loss of identity then makes it still more imperative to conform; it means that one can be sure of oneself only if one lives up to the expectations of others." [You give up insecurity and aloneness in exchange for the loss of your own self and identity.] "Psychologically the automaton, while being alive biologically, is dead emotionally and mentally."
134) "What then is the meaning of freedom for modern man? He has become free from the external bonds that would prevent him from doing and thinking as he sees fit. He would be free to act according to his own will, if he knew what he wanted, thought, and felt. But he does not know [what he wants, thinks or feels]. He conforms to anonymous authorities and adopts a self which is not his. The more he does this, the more powerless he feels, the more he is forced to conform... Looked at superficially, people appear to function well enough in economic and social life; yet it would be dangerous to overlook the deep-seated unhappiness behind that comforting veneer." [My goodness he is really nailing the anomie and alienation of modernity right here.]
2: Freedom and Spontaneity
135) [This is a good summary of the book right here]: So far this book has dealt with one aspect of freedom: the powerlessness and insecurity of the isolated individual in modern society who has become free from all bonds that once gave meaning and security to life. We have seen that the individual cannot bear this isolation; as an isolated being he is utterly helpless in comparison with the world outside and therefore deeply afraid of it; and because of his isolation, the unity of the world is broken down for him and he has lost any point of orientation. He is therefore overcome by doubts concerning himself, the meaning of life, and eventually any principle according to which he can direct his actions. Both helplessness and doubt paralyze life, and in order to live man tries to escape from freedom, negative freedom. He is driven into new bondage. This bondage is different from the primary bonds, from which, though dominated by authorities or the social group, he was not entirely separated. The escape does not restore his lost security, but only helps him to forget his self as a separate entity. He finds new and fragile security at the expense of sacrificing the integrity of his individual self. He chooses to lose his self since he cannot bear to be alone. Thus freedom--as freedom from--leads into new bondage."
136) "...is there a state of positive freedom in which the individual exists as an independent self and yet is not isolated but united with the world, with other men, and nature?"
137) On instances of genuine spontaneous activity, where we catch glimpses of it: artists, small children, spontaneity we find in ourselves in moments of genuine happiness.
138) "Why is spontaneous activity the answer to the problem of freedom?... Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world--with man, nature, and himself." Examples: genuine love, work as creation or calling, also can be thought of in terms of "focusing on the process rather than the result" (which is the opposite of our culture's emphasis).
139) The author defines this "dynamic" state of security based on our spontaneous activity as opposed to the rigid social rules of the medieval era. "It is the security acquired each moment by man's spontaneous activity."
140) On the paradox of sacrifice and even self-sacrifice in the form of true spiritual integrity, versus the "sacrifice" the fascists/totalitarians coopted as their highest virtue.
141) "Freedom from" versus "freedom to": freedom from traditional authority and freedom to become an individual; but at the same time the individual has become isolated, powerless, and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, which weakens him, undermines his self, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage.
142) Positive freedom, "freedom to" is the realization of an individual's potentialities and his ability to live actively and spontaneously.
143) [There's a metaphor here for retirement: what happens if you have the freedom to pick everything that you do and the stuff you pick just isn't that satisfying? How devastating would it be if you picked crappy things? And it's on you? Wouldn't it just be better to have a boss and a job and to be told what to do? This is a really good real-life example of the paradox of freedom to versus freedom from.]
144) It's actually most disturbing of all to read through such an insightful and perceptive book, only to find that at the end the author believes the conditions of society to enable freedom require a planned economy [!!!] "The irrational and planless character of society must be replaced by a planned economy that represents the planned and concerted effort of society as such. Society must master the social problem as rationally as it is mastered nature... Only in a planned economy in which the whole nation has rationally mastered the economic and social forces can the individual share responsibility and use creative intelligence in his work." Fromm doesn't quite understand that economic freedom is a foundational element of freedom itself. Instead he believes that there could be some magic way to decentralize a planned system and keep it from being centralized, but yet still have it remain planned. And to think that Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom about this precise misconception within a bare few years after Fromm's book came out.
145) The author argues that Russian socialism is deceptive because of the powerful bureaucracy that centralizes and manipulates the means of production in the economy, but he believes there's still exists some magical solution that prevents this problem. Kind of like the old joke that communism really works--it really does!--it's just we haven't actually done it "right" anywhere yet.
Appendix: Character and the Social Process
146) This is more of a technical discussion of some of the approaches the author uses to characterize different eras and different peoples.
147) Social character: "the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life comment to that group." See for example the emotional roots of early Protestantism or modern authoritarianism. The ideas of Calvin or Luther were powerful because they answered specific human needs in the people's social character in that era.
148) And also that "rational" behavior is largely determined by a people's character structure: thus post Calvin or post Luther the work ethic of Protestant culture was rooted in that people's social character of aloneness and anxiety; it thus differed from the attitude toward work in other cultures where people worked as much as necessary but not more, they were not driven by additional forces in their character structure.
149) On the nature of the individual's psychological satisfaction with this societal character structure as his backdrop; see for example characteristics like thrift or hard work: "...the subjective function of character for the normal person is to lead him to act according to what is necessary for him from a practical standpoint and also to give him satisfaction from his activity psychologically. ...that by adapting himself to social conditions man develops those traits that make him desire to act as he has to act." [You want to be thrifty and work hard, don't you? It's what everyone else around you is doing... but at least they are eucivic values rather than dyscivic values.]
150) Thus the psychological forces can cement or disrupt the social structure when there's a match between the individual character collectively and the overall backdrop. See for example the virtues of frugality, thrift, cautiousness and suspiciousness of the old middle classes of rigidly-structured Germany which cemented that era's social backdrop, but they were of much diminished value in the inflationary era which required initiative, aggressiveness and readiness to take risks. [This leads us to a meta-question: are the character traits in your cultural backdrop helpful to you if you were to adopt them? Are you using cautiousness in an age where risk-taking is more appropriate? And so on.]
151) Your traits "fit" in the era that you're in if they enable you to grow and develop and realize your potential; if they don't you'll become suppressed and frustrated, and so somehow you have to try and match how you are to the backdrop of how your culture is.
152) Next there is a discussion of various differences and nuances between the authors view of human personality and Freud's (this section of book is weird quite frankly), followed by a thesis (re-)statement of the author's concepts and explanations throughout the book; how there is a dynamic interdependence of economic, psychological and ideological forces sitting on a sort of substrate of the people's collective social character:
"The social character results from the dynamic adaptation of human nature to the structure of society. Changing social conditions result in changes of the social character, that is, in new needs and anxieties. These new needs give rise to new ideas and, as it were, make men susceptible to them; these new ideas in their turn tend to stabilize and intensify the new social character and to determine man's actions. In other words, social conditions influence ideological phenomena through the medium of character; character, on the other hand, is not the result of passive adaptation to social conditions but of a dynamic adaptation on the basis of elements that either are biologically inherent in human nature or have become inherent as the result of historic evolution."
To Read:
***R. H. Tawney: Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
***Jacob Burkhardt: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
***Hermann Rauschning: The Revolution of Nihilism
Johan Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages
Karen Hornet: New Ways in Psychoanalysis
Honoré de Balzac: Lost Illusions (Ilusions Perdues)
Charles Trinkhaus: Adversity's Noblemen
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. John Allen
Max Otto: The Human Enterprise
Luigi Pirandello's plays, in particular "Six Characters in Search of an Author"