Erich Fromm
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Following in the footsteps of Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm was trained in psychoanalysis and became a consulting psychologist. Writing this book in 1941, Fromm was intrigued by how dictators like Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin were able to gain the support of their mass populations and, in effect, lure them away from freedom (insofar as they had any to begin with). His study is partly driven by his assetion that this luring force toward fascism widely prevails "in millions of our own people", referring to Americans, and is the reason I read this book.
His thesis then becomes that in a state of freedom (independent, rational, objective), individuals are alone and alienated and have doubt. Man longs for security and a sense to belong.
In support of his thesis, Fromm begins with lessons drawn from the middle ages and the Renaissance, a time when "The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened-but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individuality and disorder, were inextricably interwonen".
He, furthermore, uses examples of "masochistic perversion because it proves beyond doubt that suffering can be something sought for".
The book becomes more relevant when Fromm finally gets to 20th century America and writes, "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".
And then Fromm gets to the mechanisms of escape. The one I find particularly intersting is "automaton conformity". In his words, "...the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offerred 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 the conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness...The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self".
And this, patient reader, is the relevance of Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" to the American Republic. If 300 million individuals lose their "self" to their "leader" (because they want to conform) then what we have is a totalitarian dictatorship exactly like Hitler's, Stalin's, and Mussolini's. And, as I went to great detail to show in my review of the book, Propaganda, the invisible government of the USA has been conditioning our minds and snatching our thought without us even being aware of it. This conditioning is, for all intensive purposes, complete. Expect the other shoe to drop within the next twelve months.
Fromm writes, "...if we do not see the unconscious suffering of the average automatized person, then we fail to see the danger that threatens our culture from its human basis; the readiness to accept any ideology and any leader, if only he promises excitement and offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual's life. The despair of the human automaton is fertile soil for the political purposes of Fascism".
Editorial Review:
If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941. Few books have thrown such light upon the forces that shape modern society or penetrated so deeply into the causes of authoritarian systems. If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized. Using the insights of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Fromm’s work analyzes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule.
