Escape from Freedom

I just read Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm.  Though I don't recommend it to anyone but those with a deep biding interest in psychoanalysis, it has helped me to understand the near reverential treatment of certain recent players and movements, which aim to restrict personal liberties.  The book is not a modern political treatise in response to recent events, it was penned and published in 1941.

Erich was deeply disturbed by modern man's willingness to revert to Medevial World norms of slavery and adopt Fascism and Totalitarian regimes in the middle part of the last century.  He highlights how the culture of the modern world creates anxiety with regards to safety and security.  To deal with this insecurity, man is willing to submit to all forms of dictators in hopes of becoming a well fed, well clothed cog in the machine.  If becoming an automoton also provides some sense of serving a larger purpose and creates of feeling of connectedness, his emotional needs are also met with the surrender of his freedoms to the state.

Erich sums it up nicely in the foreward in the 1965 edition, "It becomes ever increasingly clear to many students of man and of the contemporary scene that the crucial difficulty with to which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions.  Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age.  The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, rational, and objective."

Understanding the mind of the man willing to give up his rights, has created in me a greater compassion for him and a realization that the means of engaging him cannot be "fighting".  His insecurities and fears will be only heightened in such a battle and the ability for rational thought is diminished.  The "freedom fighter" becomes yet another object of fear, a personification of the anxiety the movement has suggested he be vigilant against.  In order to be successful, freedom loving people must address the emotional state of the ultra liberal or ultra conservative and offer a path with more connectedness, security, power and sense of purpose than the authoritarian alternative.  That is a tough sell when examples of crime, graft, and hypocrisy abound and one of the inherent dangers of freedom is the uncertainty that comes from personal responsibility.

We also cannot assume that as supporters of limited state power we are uniquely evolved emotionally and free from the same psychology of fascists.  Many of us who oppose the authoritarian state are ourselves adherents to an alternative means of satisfying our own anxieties and feeling connected at the expense of freedom. Simply offering another form of authoritarism- be it relgious, corporate, or tribal (ethnic) in exchange for a politically oriented one only puts the power in a different group of elites.

In the end, it appears once again that the only way freedom can be maintained is if we deal with one another fairly and act neighborly.

“One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.”  - Thomas B. Reed