“[E]ven being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone. Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.” - page 18
Escape from Freedom was the third book of Erich Fromm’s that I read. It had been on my reading list ever since I took a fabulous psychology course when I was an undergrad called Personality. I highly recommend this seminal masterpiece! It’s Social Psychology and an exposition on why it is that the majority of people do not want to embrace their freedom but in fact run away and hide from it, due to how terrifying it really is on the human psyche in a vast, uncaring universe and world filled with hoards of people who contribute to our feelings of smallness.
One of the things it deals with is the rise of capitalism and how it turned humans into anxiety-ridden, self-doubting, insignificant cogs and addresses capitalism's negative effects and parallels with politics. Fromm explains in which ways capitalism and the Reformation made people freer while also "enslaving" them for their own purposes in different ways than Europeans were "enslaved" in the Middle Ages and how and why people unconsciously run away and escape from the freedom both systems offer. The systems then feed on that for a vicious cycle where man now feels more insignificant and powerless than ever.
Fromm also deals with sadomasochistic relationships and why such symbiotic relationships exist as an unconscious way of overcoming feelings of individual powerlessness, self-doubt and insignificance by losing oneself in another person, either as a way of expending flimsy feelings of seemingly self-enhancing power (a facade of power that belies weakness) that is in actuality merely inflicting abuse on a helpless, subservient subject or by relinquishing all sense of self and individuality as an object of masochism and helplessness, giving all power to the sadist in the process.
This leads him into a discussion on the authoritarian personality that gave rise to Nazi Germany. He also goes into great detail about the political and social circumstances in Germany post-World War I and how they affected the different economic classes that led to Nazism and why those classes reacted in the ways they did as a defence mechanism. The ways in which the masses can be manipulated are fascinating, and it is extremely imperative that they be understood.
I especially enjoyed the section on hypnosis and dream analysis and how so many of our thoughts and feelings come from without rather than from within. He expounds on the ways we try to rationalize those thoughts and feelings as being our own, just like in hypnosis; only media and societal hypnosis is what fools/hypnotizes the masses on a grand scale as we internalize both media and society without even realizing it.
He also elaborates on where he is in agreement with Freud, and where he believes Freud went wrong. Fromm covers so much in this book, and anyone who’s interested in psychology, sociology and/or philosophy should definitely give it a read. It is absolutely profound and was groundbreaking for its time and will always be relevant within the study of human nature and the dangerous path the human race tends to tread on. And the solution that he posits for the problem is a very Nietzschean one, which I love: the individual living creatively and spontaneously for the full realization and cultivation of the self and the true, positive freedom that is realized and experienced along with it.
“The problem we are confronted with today is that of the organization of social and economic forces, so that man - as a member of organized society - may become the master of these forces and cease to be their slave.” - page 269
Rating: five stars!
