A Listener Review of Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm

~By Frank Smith (aka Frank from the Southside)~ February 5, 2012

Avon Books:New York 1941

At first glance, a wartime book by a psychologist explaining the appeal of fascism would be irrelevant 70 years latter.

It is, perhaps, more relevant now than when it was first published.

With a broad historical brush Fromm traces the end of feudalism and social upheaval following the Industrial Revolution to the post World War I German experience leading to the rise of Nazism.

During the Middle Ages, your birth determined social status which did not change. The end of feudalism and Industrial Revolution turned the economic system upside down, as the Reformation changed both religion and the social structure.

Led by Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin in Switzerland, the Reformation changed the meaning of man’s life from seeking salvation to the acceptance of a predestined fate at the hand of an indifferent God. Calvin stressed the evil nature of man and both he and Luther appealed strongly to the middle class which was effected negatively by the end of feudalism.

Fromm acknowledges Luther would be shocked to discover his theology as the road to fascism, however his emphasis on the nothingness of man, blind obedience to secular authorities, logically leads to man subordinating “his life to the ends of economic achievements”,

The economic class struggles of Calvin and Luther’s time gave rise to both hostility and even hatred. Fromm maintains “these two men, personally, belonged to the ranks of the greatest haters among the leading figures of, history, certainly among religious leaders” and their doctrines “were colored by” hostility and appealed to folks “driven by an intense, repressed hostility”.

Comparing the post World War Germany to the end of the Middle Ages, Fromm finds similar economic and social upheaval, and a similar disastrous

effect on the middle class. Defeated in war, stripped of colonies, forced to pay reparations to the Allies, Germany inflated their currency to the point which wiped out the savings of the middle class, rendering the virtue of thrift and hard work nil.

The fall of the monarchy, the short lived revolution by the left in 1918 and the weak Weimar Republic left the German people insecure, if not feeling insignificant in their lives. While the collapse of the rigid social structure provided freedom, it found the middle class, in particular, frightened and powerless to control their own lives.

Increasingly, Fromm claims, the lower middle class came to identify with the fate of Germany, rather than their own personal lives and fate. This was the fertile soil in which Nazism took root first.

While the working class and Catholic bourgeois were reluctant but later converts to Nazism, the shop keepers and white collar workers of the lower middle class were ardent followers of Hitler, particularly the younger people.

The Nazi emphasis on self-sacrifice was endless, “the masses have to resign themselves and submit” if the Nazi leaders were to restore Germany to its rightful place in the world. Goebbels wrote in his novel, “To be a socialist is to submit the ‘I’ to the ‘thou’; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”

Fascism’s key is the interplay between the sadist and the masochist and Fromm makes the point it takes two to tango. The sadist is dependent on his victim for his own power, there exists a symbiotic relationship between them. Neither can the sadist exist without a willing victim, nor can the victim have purpose to his miserable life without submitting.

Fromm maintains there are two opposing forces at work in man, the life force and a destructive force. If the life force is thwarted there is insecurity, inadequacies and the destructive force takes over. This is what made the lower middle classes in Germany so willing to give up their ‘self’ and submit their will for a group identification with the Party and their very lives for the “greater good”.

As a psychologist Fromm poses interesting questions, how many of our own thoughts are actually are own? He outlines the difference between original thinking and “pseudo-thinking”. The original thinker takes in information and arrives at his own conclusion, which may not be unique or new, but which is his own.

The pseudo-thinker is “the kind of person who feels that he must be able to answer every question”…”He has the illusion of having arrived at an opinion of his own, but in reality he has merely adopted an authority’s opinion without being aware of the process.”

We are, more so in the age of mass communication, surrounded by this type of pseudo-thinker. Children are trained first in the home to suppress their spontaneous thoughts and opinions and to “auto-smile”.

What is not accomplished in the home in terms of “socialization”, is completed by an educational system which discourages, if not punishes, original thinking.

If the educational system cannot extinguish the “self”, the modern culture usually does, leading to an illusion of individuality. Fromm notes “a great sector of our culture” is dedicated to “befogging the issues”, convincing us modern problems are “too complicated” for our own feeble minds and they require “a specialist” to solve; encouraging you to defer your judgment to some authority.

More than any political system, “Fascism…makes the individual subordinate…and weakens…individuality”.

Pseudo-thinking leads to the construction of a pseudo-self, identified by “the inability to act spontaneously, to express what one genuinely feels and thinks”; leaving us but actors on the stage of life.

If the purpose of man’s life is not his salvation, if his salvation is not of his own making, and he faces an indifferent, capricious God, his fate pre-determined, man must find a substitute god. The State, in fascism, is ready to step into the role. In our own culture, we find gods of materialism, status, approval to substitute for God.

Man leaves his search for meaning in the moment (see Viktor Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”), and “chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it--the illusory happiness called success.”

The growth of self in our culture is discouraged, ridiculed, and rare. Instead, we breed and raise “automatons” with “pseudo-selves” superimposed on their real selves.

Fromm’s title, “Escape from Freedom” is his thesis; freedom is frightening and people who are not secure in their own selves seek to escape it by subordinating their lives to something other than their own purposes.

Fascism has appeal to people who are insecure, thwarted in personal growth, and willing to sacrifice for the good of the whole. Economically fascism thrives under aliases of “public-private partnerships” and government direction of the means of production (Government Motors).

Fascism is not dead economically, nor politically dead (Patriot Act). Its appeal to the disadvantaged, alienated, unchurched, cannot be denied. There is no goose steeping in American streets but the parallels which made Nazism possible in Germany in the 1920’s are here. We may be short one fuehrer, or we may not be able to recognize him…yet.

Fromm’s book is not an easy read, it is ponderous, repetitive with long run-on sentences but is worth plowing through. And while psychology remains a “cereal box religion”, Fromm has made useful observations on the conditions and nature of man, if not on religion in the modern world.