Erich Fromm's "Escape From Freedom"
Book Review
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Voltaire
[This is the second instalment of a series focused on understanding how and why so many Americans have surrendered their freedom of thought and instead have submerged themselves in the “pseudo freedom” of a MAGA movement based on lies and absurdities.]
Erich Fromm was a Jewish German psychiatrist who saw what was coming in the mid-1930s and got the hell out of Germany, landing at Columbia University. In 1941 he published Escape From Freedom, an exhaustive analysis of how and why his otherwise sane countrymen “bowed to the Nazi regime without any strong resistance, deeply attracted to the new ideology and fanatically attached to those who proclaimed it.”
Fromm’s starting point is this: “the greatest achievement of modern culture is individual freedom.” But freedom also carries a heavy burden: the free individual is responsible for his own thinking and his own actions.
In an ever-changing and often-challenging world, this burden of individual responsibility can leave one isolated, full of doubt and uncertainty, envious and resentful of others who fare better. Consequently, some people seek to escape from the burden and responsibility of individual freedom, finding instead a “pseudo freedom” through “the principal social avenues of escape in our time - submission to a leader and compulsive conformity to the group.” This was the fundamental attraction that drew Fromm’s disenchanted, insecure, and resentful countrymen to surrender their hearts and minds to Hitler and Nazism, where one could “fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself and thereby acquire strength, power, and status.”
“Even if he was a nobody, he was proud to belong to a group which felt itself superior to others, dissolving himself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory.”
Rather than through one’s own independent thought and actions, “the meaning of life is now determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged.” By conforming to the beliefs and expectations of the group, one’s place in the world was thus secured. Furthermore, “the intensity of the relatedness to the leader was in reverse proportion to the ability to express and satisfy own’s potentialities.”
Fromm characterizes those who surrender as having an “Authoritarian Personality”: by giving up individual freedom and submitting control of oneself to someone else, the disenchanted and fearful man finds a new home for his psychological needs, threatened no longer by an alien and ever-changing society.
In particular, Fromm describes three factors facilitating the surrender of those with an Authoritarian Personality to the appeal of the mass movement: a Leader, Propaganda, and Violence.
THE LEADER
Fromm understood that all successful mass movements require a “Fuhrer,” a ruthless, tyrannical leader with indomitable will who demands unquestioning loyalty. He recognized Hitler’s craving for power laid bare in Mein Kampf, but also understood that “lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.” Leaders like Hitler were driven by pathological narcissism (a “bottomless pit” of need for recognition and approval), an insatiable need to dominate all others (an “overcompensation for basic lack of self-love”), and a constant reliance on defensive mechanisms (accusing enemies of his very flaws and weaknesses).
When a citizen’s sense of security and status and belonging in the social order feels under threat, politics becomes an arena of where opportunistic demagogues promise a return to security and status and power. Hitler’s 1932 campaign slogan “Make Germany Great Again” is clearly echoed in Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”
“Submission to the Leader is the fundamental basis of Fascist ideology.”
Fromm also describes how “Group members come to need the leader very badly, since they have surrendered their own individuality and freedom, and now rely on the strength and direction manifested by the Leader.” He quotes (Hitler’s chief propagandist) Goebbels’ observation that insecure and dissatisfied people “want to be governed by a strong leader who thinks for them and acts for them and tells them what to do.” Fromm quotes Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov: “the frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; his most pressing need is to find somebody to whom he can surrender.” Without Hitler, there is no Nazism; without Trump, there is no MAGA.
PROPAGANDA was the second salient factor in convincing the public to surrender their freedom (and critical thinking) to find security and meaning in the Party and the Leader. Group membership became an “opiate, or outright hypnosis.”
“A domineering apostolic nature will make the weak, doubtful followers succumb more easily and more intensely to the will of the dominating Leader.”
Relentlessly arousing deep feelings of envy, resentment, racism and xenophobia, ruthless propagandists exploit the “emotional backwardness of irrational and unconscious forces,” keeping their discontented followers in a state of constant fear and agitation, further abetted by “scepticism and cynicism toward everything which is said or printed in the media, while succumbing to a childish belief in anything said by the leader.”
Repetition of simple slogans and constant reference to irrelevant and often absurd factors “dulls the individual’s suspicions and helps him fool himself.” Critical thinking is suppressed to the point where the follower “believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking,” in contradiction to all facts, truth, or logic. Through the relentless repetition of lies, reality gives way to fantasy and (in the infamous words of Kellyanne Conway) the truth gives way to “alternative facts.”
“The more outrageous the paranoid accusations, the more likely to be believed.”
Mass rallies further amplify these emotional catalysts: surrounded by thousands of people chanting the same slogans with the same intense conviction, the follower succumbs to the power of mass suggestion. Here they find security in numbers, reinforcing their belief in “fictitious solutions” and falling into that trance arising from Goebbels’s dictum to “befog the issues” (a precursor of Steve Bannon’s strategy to “flood the zone with shit.”) Fromm describes the hypnotic and mind-numbing effect of these tactics, especially since “man’s brain lives in the twentieth century, but his heart still lives in the Stone Age.”
VIOLENCE
Members who share in this group-power are then actively encouraged to humiliate, demean and abuse those “others” who are not members of the group. “Domination and unrestricted power” become the goals of the group, led by a leader who celebrates “retaliation” against those “others who would destroy one’s homeland.”
“Destructiveness is the outcome of an unloved life, disguised as moral indignation, and rationalized as intense envy of those who had the means to enjoy life, [and is] proportionate to the dissatisfaction with one’s life before joining the group.”
For many of Fromm’s countrymen who were resentful, hateful, and looking for scapegoats and avenues of retribution, Nazism provided an “ideology which gave them a feeling of superiority” and provided “sadistic spectacles” (like Kristallnacht) in which to participate. (As Madeleine Albright wrote in Fascism: A Warning: “in the end, fascism was always about stirring people up and giving them someone to hate.”)
Fromm’s book is not an easy read (it is dense with historical background and critical references) but in the context of our contemporary politics, Escape From Freedom provides insight into how and why so many Americans are willing to surrender their critical thinking and submerge themselves in the lie-filled absurdities of Trumpism.
Today many Americans feel powerless, anxious, insecure, alienated, left behind, threatened by change, envious and resentful of others, and dissatisfied with their lives. For them (as for masses of Germans in the 1930s) there is an attraction in surrendering one’s individual freedom (of thought and personal responsibility) and committing instead to a new “pseudo freedom,” submerging themselves in the MAGA movement (advertising their commitment by dressing in American flags and symbols) and gaining new power and security through commitment and devotion to a lying, cheating, traitorous narcissist in Donald Trump who knows how to reflect and celebrate the deepest psychological needs of the authoritarian personality, a situation described by Fromm as:
“the fertile soil for the rise of Fascism anywhere.”
These were the roots fascism described by Erich Fromm in 1941, and these conditions now flourish in America under the banner of Trumpism. Fromm’s analysis does not explain the motivation of every Trump supporter, but he does lay the groundwork for understanding how so many otherwise sane Americans have surrendered their freedom of critical thinking and instead have submerged themselves in the “pseudo freedom” of a movement based on lies and absurdities. Unless this mass trance is not broken soon, America may follow Germany into the abyss.
Three of Erich Fromm’s books were on my favorites shelf of my library from my late 20’s and have not lost any standing since. Escape From Freedom was my first choice, then To Have or to Be, and The Art of Loving.
I appreciate today’s fine piece, Abraham, as well as your respectful comments. Those show such rationality and forbearance. They show knowledge that I don’t possess. So thank you.
Breaking the trance is THE question of the century. Literally. Otherwise, by the time they snap oit of it, it will be far too late.