Freedom, Fear and the Knock in the Middle of the Night...

 

FREEDOM

FROMM and ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM are popping up often enough at the moment to think we might have realized that we've had a pretty good working hypothesis about the "end of Liberal Democracy" and "the rise of the New Right." Of course, he figured it out a long time and the fact that we re-discover it whenever freedom is threatened means it's possible to at least remember if not prevent. Fromm left Germany and after a year in Geneva, accepted a teaching position at Columbia University in 1935. His approach to psychoanalysis was informed by his early academic work in law and graduate work in sociology and philosophical psychology. Escape From Freedom jumps up the university reading lists whenever the pendulum in this country moves toward repression and authoritarianism. Approachable and crisp, his work provides a great working model for understanding we're doing to ourselves and why. I've been meaning to revisit it for a while, and this piece in the The Guardian will make me wander in to my stacks and find my copy. From the Guardian article by Dr. Michele Gelfand, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland:

"The philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm first identified this predicament in his 1941 book, Escape from Freedom. The gist of it is this: when people perceive an increase in disorder, they feel tremendous anxiety. Inevitably, this anxiety leads to a quest for security. To bring a sense of safety back into their lives, they latch on to authoritarianism and conformity. As Fromm noted, this often leads to “a readiness to accept any ideology and any leader if only he offers a political structure and symbols which allegedly give meaning and order to an individual’s life”. He had observed this in Germany, which he fled in 1933: “Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds,” he wrote."

Anxiety is probably not the best word today, since we are always anxious about most things in our lives. Probably because the amount of stimulus has increased tremendously over the decades and because some of us recognize the symptoms if not the causes of what we observe around us, the concept I keep hearing is "Existential Dread." From Ari Melber and Hip Hop Artists on MSNBC to music reviews of Dustin Welch's "Amateur Theatre" to George Will, the concept is starting to surface a lot. Worth considering before it gets it's own TV show. Fromm wasn't an Existentialist, although he studied with Karl Jaspers while a doctoral student at Heidelberg in the 1920s. He was certainly influenced by Existentialism, being a contemporary of Hannah Arendt and Sartre. So before the TV show comes out with a theme song about "Here comes the Zeitgeist," Escape From Freedom is available on Amazon and Google and any other place you care to look.