They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which gives meaning to life except man himself.
The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age. The crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man’s intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Writing in an era when man contained every woman as well, Fromm considers the seedbed of our surrender: Art by Olivier Tallec from This Is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Simeón
#BRAIN ESCAPE FREE#
Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed, and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton.
In a foreword penned a quarter century after the book’s initial publication, Fromm adds a sentiment of chilling resonance today, yet another half-century later: The understanding of the reasons for the totalitarian flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces.
#BRAIN ESCAPE FULL#
This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.Ī decade before Hannah Arendt examined how tyrants use isolation and alienation as a weapon of oppression in her classic treatise on the origins of totalitarianism, Fromm writes: Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.
Modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. While modern civilization has liberated human beings in a number of practical ways and has furnished us with various positive freedoms, its psychological impacts has given rise to an epidemic of negative freedom. Erich FrommĪt the heart of Fromm’s thesis is the notion that freedom is a diamagnetic force - by one pole, it compels us to escape to it, which Fromm calls positive freedom by the other, it drives us to escape from it, a manifestation of negative freedom. What determines the degree to which we are free is what the great German humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm (March 23, 1900–March 18, 1980) explores in his first major work, the prescient 1941 treasure Escape from Freedom ( public library) - a book Fromm deems “a diagnosis rather than a prognosis,” written during humanity’s grimmest descent into madness in WWII, laying out the foundational ideas on which Fromm would later draw in considering the basis of a sane society. Neuroscientist Christoph Koch put it perfectly in his treatise on free will: “Freedom is always a question of degree rather than an absolute good that we do or do not possess.”
And yet we do - beyond the baseline laws of physics and their perennially disquieting corollary regarding free will, which presupposes that even the nature of the faculty doing the relinquishing is not the sovereign entity we wish it were, we are governed by myriad ideological, social, economic, political, and psychological forces that mitigate the parameters of our freedom. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given,” James Baldwin wrote in contemplating how we imprison ourselves, “freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.” It is hard not to instinctually bristle at this notion - we all like to see ourselves as autonomous agents of our own destiny who would never willfully relinquish our freedom.
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