Are We All Made to Be the Same? #059

Erich Fromm on another way of escaping freedom

Hello everyone, welcome back! This is Every Dawn, and I am Andy, the philosophy lecturer. Here we try to talk about how philosophy can improve our lives, how we can become more satisfied, more happy, more meaningful human beings, make a difference in our own lives, and feel better about them.

What we have been recently discussing is the idea of freedom and how freedom threatens us sometimes. We feel like we want to escape from freedom, which is an idea of the German psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, who died in 1980 but was very famous with his books. You can still find his books everywhere online and read more about that.

He is saying that when we grow up, we make this experience that suddenly, you know, our home which was protecting us is gone, and now we are alone in the world, and we are free. But this freedom now is perceived not in a positive way but as a threat because we are responsible for what we are doing. Everything can go wrong; we can completely ruin our lives, and nobody will prevent us from doing that. So, how do we get it right, and where do we find the strength to actually live our lives given that they look so threatening?

He says many people retreat into authoritarianism, trying to boss others or be bossy people, or even more, submit to bossy people so that we can give away this responsibility. Or destructiveness, which Fromm would interpret like this: attempts of people who are threatened by society, feel threatened by society and by freedom to hit back at society by destroying it, by attacking it. This can be small destruction—this can be, you know, just defacing some monument, spraying it, or it can be, you know, taking my machine gun and going to kill people in a public place. These are all destructiveness that, according to Fromm, sometimes may come from this feeling of fear that society is not supporting me. I'm not part of it; I don't know how to handle it, and I have to hit back at it because it scares me.

Now, I don't want to analyze, you know, crime in this way. There are probably many more ways, and I'm not a psychologist myself. I'm just reporting what Fromm says, and I can imagine that certainly, this is sometimes the case. But of course, there are many other reasons for destructiveness and for violence that are not this. So, don't understand me wrong as saying that this is the reason for all violence in the world. This is not what Fromm says.

But a third reaction to this freedom is what he calls conformity. And conformity is perhaps the most common among us, right? That we feel that we are threatened, and what do we do in return? We conform to what everybody else is doing because we only feel threatened when we step out of the mass of people. As long as we are in a mass that is uniform, everybody does the same, we are kind of protected by this mass of people who do the same, and we don't have individual responsibility.

And so, this is the case very obviously with something like fashion, where when I have my own sense of fashion and dress in what others would call weird ways, then I'm responsible for the reception. Then I'm responsible for being called weird, weirdly dressed. And if I don't have friends then, or if I don't find a partner because of the way I'm dressing, then perhaps I will blame myself. I will blame my individuality. So, the safe way to retreat is to just wear what everybody else is wearing, listen to the fashion, listen to YouTube, listen to your Instagram influencers, do whatever they say. And then, at least, you are the same as everybody else. You get the same chances, but of course, the problem with this is again that it destroys your own individuality, and it destroys your sense of satisfaction in life.

Now you're only living the life of another; you have the life of this YouTuber or this Instagram influencer but not your own. You are expressing their creativity, not your own, and in a sense, you feel like you are back with your parents when you were a child, and they gave you, you know, what to dress, and you dressed as they told you, and you're not responsible now, which is good because now you feel safe. But on the other hand, you lose the very important thing of grown-up life, which is the freedom to be yourself. This is now gone.

And this is not only fashion; we do this in everything we do. It's in the choice of our job. How many times have I heard, you know, students telling me, "I would love to study philosophy, but I cannot do it because my parents are against it. My parents don't want me to study philosophy, or my friends are against it, or I'm afraid to do it because I will not get a job. So, I prefer to study accounting although I, you know, despise accounting. I would love to do philosophy, but I don't have the courage to do it. I cannot oppose all these people who tell me that it's stupid to study philosophy."

And in this way, again, we are destroying our life. It's one way of making sure that you will not reach happiness because you're not doing what would make you happy, doing what makes other people happy. And the only benefit you get is that you cannot be blamed, but you are missing your own life.

So, let us today think where perhaps we are too conformist, where we are, you know, too much submitting to what society wants of us, doing what everybody else does because we are afraid to do something different and to develop our own character and our own way of living and of expressing our own personality. And at the same time, in this way, we become unhappy.

It is okay if this is what makes you happy. I don't say, and Fromm didn't say, that you have to try to stick out, you know, like a sore thumb, uh, just for the sake of it. This is not the point. The point is to try to see deep inside you what is it that you really want, and even if nobody else is doing it, perhaps you should do it because this is what human life is all about. You are given this life in order to be yourself, not to spend your life chasing the dreams or the expectations of somebody else who tells you what to do.

Thank you, and see you next time. And if you want to know more about Aristotle or about Erich Fromm and how they see the world, then watch this next video, which will go into more details about this.

See you next time. Bye-bye.