Authoritarianism and Happiness #057
Erich Fromm on how we escape our freedom
Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn.
We have been talking about the idea of freedom and why freedom is scary. Freedom is generally seen as a good thing, but it is not necessarily only a good thing because freedom comes with responsibility.
When we are children, we don't have any freedom, but we also don't have any problems. We have a protected, safe life. Then, with growing up comes more and more of this freedom, but also more and more responsibility. When we are 18, very often we're just kicked out of our homes. We go to university, we go to work, we find our own home, and then suddenly we're responsible for everything. We have to pay the rent, we have to make money, we have to find a husband or a wife, whatever it is, we have to make a family, and then we're even responsible for others. This weight of responsibility can become very oppressive.
This is why Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst from the 1960s, says that many of us try to escape freedom. Freedom scares us, and we want to go back to the situation of the child that is protected. Now, you see, Fromm was a psychoanalyst; he was a doctor. So, this going back to the developmental stage of the child seems just like something that a psychologist would say. But I think that it describes a fear that we all feel when we grow up. Even today, I am already 60, and I still feel sometimes the fear of being responsible for all these people in my family, of having to earn the money, and what happens if I lose my job, and what happens if I die in an accident. There is always this fear that you are responsible for things that you cannot actually make sure to get right. Nobody can be sure that he will not die. Nobody can be sure that they will always be employed. So, there is this fear always there at the background of everything we do.
Fromm says that we have to try to overcome this fear by realizing that it is there and by growing up, by accepting our responsibilities and acting according to them. But many people don't, and essentially there are three ways that he identifies how people refuse to accept this responsibility. They refuse to grow up, they refuse to be free, and they want to escape this freedom. We can see them all over society, and the first of them is authoritarianism.
He says authoritarianism is this idea that I either follow a father figure, an authoritarian figure, somebody who has authority, who is stronger than me. This could be a thing with many followers of people like Putin or Trump, where they want to give away this responsibility and just hand it over to somebody who will take care of the world. This also happens in smaller contexts. It can happen in an office where the boss is a very strong authority, and the workers, the employees, just give up their responsibility to the boss, push everything to him. He's happy to do it because he has this authoritarian streak in him, and everybody else is happy to get rid of the responsibility, and so this works out for them. But of course, the problem with this is that it prevents them from ever being happy or from ever developing into satisfied human beings.
Because these workers, these office workers, will never feel that they are in control. They will never feel that they do something that gives them satisfaction, that makes them better human beings because whatever they do, somebody else is responsible. This also can be in a family if there is a father or mother who is a very strong authoritarian figure, and everybody else just submits to them. This is the same. It is in a way safe and comforting, but it is comforting in the way that a child is comforted. It is not comforting in a way that's suitable for grown-ups, and this is a problem because then we never get to really experience the freedom and the satisfaction of being creative, of being doing something of our own.
And there is always this vision of freedom. Everybody wants to be free, and we're always dreaming of freedom. We're dreaming of the day when we will drop our everyday job and become YouTubers or take a sailboat and sail the world. But in reality, we're doing nothing to approach this, and we keep submitting to these authorities. So today, if you have time, perhaps you want to think about this a little. Where in your life are you giving responsibility away to some authority? Is it a good thing? Is it something that gives you comfort, or is it something that prevents you from realizing your own individuality, from doing your own thing, from making your own mistakes, and ultimately from reaching your own happiness?
Tomorrow we will continue this discussion. So make sure to come back. Thank you and goodbye.
