Destructiveness #058

Erich Fromm and our fear of freedom

Hello everyone, welcome back! I'm Andy, a philosophy lecturer in case you don't know me, and we are talking about how to apply philosophical ideas to our lives to improve them, make them better. We've been talking about how people try to escape from freedom, according to the philosophy and social psychology of a psychoanalyst called Erich Fromm, a German who left Germany during Nazi times, went to the United States, and worked there. He was very famous from the 60s to the 1980s, and later he died in 1980. He tried to treat social problems as psychological problems; he tried to psychoanalyze society.

One of his diagnoses was that we are afraid of freedom, and freedom scares us because it brings with it this responsibility and openness, and we always try to restrict our freedom. But this, at the same time, makes us unhappy because we can only find happiness if we realize our own self in freedom and get satisfaction from this.

The ways how we avoid freedom, according to Fromm, are first, what we talked about yesterday: authoritarianism, which is the idea that we are submitting to authority—a boss in the office, a strong husband or wife at home, a political leader who is strong and takes away all our decisions, and somehow himself makes it work. This is a problem because we are giving up our individuality, we're giving up our own creativity, and our own way to form our life according to our wishes to somebody else, and this in the end makes us unhappy. Although in the short term, we think that it makes our lives easier, in the end, it will make us unhappy because we are unable to reach this flourishing, what Aristotle says, this state of life where we are happier with our lives, and responsible, and creative, and in control. We will never go there if we give our choices over to some authoritarian figure.

But there are also two other ways, and the next one Fromm talks about is destructiveness, and we see this very often in young people, sometimes faced with this problem of freedom, with this fear that freedom instills in us. What am I going to do now? I'm responsible for so many things, and I'm not able to really respond, and I'm not able to take this responsibility because I don't feel that I'm strong enough or in control enough. Young people often have this because they don't yet, you know, have a job, they don't yet have anything they have done that would give them a little more confidence, they don't see the future for themselves, especially today where the future is oblique.

So, the response Fromm says with destructiveness, this is another way of responding. Destructiveness means that I attack what I am afraid of, and this is a natural response. It's a natural response because in the wild, you know, if you have a wild animal, or, and you know, like those prototypical ancient humans before the war, a society, I mean, they see something scary, they see a lion, they see a tiger, what do they do? They go attack it because you cannot run away from it, so your best chance is to just attack it, and see what happens, perhaps it will go away.

So, being weak in a situation where you perceive yourself is not able to really make your life, you know, create your situation that you want to have, destroying what you feel attacks you is a rational response and is a response that is built into us, and we see this all the time, unfortunately nowadays in our societies with, for example, the rise in knife crime. The worse society is off, the worse people are off, the less rosy the future looks, and today, for young people, it doesn't look rosy at all with all the problems of, you know, wars everywhere and atomic weapons being threatened by Russia, and uh, destruction of the natural environment, and microplastics and global warming, and whatever else there is, you know, in this situation, as a young person, and and AI, of course, unemployment. As a young person, this situation, you are afraid, you don't see any future for yourself, and what is the reaction? To destroy what you feel is threatening you, to destroy society. So, you go out, you do all kinds of things, you drive drunk, you crash with your car, you destroy yourself perhaps, or you try to destroy others, you take a knife and, or you bully someone, or you refuse to work productively, you don't go to work, you stay at home, and therefore again refuse to engage with society, you refuse to do your thing.

So, these are various ways how we can try to respond to this threat by being destructive, but of course, Fromm says, and Aristotle would agree, there is no real point to this because this does not change things, this does not improve anything. The situation is equally bad, it's worse because now you are also against society, so society will come after you, they will do whatever they can to prevent you from harming others, you might end up in prison. So, this is not the way to have a happy life, and it does not make anyone happy really to be destructive. Destructiveness is an understandable but a wrong reaction that does not achieve what the person wants to achieve, which is personal happiness.

And destructiveness can also come in smaller forms, it can be in a house, again, the opposite form of this, submitting to authority. Destructiveness can mean that I use my authority to destroy the life of others in my family, to make them miserable because I feel that this situation is threatening me, this family is threatening me with giving me responsibility that I cannot respond to, so now I try to make their lives miserable in return.

So, all this is not good, and I think we should think about it because we, every one of us, probably has some impulse of destructiveness occasionally. I know that I have. Uh, sometimes I will be angry, or sometimes I will shout at someone, or sometimes I will not do what I am supposed to do. Perhaps I will say it's procrastination, perhaps I will say it's laziness, but perhaps it is also sometimes destructiveness, and I'm just not willing to admit it to myself.

So, let's try to think where we show these destructive behaviors because the first step in, you know, improving this situation is to recognize it, and then to say okay here I am harming myself by being destructive in this way, I am not doing anything good, I'm harming myself, and if I want to improve my life, then I really have to admit this to myself first, and then I have to see how I can change this behavior, and actually accept the responsibility that freedom gives me.

If you want to know more, here's another video about the escape from freedom. Thank you, and see you next time.