Escaping from Freedom? #056

Hello, welcome back. If you're here for the first time, my name is Andy. I'm a philosophy lecturer, and together we explore philosophical ideas and how they apply to everyday life. One of my favorite thinkers in terms of applying ideas to life has always been Erich Fromm.

Erich Fromm was a German psychoanalyst, philosopher, and writer who lived from the 1920s to 1980. For about 30 years, he was immensely popular; he was very famous, and people were reading his books like crazy. Today, he is largely forgotten, like many people who were a big phenomenon in their time. There are many of those who, at one time, produced one bestseller after another and then have been forgotten for one reason or another. But I think what Fromm said is still very important today, and it is very inspirational. It gives us lots of ideas about what is going wrong with our lives and how we can fix it.

Fromm was a psychoanalyst, so he was a doctor. One of his ways of diagnosing what goes wrong and why we are unhappy is by psychoanalyzing society. He treats society as a patient and examines how society is going wrong, what problems it has. One of his most approachable books is called Escape from Freedom. In this book, he talks about how we escape from freedom, which sounds a little paradoxical because we always think that freedom is a good thing. So why would we want to escape from it? Isn't freedom what everybody wants? If you live in a country that doesn't have freedom, then you want freedom; you fight for your freedom.

But Fromm says real freedom is very difficult to handle because freedom is scary for us. The best experience of this is with children. When children are small, they don't have any freedom. They are embedded in their household. They do what their mother tells them, and they get something in return. What do they get in return? They get the freedom to play without responsibility. They get the freedom to do what they want within the limits set by their parents. Within these limits, they are not going to be blamed for what they do. They don't have any problems surviving; they don't have any problems earning their money. All these are worries that a child does not have, so the life of a child is very protected.

Then suddenly, the child grows up. I see this with my own children; they are 10, 12, 14. At this age, there is a transition to being an adult, and slowly the children become more responsible for their lives, for what they're doing, for their homework, for their friends, and how their friends behave. The first reaction is fear. Suddenly, I am responsible for what I'm doing. I have to do my homework, and it's not my mother giving it to me anymore or pushing me to do it. Now I'm responsible for my grades; I am responsible for getting to university; I am responsible for whatever I do later. What if this doesn't work out? What if I make mistakes? There is the fear.

The same is true in many other situations. Even as adults, when I am working in a regular job, perhaps not very difficult—some office work or some work on a building site, let's say I'm a worker doing the same thing every day, mixing the cement or whatever it is. As long as it's work like this, I feel protected by this routine and by this society that keeps me doing what I'm doing. Like a parent, society shields me from responsibility because I'm just following what everybody else is doing every day.

When I try to be more creative, as we discussed in yesterday's video, when I try to step out of this boring routine and really get satisfaction in my life, I suddenly realize that I am now responsible for what I'm doing. I'm doing something different. Society is not going to rush to protect me; society is going to blame me if something goes wrong. This is where Fromm says we realize that, on one hand, we want the freedom because only there can we find satisfaction. On the other hand, we experience this freedom as threatening. It is something we are afraid of because when we are free, we are responsible and alone, and there is nobody to guide us.

As a reaction to this, we try to escape from freedom. There are various mechanisms, which we will discuss in the following few days, about how we try to escape freedom and return to a situation where we are not responsible, where we can push off our responsibility to somebody else.

Perhaps today, if you like, you can think about your life or the lives of others in your environment and try to see where they are pushing away this responsibility, where they are not accepting it. In this sense, refusing to become fully grown up; everybody's doing it, including me. When I do my classes, in the same way my university wants me to teach, following my syllabus and doing exactly what everybody else does, this is a way of giving away this responsibility. I can say, even if my teaching is not the best it could be or the most original, it's okay with me because I'm not responsible. If somebody wants to blame me for my teaching, I can always point to the syllabus and say, these people are responsible, not me.

But in the end, this is something that makes me unhappy too. Try to see if there are points like this where you're avoiding responsibility, and then think about whether it makes you unhappy or provides comfort and safety. If it does provide comfort and safety, then it's fine. But if you feel that it is holding you back from having the life that you want or being the person that you want, then come back tomorrow, where we will discuss more about Fromm's ideas.

Thank you, and see you next time.