Endangered, Violated, Destroyed Human rights... Calm Down? Everything is in Your Head? Part 1
Danijela Jerkovi?
Ba.Sci., CA Certified Accountant, CIA Certified Internal Auditor | Managing Director at Danijela Jerkovic's Services
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IT IS PERSONAL!
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am for myself only, what am I?
If not now—when?
~Talmudic Saying Mishnah, Abot?
Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and inalienable rights of man.
~Thomas Jefferson?
Present political developments and the dangers which they imply for the greatest achievements of modern culture— individuality and uniqueness of personality is one aspect of it which is crucial for the cultural and social crisis of our day: the meaning of freedom for the modern man.
The meaning of freedom can be fully understood only on the basis of an analysis of the whole character structure of modern man.
The basic entity of the social process is the individual, his desires and fears, his passions and reason, his propensities for good and for evil. To understand the dynamics of the social process we must understand the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual, just as to understand the individual we must see him in the context of the culture which molds him.
Freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities.
Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. 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. Although this book is a diagnosis rather than a prognosis—an analysis rather than a solution—its results have a bearing on our course of action.
Escape from Freedom is an analysis of the phenomenon of man’s anxiety engendered by the breakdown of the Medieval World in which, in spite of many dangers, he felt secure and safe.
After centuries of struggles, man succeeded in building an undreamed-of wealth of material goods; he built democratic societies in parts of the world, and recently was victorious in defending himself against new totalitarian schemes; yet, as the analysis in Escape from Freedom attempts to show, 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.
The giant forces in society and the danger for man’s survival have increased in these twenty-five years, and hence man’s tendency to escape from freedom.
Yet there are also hopeful signs. The dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin have disappeared. In the Soviet bloc, especially in the smaller states, although they have remained ultra-conservative and totalitarian, a trend for increasing liberalization is clearly visible. The United States has shown itself resistant against all totalitarian attempts to gain influence
Man’s brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men lives still in the Stone Age.
The majority of men have not yet acquired the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be?objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority that gives meaning to life except man himself. Man represses the irrational passions of destructiveness, hate, envy, revenge; he worships power, money, the sovereign state, the nation; while he pays lip service to the teachings of the great spiritual leaders of the human race, those of Buddha, the prophets, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed—he has transformed these teachings into a jungle of superstition and idol-worship.
How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?
Answer:
The increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason.
We can not hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation; maybe it will take a thousand years until man has lifted himself from a pre-human history of hundreds of thousands of years.
At this crucial moment, however, a modicum of increased insight—objectivity—can make the difference between life and death for the human race. For this reason, the development of a scientific and dynamic social psychology is of vital importance. Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.
Purpose:
I hope that this edition of Escape from Freedom will continue to contribute to increasing the interest in the field of dynamic social psychology and to stimulate younger people to devote their
interest to a field that is full of intellectual excitement, precisely because it is only at its beginning.?
FREEDOM—A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM?
Modern European and American history is centered around the effort to gain freedom from the political, economic, and spiritual shackles that have bound men. The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend.
While a class was fighting for its own liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted in all who are oppressed. In the long and virtually continuous battle for freedom, however, classes that were fighting against oppression at one stage sided with the enemies of freedom when victory was won and new privileges were to be defended.?
Despite many reverses, freedom has won battles. Many died in those battles in the conviction that to die in the struggle against oppression was better than to live without freedom. Such a death was the utmost assertion of their individuality.
History seemed to be proving that it was possible for a man to govern himself, to make decisions for himself, and to think and feel as he saw fit.
The full expression of man’s potentialities seemed to be the goal toward which social development was rapidly approaching.
The principles of economic liberalism, political democracy, religious autonomy, and individualism in personal life, gave expression to the longing for freedom, and at the same time seemed to bring mankind nearer to its realization. One tie after another was severed.
The abolition of external domination seemed to be not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition to attain the cherished goal: freedom of the individual.?
If we want to fight Fascism we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as the ritual of an Indian rain dance.
The outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power:
Analysis of the human aspect of freedom and of authoritarianism forces us to consider a general problem, namely, that of the role which psychological factors play as active forces in the social process; and this eventually leads to the problem of the interaction of psychological, economic, and ideological factors in the social process.?
One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a long time has ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the world looked bright and safe like the well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity.
Freud accepted the traditional belief in a basic dichotomy between man and society, as well as the traditional doctrine of the evilness of human nature. Man, to him, is fundamentally antisocial.
Society must domesticate him, must allow some direct satisfaction of biological—and hence, ineradicable—drives, but for the most part, society must refine and adroitly check man’s basic impulses.
In consequence of this suppression of natural impulses by society something miraculous happens: the suppressed drives turn into strivings that are culturally valuable and thus become the human basis for culture.?
Freud chose the word sublimation for this strange transformation from suppression into civilized behavior. If the amount of suppression is greater than the capacity for sublimation, individuals become neurotic and it is necessary to allow the lessening of suppression.
Generally, however, there is a reverse relation between the satisfaction of man’s drives and culture: the more suppression, the more culture (and the more danger of neurotic disturbances). The relation of the individual to society in Freud’s theory is essentially a static one: the individual remains virtually the same and becomes changed only in so far as society exercises greater pressure on his natural drives (and thus enforces more sublimation) or allows more satisfaction (and thus sacrifices culture).
Each person works for himself, individualistically, at his own risk, and not primarily in co-operation with others.
Freud’s concept of human relations is essentially the same: the individual appears fully equipped with biologically given drives, which need to be satisfied.
The field of human relations in Freud’s sense is similar to the market—it is an exchange of satisfaction of biologically given needs, in which the relationship to the other individual is always a means to an end but never an end in itself.?
The most beautiful as well as the ugliest inclinations of man are not part of a fixed and biologically given human nature but result from the social process which creates man. In other words, society has not only a suppressing function—although it has that too—but it has also a creative function.
Man’s nature, his passions, and anxieties are a cultural product; as a matter of fact, the man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history.
It is the very task of social psychology to understand this process of man’s creation in history.
Why do certain definite changes of man’s character take place from one historical epoch to another?
Why is the spirit of the Renaissance different from that of the Middle Ages?
Why is the character structure of man in?monopolistic capitalism different from that in the nineteenth century?
Social psychology has to explain why new abilities and new passions, bad or good, come into existence. Thus we find, for instance, that from the Renaissance up until our day men have been filled with a burning ambition for fame, while this striving which today seems so natural was little present in man of the medieval society.
Man is not only made by history—history is made by man. The solution to this seeming contradiction constitutes the field of social psychology. Its task is to show not only how passions, desires, anxieties change and develop as a result of the social process, but also how man’s energies thus shaped into specific forms in their turn become productive forces, molding the social process. Thus, for instance, the craving for fame and success and the drive to work are forces without which modern capitalism could not have developed; without these and a number of other human forces man would have lacked the impetus to act according to the social and economic requirements of the modern commercial and industrial system.
Only dynamic psychology, the foundations of which have been laid by Freud, can get further than paying lip service to the human factor.
Though there is no fixed human nature, we cannot regard human nature as being infinitely malleable and able to adapt itself to any kind of conditions without developing a psychological dynamism of its own. Human nature, though being the product of historical evolution, has certain inherent mechanisms and laws, to discover which is the task of psychology.
At this point, it seems necessary for the full understanding of what has been said so far and also of what follows to discuss the notion of adaptation. This discussion offers at the same time an illustration of what we mean by psychological mechanisms and laws.
All these physiologically conditioned needs (an indispensable part of human nature and imperatively need satisfaction, namely, those needs that are rooted in the physiological organization of man, like hunger, thirst, the need for sleep, and so on) can be summarized in the notion of a need for self-preservation.
This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature that needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behavior.
A simple formula: man must eat, drink, sleep, protect himself against enemies, and so forth.
In order to do all this, he must work and produce.
Different kinds of work require entirely different personality traits and make for different kinds of relatedness to others.
When a man is born, the stage is set for him. He has to eat and drink, and therefore he has to work, and this means he has to work under particular conditions and in the ways that are determined for him by the kind of society into which he is born.
Both factors, his need to live and the social system, in principle are unalterable by him as an individual, and they are the factors that determine the development of those other traits that show greater plasticity.
Thus the mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the peculiarity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in determining his whole character structure, because the imperative need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under which he has to live.
This does not mean that he cannot try, together with others, to effect certain economic and?political changes; but primarily his personality is molded by the particular mode of life, as he has already been confronted with it as a child through the medium of the family, which represents all the features that are typical of a particular society or class.
An individual may be alone in a physical sense for many years and yet he may be related to ideas, values, or at least social patterns that give him a feeling of communion and “belonging.”
On the other hand, he may live among people and yet be overcome with an utter feeling of isolation, the outcome of which, if it transcends a certain limit, is the state of insanity which schizophrenic disturbances represent.
This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness.
One important element is the fact that men cannot live without some sort of co-operation with others. In any conceivable kind of culture, man needs to cooperate with others if he wants to survive, whether for the purpose of defending himself against enemies or dangers of nature or in order that he may be able to work and produce.
Human nature is neither a biologically fixed and innate sum total of drives nor is it a lifeless shadow of cultural patterns to which it adapts itself smoothly; it is the product of human evolution, but it also has certain inherent mechanisms and laws. There are certain factors in man’s nature that are fixed and unchangeable: the necessity to satisfy the physiologically conditioned drives and the necessity to avoid isolation and moral aloneness.
We have seen that the individual has to accept the mode of life rooted in the system of production and?distribution peculiar for any given society. In the process of dynamic adaptation to culture, a number of powerful drives develop which motivate the actions and feelings of the individual. The individual may or may not be conscious of these drives, but in any case, they are forceful and demand satisfaction once they have developed.
They become powerful forces which in their turn become effective in molding the social process.
The main theme of this book: that man, the more he gains freedom in the sense of emerging from the original oneness with man and nature and the more he becomes an “individual,” has no choice but to unite himself with the world in the spontaneity of love and productive work or else to seek a kind of security by such ties with the world as destroying his freedom and the integrity of his individual self.?
THE EMERGENCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE AMBIGUITY OF FREEDOM?
Before we come to our main topic—the question of what freedom means to modern man, and why and how he tries to escape from it—we must first discuss a concept that may seem to be somewhat removed from actuality.
It is, however, a premise necessary for the understanding of the analysis of freedom in modern society.
The social history of man started with his emerging from a state of oneness with the natural world to an awareness of himself as an entity separate from surrounding nature and men. Yet this awareness remained very dim over long periods of history.
The individual continued to be closely tied to the natural and social world from which he emerged; while being partly aware of himself as a separate entity, he felt also part of the world around him. The growing process of the emergence of the individual from his original ties, a process which we may call “individuation,” seems to have reached its peak in modern history in the centuries between the Reformation and the present.
The organized and integrated whole of the personality the self could be perceived as the one side of the growing process of individuation is the growth of self-strength.
The other aspect of the process of individuation is growing aloneness.
The primary ties offer security and basic unity with the world outside of oneself. To the extent to which the child emerges from that world, it becomes aware of being alone, of being an entity separate from all others.
This separation from a world, which in comparison with one’s own individual existence is overwhelmingly strong and powerful, and often threatening and dangerous, creates a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety. As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities and responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it.
When one has become an individual, one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects.
Impulses arise to give up one’s individuality, to overcome the feeling of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the world outside. These impulses, however, and the new ties arising from them, are not identical with the primary ties which have been cut off in the process of growth itself.
Submission is not the only way of avoiding aloneness and anxiety. The other way, the only one which is productive and does not end in an insoluble conflict, is that of spontaneous relationship to man and nature, a relationship that connects the individual with the world without eliminating his individuality.
This kind of relationship—the foremost expressions of which are love and productive work—is rooted in the integration and strength of the total personality and is therefore subject to the very limits that exist for the growth of the self.
The problem of submission and of spontaneous activity as two possible results of growing individuation; the general principle, the dialectic process which results?from growing individuation and from growing freedom of the individual.
The process of individuation is one of growing strength and integration of its individual personality, but it is at the same time a process in which the original identity with others is lost and in which the child becomes more separate from them.
This growing separation may result in isolation that has the quality of desolation and creates intense anxiety and insecurity; it may result in a new kind of closeness and solidarity with others if the child has been able to develop the inner strength and productivity which are the premise of this new kind of relatedness to the world.??
While the process of individuation takes place automatically, the growth of the self is hampered for a number of individual and social reasons.
The lag between these two trends results in an unbearable feeling of isolation and powerlessness, and this in its turn leads to psychic mechanisms, which later on are described as mechanisms of escape.?
Freedom in the sense just discussed is an ambiguous gift.
Man is born without the equipment for appropriate action which the animal possesses; he is dependent on his parents for a longer time than any animal, and his reactions to his surroundings are less quick and less effective than the automatically regulated instinctive actions are. He goes through all the dangers and fears which this lack of instinctive equipment implies. Yet this very helplessness of man is the basis from which human development springs; man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
From the beginning of his existence, man is confronted with the choice between different courses of action.
Growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing to doubt concerning one’s own role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.
If the process of the development of mankind had been harmonious, if it had followed a certain plan, then both sides of the development—the growing strength and the growing individuation—would have been exactly balanced.
As it is, the history of mankind is one of conflict and strife. Each step in the direction of growing individuation threatened people with new insecurities. Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it.
There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love, and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.
FREEDOM IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION
1. Medieval Background and the Renaissance
What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. Everybody in the earlier period was chained to his role in the social order.
But although a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated.
In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place?in the social world from the moment of birth, the man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt.
Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life (freedom of choice which is largely abstract), there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life.?
There was much suffering and pain, but there was also the Church which made this suffering more tolerable by explaining it as a result of the sin of Adam and the individual sins of each person. While the Church fostered a sense of guilt, it also assured the individual of her unconditional love to all her children and offered a way to acquire the conviction of being forgiven and loved by God. The relationship to God was more one of confidence and love than of doubt and fear.
Although society was thus structuralized and gave man security, it kept him in bondage. It was a different kind of bondage from that which authoritarianism and oppression in later centuries constituted.
Awareness of one’s individual self, of others, and of the world as separate entities, had not yet fully developed.
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital, individual economic initiative, and competition grew in importance; a newly moneyed class developed.
A growing individualism was noticeable in all social classes and affected all spheres of human activity, taste, fashion, art, philosophy, and theology.
The Renaissance was the culture of a wealthy and powerful upper class, on the crest of the wave which was whipped up by the storm of new economic forces.
The masses who did not share the wealth and power of the ruling group had lost the security of their former status and had become a shapeless mass, to be flattered or to be threatened—but always to be manipulated and exploited by those in power. A new despotism arose side by side with the new individualism. Freedom and tyranny, individuality and disorder, were inextricably interwoven.
The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty-bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers. Their economic activity and their wealth gave them a feeling of freedom and a sense of individuality. But at the same time, these same people had lost something: the security and feeling of belonging which the medieval social structure had offered.
They were freer, but they were also more alone. They used their power and wealth to squeeze the last ounce of pleasure out of life; but in doing so, they had to use ruthlessly every?means, from physical torture to psychological manipulation, to rule over the masses and to check their competitors within their own class.
All human relationships were poisoned by this fierce life-and-death struggle for the maintenance of power and wealth. Solidarity with one’s fellow men—or at least with the members of one’s own class—was replaced by a cynical detached attitude; other individuals were looked upon as “objects” to be used and manipulated, or they were ruthlessly destroyed if it suited one’s own ends.
The individual was absorbed by passionate egocentricity, insatiable greed for power and wealth.
As a result of all this, the successful individual’s relation to his own self, his sense of security and confidence were poisoned too.
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His own self became as much an object of manipulation to him as other persons had become.
We have reasons to doubt whether the powerful masters of Renaissance capitalism were as happy and as secure as they are often pictured.
It seems that the new freedom brought two things to them: an increased feeling of strength and at the same time increased isolation, doubt, skepticism (cf. Huizinga, p. 159.), and—resulting from all these—anxiety.
Side by side with their emphasis on human dignity, individuality, and strength, they exhibited insecurity and despair in their philosophy.
The main difference between the two cultures is this: the Renaissance period represented a comparatively high development of commercial and industrial capitalism.
It was a society in which a small group of wealthy and powerful individuals ruled and formed the social basis for the philosophers and artists who expressed the spirit of this culture.
In medieval society, the economic organization of the city had been relatively static. The craftsmen since the later part of the Middle Ages were united in their guilds. Each master had one or two apprentices and the number of masters was in some relation to the needs of the community. Although there were always some who had to struggle hard to earn enough to survive, by and large, the guild member could be sure that he could live by his hand’s work.
Significant changes in the psychological atmosphere accompanied the economic development of capitalism. A spirit of restlessness began to pervade life toward the end of the Middle Ages.
The individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status.
2. The Period of the Reformation
At this point of development, Lutheranism and Calvinism came into existence.
The new religions were not the religions of a wealthy upper class but of the urban middle class, the poor in the cities, and the peasants. They carried an appeal to these groups because they gave expression to a new feeling of freedom and independence as well as to the feeling of powerlessness and anxiety by which their members were pervaded.
But the new religious doctrines did more than give articulate expression to the feelings engendered by a changing economic order. By their teachings, they increased them and at the same time offered solutions that enabled the individual to cope with otherwise unbearable insecurity.
What the psychological analysis of doctrines can show are the subjective motivations that make a person aware of certain problems and make him seek answers in certain directions. Any kind of thought, true or false, if it is more than superficial conformance with conventional ideas, is motivated by the subjective needs a
nd interests of the person who is thinking.
It happens that some interests are furthered by finding the truth, others by destroying it.
But in both cases, psychological motivations are important incentives for arriving at certain conclusions.
We can go even further and say that ideas that are not rooted in the power needs of the personality will have little influence on the actions and on the whole life of the person concerned.?
Both problems, the psychology of the leader and that of his followers, are, of course, closely linked with each other.
Doubt is the starting point of modern philosophy; the need to silence it had a most powerful stimulus on the development of modern philosophy and science.
But although many rational doubts have been solved by rational answers, the irrational doubt has not disappeared and cannot
disappear as long as man has not progressed from negative freedom to positive freedom.?
The modern attempts to silence it, whether they consist in a compulsive striving for success, in the belief that unlimited knowledge of facts can answer the quest for certainty, or in the submission to a leader who assumes the responsibility for “certainty”—all these solutions can only eliminate the awareness of doubt.
The doubt itself will not disappear as long as man does not overcome his isolation and as long as his place in the world has not become a meaningful one in terms of his human needs.?
The irrationality of such compulsive effort is that the activity is not meant to create the desired end but serves to indicate whether or not something will occur which has been determined beforehand, independent of one’s own activity or control.
This new attitude towards effort and work as an aim in itself may be assumed to be the most important psychological change which has happened to man since the end of the Middle Ages.
In every society, man has to work if he wants to live.
Many societies solved the problem by having the work done by slaves, thus allowing the free man to devote himself to “nobler” occupations.
In such societies, work was not worthy of a free man.
In medieval society, too, the burden of work was unequally distributed among the different classes in the social hierarchy, and there was a good deal of crude exploitation. But the attitude toward work was different from that which developed subsequently in the modern era.?
Rising capitalism, although it made also for their increased independence and initiative, was greatly a threat. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the individual of the middle class could not yet gain much power and security from the new freedom.
Freedom brought isolation and personal insignificance more than strength and confidence.
The new character structure, resulting from economic and social changes and intensified by religious doctrines, became in its turn an important factor in shaping further social and economic development.
Those very qualities which were rooted in this character structure—the compulsion to work, passion for thrift, the readiness to make one’s life a tool for the purposes of extra personal power, asceticism, and a compulsive sense of duty—were character traits which became productive forces in a capitalistic society and without which modern economic and social development is unthinkable; they were the specific forms into which human energy was shaped and in which it became one of the productive forces within the social process.
To act in accord with the newly formed character traits was advantageous from the standpoint of economic necessities; it was also satisfying psychologically since such action answered the needs and anxieties of this new kind of personality.
To put the same principle in more general terms: the social process, by determining the mode of life of the individual, that is, his?relation to others and to work, molds his character structure; new ideologies— religious, philosophical, or political—result from and appeal to this changed character structure and thus intensify, satisfy, and stabilize it; the newly formed character traits in their turn become important factors in further economic development and influence the social process; while originally they have developed as a reaction to the threat of new economic forces, they slowly become productive forces furthering and intensifying the new economic development.
THE TWO ASPECTS OF FREEDOM FOR MODERN MAN?
The analysis centered on the problem of freedom in its twofold meaning; it showed that freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity.
By the doctrines of Protestantism, the man was psychologically prepared for the role he was to play under the modern industrial system. This system, its practice, and the spirit which grew out of it, reaching every aspect of life, molded the whole personality of man and accentuated the contradictions which we have discussed in the previous chapter: it developed the individual—and made him more helpless; it increased freedom—and created dependencies of a new kind.
The structure of a modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously:
The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other. T
This is difficult because conventionally we think in non-dialectical terms and are prone to doubt whether two contradictory trends can result simultaneously from one cause. Furthermore, the negative side of freedom, the burden which it puts upon man, is difficult to realize, especially for those whose?heart is with the cause of freedom.
Because in the fight for freedom in modern history the attention was focused upon combating old forms of authority and restraint, it was natural that one should feel that the more these traditional restraints were eliminated, the more freedom one had gained.
We fail sufficiently to recognize, however, that although man has rid himself from old enemies of freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen; enemies which are not essentially external restraints, but internal factors blocking the full realization of the freedom of personality.
We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes an important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what “he” thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts.
Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do.
We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and “common sense,” which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has?about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different. In other words, we are fascinated by the growth of freedom from powers outside of ourselves and are blinded to the fact of inner restraints, compulsions, and fears, which tend to undermine the meaning of the victories freedom has won against its traditional enemies.
We, therefore, are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary.
We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with the utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.
Any critical evaluation of the effect which the industrial system had on this kind of inner freedom must start with the full understanding of the enormous?progress which capitalism has meant for the development of human personality.
In one word, capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increase of positive freedom, to the?growth of an active, critical, responsible self.?
In capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves.
It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself.
The subordination of the individual as a means to economic ends is based on the peculiarities of the capitalistic mode of production, which makes the?accumulation of capital the purpose and aim of economic activity.
One works for profit’s sake, but the profit one makes is not made to be spent but to be invested as new capital; this increased capital brings new profits which again are invested, and so on in a circle.
There were of course always capitalists who spent money for luxuries or as “conspicuous waste”; but the classic representatives of capitalism enjoyed working—not spending.
This principle of accumulating capital instead of using it for consumption is the premise of the grandiose achievements of our modern industrial system.
If man had not had the ascetic attitude to work and the desire to invest the fruits of his work for the purpose of developing the productive capacities of the economic system, our progress in mastering nature never could have been made; it is this growth of the productive forces of society which for the first time in history permits us to visualize a future in which the continual struggle for the satisfaction of material needs will cease.
Yet, while the principle of work for the sake of the accumulation of capital objectively is of enormous value for the progress of mankind, subjectively it has made man work for extra personal ends, made him a servant to the very machine he built, and thereby has given him a feeling of personal insignificance and powerlessness.
In any society, the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are most powerful in that society.
Hatred is a passionate wish for destruction;
love is a passionate affirmation of an “object”; it is not an “affect” but an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object.
The affirmation of my own life, happiness, growth, freedom, is rooted in the presence of the basic readiness of and the ability for such an affirmation. If an individual has this readiness, he has it also toward himself; if he can only “love” others, he cannot love at all.
?Selfishness is not identical with self-love but with its very opposite. Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction.
Greed is a bottomless pit that exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Close observation shows that while the selfish person is always anxiously concerned with himself, he is never satisfied, is always restless, always driven by the fear of not getting enough, of missing something, of being deprived of something. He is filled with burning envy of anyone who might have more. If we observe still closer, especially the unconscious dynamics, we find that this type of person is basically not fond of himself, but deeply dislikes himself.
Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself. The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself since basically, he lacks security and satisfaction.
The same holds true with the so-called narcissistic person, who is not so much concerned with getting things for himself as with admiring himself.
While on the surface it seems that these persons are very much in love with themselves, they actually are not fond of themselves, and their narcissism—like selfishness—is an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love.
Freud has pointed out that the narcissistic person has withdrawn his love from others and turned it toward his?own person. Although the first part of this statement is true, the second is a fallacy He loves neither others nor himself.
The “self” in the interest of which modern man acts is the social self, a self which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function of man in society.
Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self and whose object is the social self.
While modern man seems to be characterized by the utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self—intellect and willpower—to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.
Just as one cannot properly understand psychological problems without their social and cultural background, neither can one understand social phenomena without the knowledge of the underlying psychological mechanisms.
MECHANISMS OF ESCAPE
In order to make this clearer, a brief discussion of the terms neurotic and normal, or healthy, seems to be useful.
The term normal or healthy can be defined in two ways.
Firstly, from the standpoint of a functioning society, one can call a person normal or healthy if he is able to fulfill the social role he is to take in that given society. More concretely, this means that he is able to work in the fashion which is required in that particular society, and furthermore that he is able to participate in the reproduction of society, that is, that he can raise a family.
Secondly, from the standpoint of the individual, we look upon health or normalcy as the optimum of growth and happiness of the individual.
If the structure of a given society were such that it offered the optimum possibility for individual happiness, both viewpoints would coincide. However, this is not the case in most societies we know, including our own. Although they differ in the degree to which they promote the aims of individual growth, there is a discrepancy between the aims of the smooth functioning of society and of the full development of the individual.
This fact makes it imperative to differentiate sharply between the two concepts of health. The one is governed by social necessities, the other by values and norms concerning the aim of individual existence.
Most psychiatrists take the structure of their own society so much for granted that to them the person who is not well adapted assumes the stigma of being less valuable. On the other hand, the well-adapted person is supposed to be the more valuable person in terms of a scale of human values.
If we differentiate the two concepts of normal and neurotic, we come to the following conclusion: the person who is normal in terms of being well adapted is often less healthy than the neurotic?person in terms of human values. Often he is well adapted only at the expense of having given up his self in order to become more or less the person he believes he is expected to be. All genuine individuality and spontaneity may have been lost.
On the other hand, the neurotic person can be characterized as somebody who was not ready to surrender completely in the battle for himself. To be sure, his attempt to save his individual self was not successful, and instead of expressing his self productively, he sought salvation through neurotic symptoms and by withdrawing into a phantasy life.
From a standpoint of human values, however, a society could be called neurotic in the sense that its members are crippled in the growth of their personalities.
...mechanisms of escape, which result from the insecurity of the isolated individual...
Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness
By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work, in the genuine expression of his emotional, sensuous, and intellectual capacities; he can thus become one again with man, nature, and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self.
The other course open to him is to fall back, to give up his freedom, and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world.
The tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking.
Or, to put it in different words, to seek new, “secondary bonds” as a substitute for the primary bonds which have been lost.?
The more distinct forms of this mechanism are to be found in the striving for submission and domination, or, as we would rather put it, in the masochistic and sadistic strivings as they exist in varying degrees in normal and neurotic persons respectively.
The authoritarian character, the most important feature to be mentioned is its attitude towards power. For the authoritarian character there exist, so to speak, two sexes: the powerful ones and the powerless ones. His love, admiration, and readiness for submission are automatically aroused by power, whether of a person or of an institution. Power fascinates him not for any values for which a specific power may stand, but just because it is power. Just as his “love” is automatically aroused by power, so powerless people or institutions automatically arouse his contempt.
The very sight of a powerless person makes him want to attack, dominate, humiliate him. Whereas a different kind of character is appalled by the idea of attacking one who is helpless, the authoritarian character feels the more aroused the more helpless his object has become.?
There is one feature of the authoritarian character which has misled many observers: a tendency to defy authority and to resent any kind of influence from “above.”
Sometimes this defiance overshadows the whole picture and the submissive tendencies are in the background. This type of person will constantly rebel against any kind of authority, even one that actually furthers his interests and has no elements of suppression.
Finally, there is a type in which the rebellious tendencies are completely repressed and come to the surface only when conscious control is weakened; or they can be recognized ex posterior, in the hatred that arises against authority when its power is weakened and when it begins to totter.?
The authoritarian character is never a “revolutionary”. There are many individuals and political movements that are puzzling to the superficial observer because of what seems to be an inexplicable change from “radicalism” to extreme authoritarianism. Psychologically, these people are the typical “rebels.”?
The attitude of the authoritarian character toward life, his whole philosophy, is determined by his emotional strivings.
The authoritarian character loves those conditions that limit human freedom, he loves being submitted to fate. It depends on his social position what “fate” means to him.
The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.?
The authoritarian character does not lack activity, courage, or belief. But these qualities for him mean something entirely different from what they mean for the person who does not long for submission.
For the authoritarian character, activity is rooted in a basic feeling of powerlessness which it tends to overcome. Activity in this sense means to act in the name of something higher than one’s own self.
2. Destructiveness
Any observer of personal relations in our social scene cannot fail to be impressed with the amount of destructiveness to be found everywhere.
For the most part, it is not conscious as such but is rationalized in various ways. As a matter of fact, there is virtually nothing that is not used as a rationalization for destructiveness.
Love, duty, conscience, patriotism have been and are being used as disguises to destroy others or oneself. However, we must differentiate between two different kinds of destructive tendencies. There are destructive tendencies that result from a specific situation; as a reaction to attacks on one’s own or others’ life and integrity, or on ideas with which one is identified. This kind of destructiveness is the natural and necessary concomitant of one’s affirmation of life.
It seems that any attempt to understand the roots of destructiveness must start with the observation of these very differences and proceed to the question of what other differentiating factors can be observed and whether these factors may not account for the differences in the amount of destructiveness.
Life has an inner dynamism of its own; it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. It seems that if this tendency is thwarted the energy directed toward life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed toward destruction.
In other words: the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness.
Destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life.
Those individual and social conditions that make for suppression of life produce the passion for destruction that forms, so to speak, the reservoir from which the particular hostile tendencies—either against others or against oneself—are nourished.?
It goes without saying how important it is not only to realize the dynamic role of destructiveness in the social process but also to understand what the?specific conditions for its intensity are.
3. Automaton Conformity
Other mechanisms of escape are the withdrawal from the world so completely that it loses its threat, and the inflation of oneself psychologically to such an extent that the world outside becomes small in comparison.
Although these mechanisms of escape are important for individual psychology, they are only of minor relevance culturally.
This particular mechanism is the solution that the majority of normal individuals find in modern society. To put it briefly, the individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns, and he, therefore, becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be.
Rationalizations are essentially lacking this quality of discovering and uncovering; they only confirm the emotional prejudice existing in oneself.
Rationalizing is not a tool for penetration of reality but a post-factum attempt to harmonize one’s own wishes with existing reality.?
With feeling as with thinking, one must distinguish between a genuine feeling, which originates in ourselves, and a pseudo feeling, which is really not our own although we believe it to be.
The automatization of the individual in modern society has increased the helplessness and insecurity of the average individual.
Thus, he is ready to submit to new authorities who offer him security and relief from doubt.
4. PSYCHOLOGY OF NAZISM
The wish for power over the masses is what drives the member of the “elite,” the Nazi leaders.
This wish for power is sometimes revealed with almost astonishing frankness.
Sometimes it is put in less offensive forms by emphasizing that to be ruled is just what the masses wish. Sometimes the necessity to flatter the masses and therefore to hide the cynical contempt for them leads to tricks like the following: In speaking of the instinct of self-preservation, with the drive for power.
While the “leaders” are the ones to enjoy power in the first place, the masses are by no means deprived of sadistic satisfaction.
The instinct of self-preservation leads to the fight of the stronger for the domination of the weaker and economically, eventually, to the survival of the fittest.
The history of mankind is the history of growing individuation, but it is also the history of growing freedom.
The quest for freedom is not a metaphysical force and cannot be explained by natural law; it is the necessary result of the process of individuation and of the growth of the culture. The authoritarian systems cannot do away with the basic conditions that make for the quest for freedom; neither can they exterminate the quest for freedom that springs from these conditions.?