ERICH FROMM REDUX

With the menace of authoritarianism looming and the irrational flourishing in American society, we can look to the venerable social-psychologist Erich Fromm for an explanation as to how and why.

 

I suspect I am not alone in walking around with an internal sense of dread. From conversing with friends and others, I know that my current distress is commonplace. I live in two worlds. I go through my daily routines driven by the purposes that attend to them. This world is familiar and normal. Yet the dread so noted bespeaks a different reality. We fiddle while Rome burns. We live under a sword of Damocles. I envision the familiar motif of science fiction films wherein a stray asteroid is on a collision course with Earth, anxiously bringing anticipated doom. 

Choose whatever metaphor you wish. As time inexorably moves forward, the November elections will soon arrive, and with them we may well experience the death of the American experiment, and the freedom, creativity, vitality, and, yes, progress, it has enabled. It will not be life as we have known it. It is a reality too momentous to take in. As we fret, we bide our time.

I continue to read a great deal about our current socio-political condition. There is an avalanche of books, articles, and learned and thoughtful opinion, as to the sources of our malaise and how democracies die. The focal point is Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement is characterized not only by its extremism but by its negation of realities identified with normative human functioning. Some of the appeal of Trumpism, however destructive, is explicable. But elements elude my understanding. Most salient is how tens of millions of Americans have ostensibly lost their minds, and how facts, reality, and logical consistency make no difference in what millions of people are willing to believe. Unbelievable conspiracy theories abound. From all I have read, few pundits have addressed the issue of pandemic irrationality head-on.

In my loss of comprehension, I turn to a venerable source, the social psychologist Erich Fromm. Fromm's thought is experiencing a revival in academic circles, a phenomenon I welcome in that his ideas served as the scaffolding which, as an adolescent who had a very painful childhood, I used to construct my adult life. In my teens, I devoured all of his popular writings and they became the basis of my life philosophy. Though I have moved beyond Fromm's thinking in a good number of particulars, I retain to this day his humanistic values and his vision of human purposes. I also think his psychology can be applied to our current condition and helps to explain to a useful degree the excesses of our political moment. A summary of Fromm's relevant ideas is in order.

Fromm was of German-Jewish origin. He was born in 1900 and fled the Nazi regime in the early1930s. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which included such intellectual luminaries as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Nazism caused the Frankfurt Institute to relocate, and Fromm brought it with him to Columbia University.

Fromm was a psychoanalyst who reconstructed Freudian thought in a more social direction. While Freud can be construed as rooting character in biological instincts, most centrally sex and aggression, Fromm developed the notion of “social character” to explain the source of what shapes human beings. Social character is a somewhat vague concept, but it is more open-ended than Freud lodging human drives in the libido. By contrast, Fromm continuously maintained that, in molding individual personality, humans are social beings whose lives are formed in relation to the culture of which they are a part and its social structures.

While Fromm was capable of academic erudition, he concluded that the urgency of the times required that he reach a mass audience. As a result, he wrote in an accessible and very engaging style. In his day, Fromm became one of America's most noted public intellectuals and was immensely popular. His books sold millions of copies, with the most popular, The Art of Loving, topping the list with more than 25 million sales. His books have been translated into many languages. 

Fromm was a self-identified humanist and a democratic socialist who analyzed and critiqued the impact of corporate power, excessive materialism, and consumerism on the state of society and the psyches, emotional adjustment, and happiness of individuals. His thought was captivating and compelling, and he paved the way for social critics such as David Riesman, Vance Packard, and C. Wright Mills. I also see Fromm as a precursor of the humanistic psychology movement and an influence on the New Left of the 1960s.

Here, in outline, is a summary of Fromm's social psychology as it pertains to the crisis of moment: Fromm asserted that human beings grow naturally in the direction of unfolding their potentialities to their fullest extent. In short, Fromm identifies human flourishing as the ultimate end and purpose of a human life. In this sense, one can trace the origins of this idea to Aristotle's ethics. In his text, Man for Himself, Fromm states the following:

“'To be alive' is a dynamic, not a static, concept. Existence and the unfolding of specific powers of an organism are one and the same. All organisms have an inherent tendency to actualize their specific potentialities. The aim of a man's life, therefore, is to be understood as the unfolding of his powers according to the laws of his nature.”

“Man, however, does not exist 'in general.' While sharing the core of human qualities with all members of his species, he is always an individual, a unique entity, different from everybody else... He can affirm his individual potentialities only by realizing his individuality. The duty to be alive is the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.” Fromm identifies the successful unfolding of potentialities with what he refers to as the productive character orientation, and for him it's the basis for happiness and implicitly prefigures the ideal human type. For Fromm, living is an art, and in a beautiful metaphor he notes, “In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble, the physician, the patient.”

The human being partakes of a two-fold existence, he or she is both social and, at the same time, burdened with the task of becoming an individual. Existentially, Fromm notes,

“Man is alone and he is related at the same time. He is alone as much as he is a unique entity, not identical with anyone else, and aware of himself as a separate entity. He must be alone when he has to judge or make decisions solely by the power of his reason. And yet he cannot bear to be alone, to be unrelated to his fellow men. His happiness depends on his solidarity he feels with his fellow men...”

This perception, I believe, at least partially explains our current circumstances. It is the reality of aloneness that is the pivotal driver. It is Fromm's observation that to be alone, to be utterly separated from others, is a major source of anxiety. And anxiety is a condition that is overwhelmingly intolerable. As such, it drives a person inexorably to flee from it. 

While modern persons strive for freedom, they also confront freedom as a problem. Fromm accepts the historical reality that freedom – and its attendant psychological problems – emerged in the modern period as society evolved from the Middle Ages to valorize the place of the individual within liberal democratic political structures. Existentially, the modern condition confronts each person with a choice as to how he or she will psychologically develop. People can strive to unfold their human potentials in the direction of developing a productive character orientation. This includes fostering, as greatly as possible, the capacities for reason, love and self-love, creativity, and the ability to experience joy in the processes of living. Or, one can retreat and form one's character structure by embedding oneself in larger environments that provide comfort and security at the cost of building a productive character orientation and healthier social relations. Again, these life choices are impelled by the need to escape the condition of freedom, aloneness, and the resultant anxiety.

Fromm's social psychology is greatly devoted to describing the dynamics of various modes of escape, how they are formed, and how they play out in the lives of people. This pivotal dynamic lies at the center of Fromm's most important book, Escape from Freedom, published in 1941. 

While Fromm delineates a range of modes of escape in considerable detail, several are most salient. These include “authoritarianism,” which may yield “sadomasochism” and “destructiveness,” as well as what Fromm terms “automaton conformity.” Clearly, the emergence of Fascism and Nazism is foremost in his mind. But Fromm extends his psychology to focus on contemporary America and the effects of corporate capitalism in the molding of the social character of persons in the environment most familiar to us.

In brief, the power of Nazism could be psychologically explained through the adaptation of authoritarianism melded with sadomasochism and destructiveness. In the authoritarian scenario, the individual escapes freedom by submitting to a greater authority. This submission is not merely an acceptance of the authority's ideas and dictates, but involves a process of internalization into one's conscience of the will and dictates of the authority. As Fromm explains, this often involves the projection onto the authority of a belief that he represents an ideal type. Describing the authoritarian personality, Fromm notes, “He admires authority and tends to submit to it. But at the same time, he wants to be an authority himself and have others submit to him.” Within the Nazi experience, authoritarianism produces sadomasochistic character orientations. It evinced followers of the regime who submitted to their “superiors” in what they believed was a noble cause while partaking in the destruction of their “inferiors.” Since life is governed by forces outside the self, there could be no conception of equality or of universal human solidarity, only that of superiors and inferiors. 

Fromm uses authoritarianism and the incumbent sadomasochistic orientation to analyze Nazism and Fascism as it relates to his concept of group narcissism. The group can absorb individual identity, and in doing so, fill the need for identity and uniformity of identities that stand in opposition to Fromm's humanistic notion of the productive and flourishing individual. Explaining group narcissism, in his book The Anatomy of Destructiveness, Fromm notes the following:

“Group narcissism has important functions. In the first place, it furthers the solidarity and cohesion of the group and makes manipulation easier by appealing to narcissistic prejudices. Secondly, it is extremely important as an element giving satisfaction to the members of the group and particularly those who have few other reasons to feel proud and worthwhile...There is compensation for one's miserable condition in feeling 'I am part of the most wonderful group in the world.'...Consequently, the degree of group narcissism is commensurate with the lack of real satisfaction.”

The Frommian paradigm is picked up and expanded by political scientist Michael Thompson in his recent book The Twilight of the Self: The Decline of the Individual in Late Capitalism, a text I had reviewed in a previous essay. With regard to the dynamics of group narcissism, Thompson writes,

“Relations cease to be based on empathy for others and are replaced by relations of exclusion and narcissistic empathy; having concern for others because they are, in some sense, like you, thereby increasing the self's absorption into the group identity, enhancing the feeling of security, from external threat or of any form of external critical engagement. It is no small wonder that the spread of cults (religious or secular) and conspiracy theories of all stripes and political persuasions have sprouted in recent decades.” Reflecting Fromm's thesis that group narcissism as a method of escape derived from the intolerability of being disconnected from productive relations, Thompson concludes that it serves as a “compensatory device for the withered self.

Both Fromm and Thompson provide us with explanations for the rampant tribalism that infects American society as well as the divisiveness it has fostered. Admittedly neither Erich Fromm nor Michael Thompson provide a penetrating analysis specifically targeting an explanation for the flourishing of irrationalism in society in the current moment. But they do elucidate compelling explanations for the larger social and economic forces that enable it to take hold. For Fromm, as noted, the primary driver is the fear of freedom and the intolerable social isolation it causes. This leads to regressive mechanisms of escape. For Thompson, the consequences of late capitalism have generated the fading of personal autonomy and agency, which has eroded the individual's capacity to engage in critical thinking and critique the larger society which holds sway over his life and, as suggested, the withering self. No doubt, Fromm would recognize agency and the ability to engage in independent critical thinking as attributes of the productive character orientation that he sees as constitutive of human flourishing.

This brings us back to Fromm and a third such mechanism. While Fromm was writing Escape from Freedom against the background of Nazism, he clearly wanted to apply his analysis to the mid-century democracies and the United States in particular. In addition to sadomasochism, destructiveness, and the authoritarian character orientation, Fromm develops an analysis of what he terms automaton conformity. It is the psychological state of the mass man. Monopoly capitalism has forced individuals to become associated with large, impersonal organizations necessary for their survival. This transforms human beings into impersonal cogs of a larger system by which they are shaped but that lies beyond their grasp. It leads to automaton conformity in which much of what the contemporary person “thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says.” Drawing from the early writings of Karl Marx, Fromm saw the modern plight as one of extreme alienation in which the worker, and the citizenry as a whole, had diminished control over their lives. It rendered people small and their lives inconsequential, transforming people into pseudo-selves “who had evolved into a reflex of other people's expectations of him.” In addition, frenetic consumerism, inherent in capitalist production, increasingly measures people by what they acquire rather than what they are, as reflected in the development of a productive character orientation. 

We can see the human condition as described by Erich Fromm as laying the groundwork for conformity, and retreat of autonomy, mutually enriching social relations and thereby rendering the populace vulnerable to demagoguery and political tyranny.

I note, again, that the agent that drives individuals to seek larger encompassing affiliations is the need to overcome anxiety-producing feelings of being alone and isolated. Does this analysis comport with our contemporary malaise and its political challenges? Is it relevant to contemporary conditions? I believe so.

One can conjecture that at the bottom of the MAGA movement, its anger and extremism is the destruction of productive human relations. On the most manifest level, it is well known that American society is suffering from a plague of loneliness. Organizational life and institutions --- from local clubs, neighborhood associations, and churches, to marriage --- are breaking down. Social media cannot fill those bonds, and may conversely be aggravating feelings of loneliness. Increasingly Americans are unaffiliated and alone. 

At a deeper level, the anchorages of society, which have enabled people's environments to feel familiar, are changing and slipping away. All people seek to feel at home in their world. But this sense of security is being upended. American society is demographically changing. With those changes come new and different ethnicities and cultures, leaving white Americans feeling estranged and bereft in a nation that they long considered their own. Government institutions and administrations are felt as imperious, out of reach, and greatly unresponsive. And life, especially with the omnipresence of digital technologies, confronts the individual as confusing and bewilderingly complex. So-called elites, with their college-educated prestige, and who seem to be driving the culture, make an easy target for the anger of those feeling oppressed and left behind. And while economic circumstances have notably improved in the Biden administration, fixed living expenses loom large. Social climbing and the American dream are sputtering. In short, many feel cut off from the hopes and promises of a brighter, more manageable, and comfortable future. This, too, is a form of isolation. And so they seek out affiliation with others like themselves who nurse similar grievances and harbor no inhibitions at volatilely voicing their anger and resentment. Donald Trump is masterful at stoking this resentment and modeling for those so angered the acceptability of transgressive behavior.

A way beyond our current crisis needs to begin with critique and an alternative vision. Indeed, the vision folds back into the critique. The response to our times, I believe is the humanistic image of what people at their best can strive to become and the political foundations that can enable that image to be realized. I believe now, as I did in my adolescence, that Erich Fromm has provided that vision. 

It is the image of the human being unfolding her and his human potentials, not alone, but in active and productive engagement with others, and envisioning this process as the end and purpose of human existence. Among these potentials is the capacity for love and caring, reason and knowledge. Fromm summed up his creed by stating: “I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.”

There can be no doubt that democracy is the sole political system that can enable this realization of the fully actualized person. But our understanding of democracy needs to go far beyond the formal act of casting votes on delegated occasions, however essential this function is for democracy. Rather, democracy is a process far more intimate and personal. It is what the philosopher John Dewey understood as the lifestyle of a free people. It is something that Erich Fromm would assuredly have agreed with. We practice democracy when we are engaged with local civic organizations, in neighborhood campaigns joined with others in shared projects, when we work for the improvement of the education of our children, or on behalf of the welfare and rights of the disadvantaged. We act democratically when acting on our commitments in the service of the common good.

We need this commitment now, and we need to put it into practice as we move into the future. At the moment, we need to work with urgency to ensure that the elective outcome in November enables us to carry that vision forward into a progressive American future.