"Escaping Freedom, 85 Years On": An essay by Martina Valković (Keywords: Belonging; Anxiety;Individuality;Authoritarianism; Security;Solidarity)

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This is the first essay in a new intermittent, online-only series called "Provocations" — short pieces meant to raise challenging, open-ended questions about our contemporary moment.

In Escape from Freedom, published in 1941 in the US, Erich Fromm explored the tension between our need to be free and independent and our need for belonging and security [1]. In the book, he distinguishes between negative freedom, or freedom from, and positive freedom, or freedom to, the latter of which enables us to fully develop our potential as individuals. Now, 85 years on, it is a good time to revisit it, not so much for the psychoanalytic elements of the theory put forward, as for its insights into the socio-political circumstances of the time of its writing which in many ways parallel our own historical moment.

While we each have an urge to develop into and live as a free being, according to Fromm this freedom does not come without cost. At the very beginning of our quest for freedom, we are required to break from what Fromm terms our primary ties: our bonds with family and other loved ones. Indeed, freedom can quickly become a burden – with it comes responsibility, insecurity, and isolation. When we are free to act, we are responsible for our actions and their consequences, which raises new questions for us of how to act. In contrast, when we do what we are told – or do that which is required or expected of us – we can try to convince ourselves that we are not actually free to act and that, therefore, we do not bear responsibility for our actions and their consequences.

Freedom can quickly become a burden – with it comes responsibility, insecurity, and isolation.

Fromm thus posits that alongside our urge for freedom there coexists an instinctive desire for submission. While growing physically, emotionally, and mentally stronger, we may also feel increasingly more alone and separated from a world that can appear overwhelming and threatening. This is often when the impulse to give up one’s own individuality and freedom arises as an attempt to overcome the feeling of being alone and powerless. By submitting oneself to an external authority, we sacrifice freedom for security, with personal integrity and strength as the price.

One way to understand this is by imagining the comfort of childhood: of being parented and controlled while also cared for; bossed around and punished, but at the same time provided for and protected. When the burden of freedom gets too crushing; when the dread of isolation and feelings of insignificance grow too strong, we may fantasize about a return to structures and rules reminiscent of childhood. However, once these primary bonds with others are severed, they cannot be repaired or recouped (“once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it” p.30). Freedom requires that we re-orient ourselves in the world and find security in new ways.

Thankfully, Fromm points to another way to overcome anxiety and isolation. The only productive way in which individualized people can relate to the world, Fromm claims, is through active solidarity with others, through love and work which reunites them with the world as free and independent individuals. However, if circumstances—political, economic, social—do not provide a basis for this kind of human realization, while at the same time people have lost their feelings of security and connection, freedom becomes an unbearable burden. It is at this conjuncture of social circumstances and personal development that a desire to escape can grow stronger, compelling a flight into submission or another kind of relation promising relief from uncertainty.

When the burden of freedom gets too crushing; when the dread of isolation and feelings of insignificance grow too strong, we may fantasize about a return to structures and rules reminiscent of childhood.

How does this relate to the world of today? Today, economic and social insecurity is widespread, as is a lack of community, belonging, and rootedness – despite, and even because of, many online “communities.” Many of us experience intense anxiety in response to our rapidly changing and challenging world. In his writing on the Reformation and its consequences, Fromm notes that:

a vast sector of the population was threatened in its traditional way of life by revolutionary changes in the economic and social organisation; especially was the middle class (…) threatened by the power of monopolies and the superior strength of capital, and this threat had an important effect on the spirit and the ideology of the threatened sector of society by enhancing the individual’s feeling of aloneness and insignificance. (p.32).

We too face revolutionary changes in economic and social organization, from the disruption of AI to the rise of new authoritarianism and fascism, not to mention the power of monopolies and capital. Is it a long shot to suspect that these circumstances may lead some people to try to “escape their freedom” by losing themselves in the MAGA, Reform, or the AfD movements, or another local equivalent thereof? Fromm adds, writing of the time of Reformation, but in words that could equally be written today: “The idea of efficiency assumed the role of one of the highest moral virtues. At the same time, the desire for wealth and material success became the all-absorbing passion” (p.50). Capital came to determine the economic, and thereby one’s personal fate; competition came to rule our social world. Such highly unpredictable, insecure, tense, and harsh circumstances will inevitably lead many to experience feelings of isolation and anxiety. The sharp focus on competition and wealth accumulation over cooperation and mutual support also make forging solidarity very difficult, further alienating individuals and strengthening the desire to escape.

If we cannot even adequately conceptualise and talk about the situation in which we are in, what hope is there to act autonomously so that we might change it?

In another parallel with our own time, Fromm notes the abuse of language that was widespread during the WWII era:

Never have words been more misused in order to conceal the truth than to-day. Betrayal of allies is called appeasement, military aggression is camouflaged as defence against attack, the conquest of small nations goes by the name of a pact of friendship, and the brutal suppression of the whole population is perpetrated in the name of National Socialism. The words democracy, freedom, and individualism become objects of this abuse, too… Democracy is a system that creates the economic, political, and cultural conditions for the full development of the individual. Fascism is the system that… makes the individual subordinate to extraneous purposes and weakens the development of genuine individuality. (p.236).

In our time, we can note similar abuses of language. Next to the already mentioned “online communities” of people who have never even shared a physical space, we observe calls for taking away liberties referred to as “free speech”; illegal abductions and deportations called “border control”; mobster-style ganging up on (former?) allies explained as “demand for respect”; and innocent citizens labelled “domestic terrorists” and “professional agitators” as they are liquidated in broad daylight. And what about the violation of the borders of and waging a brutal war on a sovereign country being called a “special military operation” and attempts to pillage countries of their natural resources referred to as “deals”? This abuse of language has a function: it is a deception that prevents the development of freedom and the individual by concealing the truth of the situation. If we cannot even adequately conceptualise and talk about the situation in which we are in, what hope is there to act autonomously so that we might change it?

Equally so, it is difficult to read the following without it bringing to mind the current American and Russian administrations, among others: “the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.” (p.139). But, unlike Fromm and others in 1941, we have an advantage: we know that solidarity can overcome brutality, as light follows dark and spring follows winter. Perhaps, with a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck, we will avoid the return into the darkest of the dark times and will emerge blinking from our own dark age, into the sunshine.

[1] The book was subsequently published in 1942 in the UK with the title The Fear of Freedom. All page references in this article are to this edition.

Martina Valković is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Milan, Italy. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. Her PhD research centred around the ontological and methodological assumptions of cultural evolutionary theories and their problematic social and political implications. She is especially interested in democracy and the relation between it and science.

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