Erich Fromm

Fromm answers a question the rest of this site mostly leaves open: not how control is imposed, but why so many people want it.

Modern freedom cut people loose from the ties that told them who they were. It delivered independence and, with it, isolation and powerlessness. Many will trade the first back to be rid of the second.

The trade

Fromm wrote in exile, trying to explain how a modern, literate, industrial society had produced mass enthusiasm for its own subjugation. His answer was that freedom has two components that arrive together and are not experienced alike.

Freedom from external authority is gain. Freedom as being alone with your own choices, in a society that has dissolved the guilds, the church, the fixed station and the settled village, is a burden. He called the reaction the fear of freedom, and identified three routes out of it: authoritarian submission, destructiveness, and automaton conformity, where you simply become what is expected and stop noticing you have done it.

The third is the one he thought applied to democracies.

Sadism as weakness

In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973) he sharpened the point that matters here. Sadism, for Fromm, is the transformation of impotence into the experience of omnipotence. The need to have absolute power over another person is what appears when the capacity to produce, relate or create has failed.

That is the psychological statement of something this site argues structurally: control is what gets installed where something else did not hold.

Read alongside

Adler has the individual version, written earlier. Paulo Freire reaches the same fear of freedom from the other direction, arguing that the oppressed resist liberation because it means giving up a known identity. Havel shows what the conformist route looks like when a whole society takes it.

Serious objections

• The argument is interpretive rather than empirical. Fromm offers a reading of history and character, not evidence that could distinguish his account from a rival one.
• It risks explaining political outcomes by psychology, which underweights the material and institutional causes that a large literature treats as primary.
• The Authoritarian Personality research that grew from this milieu was heavily criticized on methodological grounds, and some of that criticism reaches back to the ideas underneath it.
• Automaton conformity is hard to test and easy to apply to anyone you disagree with.