Escape from Freedom

In nineteen forty-one, a psychoanalyst named Erich Fromm published a book that asked one of the most unsettling questions a person can sit with.

The book was called Escape from Freedom, and the question was this: Why do people so often flee the very freedom they claim to want? It was not an academic exercise.

It was not the kind of question that belongs only in lecture halls or philosophical journals.

It was born from watching the world come apart.

Something deeper was at work, something in the very structure of the human relationship with freedom.

And he was determined to understand what it was.

Escape from Freedom, his first major book, grew directly from this urgent need to understand.

It was not written from a position of detached scholarship.

So that's the first kind of underlying temperament I see.

And then the second important underlying factor comes from the biologist Mark Lewis, who wrote a couple of great books.

The one that I'm thinking of is called The Biology of Desire.

And in this book, he pointed out that in the vast majority of humans...

So if you have this kind of temperament and you've got one addiction that is negative, trade up addictions.

Okay.

I'll probably go from being addicted to writing books to addicted to bonsai trees.

Sometimes in the next 15 years, that'll be a trade up.

So they ran toward the one thing that promised to make the pain stop.

In 1941, social theorist Eric Fromm at Columbia University published Escape from Freedom.

After watching an entire civilization surrender its freedom to an authoritarian leader, Fromm found something nobody expected.

People weren't forced into authoritarianism.

They ran toward authoritarianism.

They wanted it.

He called it the escape from freedom.

The escape from freedom is when the pain of isolation becomes so unbearable that people surrender their judgment to whoever promises to take that pain away.

I think it drives us crazy.

I'm very influenced by someone like Eric Fromm, who wrote the insanely important book, Escape from Freedom.

It was called Fear of Freedom in Europe.

all about the ways that we try desperately to hand that back over to God or to something else.

For our listeners who don't know, uh, Erich Fromm was, um, the great Marxist psychoanalytic theorist, um, author of The Authoritarian, uh, Personality, uh, and then...

Or sorry, Escape from Freedom.

Authoritarian Personality is the, uh, Adorno book.

Uh, Escape from Freedom, uh, The Art of Loving, uh, and, uh, The Sane Society, right? And, uh, Fromm always considered himself more of a Marxist than a Freudian.

Uh, in The Sane Society, he points out how, um, you know, Marx was a theorist who's just levels beyond Freud.

Uh, that said, he is somewhat critical of exactly the kind of Marxist instincts you're talking about to assume that, well, under the right social conditions, all these kind of, uh, vulgarities and perversities are just going to disappear.

But also, um, because it's composed of individuals, but at the same time, um, the individual endeavors and, and, and, and, and, and, and individual decisions need to be made with recourse to the community because we can't negate the community in the end.

And incidentally, you mentioned feudalism before.

And he wrote two books that are both really good, and I would encourage people to check them out.

The first one was called Escape from Freedom, and then he had another one, which is one that you cite more in yours, called The Art of Loving.

But they both really deal with very similar topics.

Yeah.

And when we want to know ourselves, a big part of why we want to know ourselves is a, what is triggering love feelings within us, but B, how can we sustain better loving relationships with others? And I think knowing yourself is really crucial to that because one of the biggest obstacles to, for most people, And engaging in meaningful, healthy, loving relationships is their own shit, their own attachment issues, their anxieties, their tendencies for withdrawal, their inability to sort of hear and communicate with what other people are trying to tell them, their own neuroses kind of coming to the fore and presenting themselves as obstacles to actual meaningful connection.

Yeah, that's definitely, yeah, he does touch on that a lot.

And also the kind of political dynamic of that as well, which is not as much in The Art of Loving, but more in Escape from Freedom.

The idea that, you know, as awareness of self, there's something there.

I mentioned I've also been reading work from Eric Fromm.

I'm currently rereading Escape from Freedom.

It's been a long time since undergrad, since I've read anything from Fromm.

And his work also feels very aligned with this Knight of Pentacles right now because Fromm talks about the difference between having and being and the difference between kind of organizing our lives around possessions, which feels very Pentacles, or our status, consumerism, consumption, or different identities versus this actually kind of participating in the experience of being a human.