What I think
I think Escape from Freedom is one of the most fascinating books that exists. It’s a fascinating book written at a fascinating time: 1941, as the world was breaking out into chaos.
Why it’s interesting:
- It breaks freedom down into two interesting categories
- It puts into context that freedom from absolute oppression is new
- It was written at an interesting time
- Positive freedom is still relatively rare
I’ve grown fond of Fromm’s conception of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. In order to thrive, people need to find something positive, a connection to work, community, and people. But positive freedom is not really something that gets anyone fired up. There’s no political vision for it, and it’s really hard and disorienting to actually do.
This book shaped The Pathless Path. Before I left my job, I was exploring my creativity but did not feel the deeper connectedness that Fromm wrote about. I was convinced that escaping my job was the most important thing I had to do. However, soon after achieving the “freedom from” traditional employment, I discovered the vastness and challenge of developing a positive side of freedom.
The pathless path is the deliberate pursuit of a positive version of freedom. In my interpretation, positive freedom is about leaning fully into your own genuine path and the things that you actually want to be doing, in a sustainable, life-giving way.
I talked about the book as a guest on the Made You Think podcast with Nat Eliason and Neil Soni. You’ll likely enjoy it if you are on an unconventional path or like interesting books. It pairs well with Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
What the book is about
Writing at the start of World War II, Fromm asks why millions of people who had just won their freedom were so eager to hand it to dictators. His answer is that modern freedom has two sides. People have been freed from the old authorities of church, class, and community, but that freedom left them isolated and anxious. Unless they develop a positive freedom of their own, through love, work, and spontaneous activity, they escape it by submitting to leaders, destroying things, or simply conforming.
Highlights
Two kinds of freedom
They cannot go on bearing the burden of “freedom from”; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom.
my take
Over the course of history, humans have been released from oppressive forces. This is “freedom from” oppression, and for the most part, much of our modern world still thinks about freedom through this lens. We think about the “freedom to” wear or not wear masks, or be a dick, but that’s not really it.
It is covered over by the daily routine of his activities, by the assurance and approval he finds in his private or social relations, by success in business, by any number of distractions, by “having fun,” “making contacts,” “going places.” But whistling in the dark does not bring light.
Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual’s potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously.
We have been compelled to recognize that millions in Germany were as eager to surrender their freedom as their fathers were to fight for it;
Work as an end in itself
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.
my take
Following the Reformation, work as an end in itself was no longer a crazy idea. People traded one master, the Catholic Church, for another, their vocation. But along with greater freedom and self-determination came the anxiety and insecurity of never really knowing if you were working hard enough or doing the right thing.
This kind of effort and activity is not the result of inner strength and self-confidence; it is a desperate escape from anxiety.
What was new in modern society was that men came to be driven to work not so much by external pressure but by an internal compulsion, which made them work as only a very strict master could have made people do in other societies.
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
my take
As our economy shifts from an industrial to a technological one, it will shape what people think about work.
Conformity
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.
my take
Fromm argued the pressures were higher in the West because we don’t have strong roles to fall into. We constantly are looking at what other people do.
Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a certain political question. He will give you as “his” opinion a more or less exact account of what he has read, and yet—and this is the essential point—he believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking.
It seems that nothing is more difficult for the average man to bear than the feeling of not being identified with a larger group.
The less he felt he was being somebody the more he needed to have possessions.
Knowing what we want
All our energy is spent for the purpose of getting what we want, and most people never question the premise of this activity: that they know their true wants.
modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.
he tries to achieve the aims which are supposed to be “his”; but he is deeply afraid of taking the risk and the responsibility of giving himself his own aims.
Power and destructiveness
The word power has a twofold meaning. One is the possession of power over somebody, the ability to dominate him; the other meaning is the possession of power to do something, to be able, to be potent.
my take
You can arrive at power from a sense of lack or a sense of positive freedom.
But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness.
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.
The way through
Work is the other component; not work as a compulsive activity in order to escape aloneness, … but work as creation in which man becomes one with nature in the act of creation.
my take
In addition to doing something challenging, “finding the others,” or discovering a different kind of work you enjoy, you might also find a mode of being that opens you up to a deeper relationship with the world and yourself. In this way, the creative act is one of the most sacred things in the world and should be taken seriously in itself and not with any expected outcome.
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.
Thereby man misses the only satisfaction that can give him real happiness—the experience of the activity of the present moment—and chases after a phantom that leaves him disappointed as soon as he believes he has caught it—the illusory happiness called success.
Man does not suffer so much from poverty today as he suffers from the fact that he has become a cog in a large machine, an automaton, that his life has become empty and lost its meaning.