Reading Notes on Erich Fromm's "Escape from Freedom"
Table of Contents
What Started This
Lately I’ve been messing around with Home Assistant and built the Noelle system (named after Noelle, the Genshin Impact character), which manages my daily life with an iron fist.
But when I stopped to think about it, building this system at this particular moment felt strangely, almost profoundly meaningful.
The essay video I finished at the end of October quoted Kant and Barbatos, and arrived at the conclusion “I want to be a traveler.” And yet what I actually did was build a system inside my own home to monitor myself. That seems like the complete opposite of the whole idea of a “traveler.”
What on earth is going on?
December 12. I was at a year-end party with friends, talking about shallow stuff and deep stuff, and I felt that “maybe I’m tired of freedom.” And suddenly I remembered that there’s a book called Escape from Freedom.
Honestly, I only knew the title, but maybe it had something interesting in it.
…So I read it, and it turned out to be a certified masterpiece, one of those life-changing books.
Summary
In this article I’ll put together my own interpretation. If you want an objectively correct summary, ask Gemini, that should do it.
What Is Freedom?
There are two kinds of freedom: negative freedom and positive freedom.
Negative Freedom
Freedom from something. Think “freedom from fear and want…” and so on. Since the Middle Ages, humans have managed to win this kind of freedom.
Positive Freedom
Freedom to do something. The lack of this is what sends modern society and modern people off in a weird direction.
What exactly it is comes later.
The Flow of History
Up through the Middle Ages, humans were connected to society by “primary ties.” In other words, the individual was pinned in place inside God or some powerful social system. The differences in hierarchy were impossible to shake, and there was no individual freedom (or rather, no concept of the individual to begin with). In a sense, you could live out your whole life inside the existing social system without thinking about anything.
But then came a process in which the Reformation brought down the authority of the established church and the Enlightenment brought down the authority of religion, and humans gained negative freedom while losing their primary ties at the same time. This is where the unhappiness of modern people begins.
The Three Mechanisms of Escape
Fromm lists the following three mechanisms of escape.
Authoritarianism
Trying to fuse with another person. A craving for symbiosis.
…but put like that, it’s way too hard to follow. Let me break it down a bit. Authoritarianism is the idea that sadism and masochism have in common.
Sadism is the movement of the mind that tries to crush the other person and absorb them into oneself, and masochism is the movement of the mind that tries to crush oneself and be absorbed into the other person. The outcomes are at opposite extremes, but either way the common point is “trying to become one with the other.”
Why Is This Bad?
Because with sadism you wipe out the other person, and with masochism you wipe out yourself. Real human relationships shouldn’t be like that. You have to respect both yourself and the other person.
Note: Rational and Irrational Authority
Fromm isn’t saying that all authority is bad. There’s obviously authority in the relationship between a teacher and a student, but depending on the case it may be good authority or bad authority.
Good authority is called rational authority, and bad authority is called irrational authority. The difference is that rational authority ultimately works toward its own disappearance, while irrational authority works toward its own expansion.
For example, in a teacher-student relationship based on rational authority, the teacher wants the student to grow. The final goal is for the student to absorb all of the teacher’s knowledge and surpass them, and in that sense the teacher’s authority itself disappears.
In a teacher-student relationship based on irrational authority, on the other hand, the teacher forces their ideas on the student. Or they don’t allow the student to question the teacher’s teachings. In a case like this, the authority doesn’t disappear; it heads toward expansion.
Destructiveness
An impulse that arises when the “unlived life” rots.
This is easier to understand if you start from Freud’s theory. Freud split the fundamental human drives into two: libido (the drive toward life/sex) and Thanatos (the drive toward death/destruction).
Fromm, however, thought that Thanatos is only secondary: living things have a drive toward life, growth and creation, and when that gets thwarted, it turns into a drive toward death.
The Kyoto Animation arson attack, where a man who couldn’t become an animator set fire to an animation studio, looks like a textbook example of exactly this.
That said, destructiveness isn’t necessarily aimed at the people who managed to live out the “unlived life” the destroyer couldn’t. It might turn into an indiscriminate stabbing spree, or it might turn into self-harm. I feel like most of the “invincible man” (muteki no hito, a person with nothing left to lose) type of crimes can be explained this way.
The essence of destructiveness is this: originally they wanted to influence society in the direction of life and creation, but when that got thwarted, destruction became the only way left to connect with society. Whether it’s self-harm or harming others, you can’t call it creative activity by any stretch, but at least it lets you announce your existence to society and temporarily dissolve your loneliness in a pseudo way.
Why Is This Bad?
Needless to say, because the energy of action should be directed toward creation, not destruction.
Automaton Conformity
Internalizing a social character and losing track of your own thoughts, will and feelings. A state like being hypnotized.
A small-scale example: you watch a movie and think “meh,” but the reviews are raving about it, so you end up revising your own impression. A more abstract example: “you must be punctual” or “you must have a job” may be nothing more than a social character demanded by capitalist society, and you may simply have internalized it.
Why Is This Bad?
Because turning into an automaton may indeed let you get along fine in society, but it doesn’t directly solve what the real you wanted. As a counterfeit “primary tie,” it may work on the surface to ease the loneliness, but an “unlived life” starts forming somewhere out of your awareness, and you end up storing up destructiveness.
This may be the form of escape that the vast majority of modern people are most prone to.
Why Did Hitler Catch On?
With the concepts so far, the spread of Nazism can be explained beautifully.
Nazism was passionately supported especially by the lower middle class. Why? First, they had a strong tendency to love the strong and hate the weak. In other words, they had an authoritarian character.
But amid the economic chaos after World War I, their position became precarious. The Kaiser and the traditional authorities they used to love lost their power, and they faced the risk of being overtaken by the proletariat they’d been looking down on.
To them, Hitler offered a counterfeit “primary tie” in the form of “the purity of the Aryan race,” and turned them into automatons.
Next, Hitler offered a new authority. That is, he presented the destiny of the Aryan race and Hitler himself as an absolute irrational authority, and other nations and the Jews as objects to look down on. And as an outlet for their destructiveness, he plotted world conquest.
So What Do We Do?
As stated at the beginning, Escape from Freedom is mainly a diagnosis and wasn’t written to provide a prescription. Apparently those are covered in Fromm’s later works, but you can still pull out some solutions from Escape from Freedom itself.
Basically, you should consciously avoid the three mechanisms of escape above.
- Don’t turn into an automaton
- Don’t lose your genuine thoughts/will/feelings
- Don’t destroy
- Pour your energy into creative activity
- Don’t yield to irrational authority
- Instead of wiping out yourself or others, keep the boundaries of your ego intact and relate as equals
When you achieve these, a human being can keep an independent self without feeling isolated from the world, and win genuine “positive freedom.”
(Abridged, paraphrased.) What matters is the activity itself, the process rather than the result. Our culture has it exactly backwards: we produce for the abstract goal of selling, not for concrete satisfaction, and we treat even our personal qualities and efforts as commodities to be traded for money, prestige and power. So we miss the only satisfaction that can give real happiness, the experience of the activity in the present moment, and chase an illusion, “success,” that disappoints the instant we think we’ve caught it.
(Abridged, paraphrased.) When an individual realizes himself through spontaneous activity and so relates himself to the world, he stops being an isolated atom, and his doubts about himself and the meaning of life vanish. Living neither compulsively nor automatically, he recognizes that there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
The Answer to “What Started This”
Escape from Freedom also gave me a perfect answer to what had happened to my mind. To put it grandly, it seems I lived through several hundred years of history, from the Middle Ages to the modern era, in a single year.
Until a year ago, you could say I was connected to society through a primary tie called “Nilou” (or rather, a symbiotic relationship as a substitute for one). After I lost it, I had no choice but to start up the mechanisms of escape.
I internalized Kantian deontology without properly integrating it into myself, and the result was a structure in which my self and deontology were at odds. That led me into masochism toward the internalized authority, and I pushed forward with becoming an automaton by throwing myself into work and obsessing over health. Then the unlived life was converted into destructiveness, and I ran toward turning the internalized authority into an external device: the strict management by Noelle, and self-harm.
Conclusion
As expected, the Wind God was right.
Traveler, as you set off on your journey once again, you must remember that the journey itself has meaning.
The birds of Teyvat, the songs and the cities, the Tsaritsa, her Fatui and the monsters… they are all part of your journey.
The destination is not everything. So before you reach the end, keep your eyes open. Use the chance to take in the world around you…
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Notes on games, radio and technology, translated from the Japanese blog.