Erich Fromm And The Rise Of Fascism (Part 1)

There are a lot of people warning about Donald Trump’s presidency as mirroring Hitler’s rise to power. They point to the next elections as do or die for defeating this new Nazi scourge: if we don’t roll with the blue wave, all hope is lost.

 

Accompanying such talk are loose references to the Weimar Republic and hyper-inflation, but I haven’t heard anything that sounded like it came from an in-depth understanding of why the fascists came to power when and where they did. In the interest of better understanding what actually brought the Nazis to power and how to avoid such a thing in the present, I thought it a good idea to re-read Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm.

I do believe Erich Fromm had a unique position from which to comment on the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Born in Frankfurt Germany in 1900, he was young enough to witness the effects of the First World War to his country, although too young to serve. He was there to experience post-war Germany and the slow rise of the Nazi party until, as a Jew, he found it prudent to take a position in the United States in 1933. As someone who earned his doctorate in sociology and later became a practicing psychologist, I can think of nobody more qualified to diagnose the disease that is fascism and warn us of how we might prevent its occurrence elsewhere and in the future.

This is precisely what he did in 1941, when he wrote Escape From Freedom. He writes from the position of not only a sociologist, but as a psychologist, a German, and a member of the group most hated by the Nazis. This is why I strongly recommend reading this book if you are truly concerned about fascism rising here and now in our country. The most important thing you can do is educate yourself on the past if you do not wish to see its atrocities duplicated in the past.

But hey, I know a lot of you are really that interested in stopping a fascist takeover our country. I mean, you’ll get off your couch and go to vote. Which is better than what half of us will do. You’ll get on social media and express your opinions, of which you are quite certain. More importantly, you’ll call out anyone who disagrees with you as either active participants in or useful idiots for fascism. But when it comes to reading an old book that’s over 300 pages long of in-depth analysis of socio-economic trends and the psychological underpinnings of the appeal of authoritarian governments, well…you’ll let the people you vote for take care of that sort of thing. That’s what they’re paid for, right? You have a daytime job, and yoga classes, and luncheon appointments…

No worries, I’ve got you covered. I’ve read the whole book and highlighted the parts that appear to be relevant to the present time. While cliff notes are not the same as reading the actual text of Hamlet, there is yet something to be gained by them. Similarly, reading segments from Erich Fromm's book isn't going to be as good as immersing yourself in it, nonetheless, I feel it has value. Below I present you with excerpts from Escape From Freedom.

--At this crucial moment, however, a modicum of increased insight—objectivity—can make the difference between life and death for the human race. For this reason the development of a scientific and dynamic social psychology is of vital importance. Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.

--If we want to fight Fascism we must understand it. Wishful thinking will not help us. And reciting optimistic formulae will prove to be as inadequate and useless as the ritual of an Indian rain dance.”

--(Quote from John Dewey) “The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority. Discipline, uniformity, and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions.”

--’Freedom from’ is not identical with positive freedom, with ‘freedom to’. The emergence of man from nature is a long-drawn-out process: to a large extent he remains tied to the world from which he emerged; he remains part of nature—the soil he lives on, the sun and moon and stars, the trees and flowers, the animals, and the group of people with whom he is connected by the ties of blood.

--…if the economic, social and political conditions on which the whole process of human individuation depends, do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality …while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.”

--…the negative side of freedom, the burden which it puts upon man, is difficult to realize, especially for those whose heart is with the cause of freedom. Because in the fight for freedom in modern history the attention was focused upon combating old forms of authority and restraint, it was natural that one should feel that the more these traditional restraints were eliminated, the more freedom one had gained. We fail sufficiently to recognize, however, that although man has rid himself from old enemies of freedom, new enemies of a different nature have arisen: enemies which are not essentially external. We believe…that freedom of speech is the last step in the march of victory of freedom. We forget that, although freedom of speech constitutes and important victory in the battle against old restraints, modern man is in a position where much of what ‘he’ thinks and says are the things that everybody else thinks and says; that he has not acquired the ability to think originally—that is, for himself—which alone gives meaning to his claim that nobody can interfere with the expression of his thoughts. Again, we are proud that in his conduct of life man has become free from external authorities, which tell him what to do and what not to do. 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.

--We therefore are prone to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively that of gaining still more freedom of the kind we have gained in the course of modern history, and to believe that the defense of freedom against such powers that deny such freedom is all that is necessary. We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we do not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedoms, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.

--Once man was ready to become nothing but the means for the glory of a God who represented neither justice nor love, he was sufficiently prepared to accept the role of a servant to the economic machine—and eventually a “Fuhrer”.

--In any society the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are most powerful in that society. This is so partly because these groups have the power to control the educational system, schools, church, press, theater, and thereby to imbue the whole population with their own ideas; furthermore, these powerful groups carry so much prestige that the lower classes are more than ready to accept and imitate their values and to identify themselves psychologically.

--While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self—intellect and will—to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.

--But although man has reached a remarkable degree of mastery of nature, society is not in control of the very forces it has created. The rationality of the system of production, in its technical aspects, is accompanied by the irrationality of our system of production in its social aspects. Economic crises, unemployment war, govern man’s fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the product of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down whom he tries to placate or to manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the center of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt toward God.

--The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality. In all social and personal relations the laws of the market are the rule.

--The word “employer” contains the whole story: the owner of capital employs another human being as he “employs” a machine. They both use each other for the pursuit of their economic interests. It is not a relationship of two human beings who have any interest in the other outside of this mutual usefulness.

--For those who struggle on, especially for a large part of the middle class, the fight assumes the character of a battle against such odds that the feeling of confidence in personal initiative and courage is replaced by a feeling of powerlessness and hopelessness. An enormous though secret power over the whole of society is exercise by a small group, on the decisions of which depends the fate of a large part of society. The inflation in Germany in 1923, or the American crash, increased the feeling of insecurity and shattered for many the hope of getting ahead by one’s own efforts and the traditional belief in the unlimited possibilities of success.

--The insignificance of the individual in our era concerns not only his role as a businessman, employee, or manual laborer, but also his role as a customer…As an abstract customer he is important, as a concrete customer he is utterly unimportant. There is nobody who is glad about his coming, nobody who is particularly concerned about his wishes. The act of buying has become similar to going to the post office and buying stamps.

--(regarding advertising) it does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually. This type of advertising impresses the customer by all sorts of means: by repetition of the same formula again and again; by the influence of an authoritative image, like that of a society lady or a famous boxer, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette; by attracting the customer and at the same time weakening his critical abilities by the sex appeal of a pretty girl; by terrorizing him with the threat of “b.o.” or “halitosis; or yet again by stimulating daydreams about a sudden change in one’s whole course of life brought about by buying a certain shirt or soap. All these methods are essentially irrational; they have nothing to do with the qualities of the merchandise, and they smother and kill the critical capacities of the customer like an opiate or outright hypnosis. They give him a certain satisfaction by their daydreaming qualities just as the movies do, but at the same time they increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness.

--As a matter of fact, these methods of dulling the capacity for critical thinking are more dangerous to our democracy than many of the open attacks against it, and more immoral—in terms of human integrity—than the indecent literature, publication of which we punish.

Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter. Repetition of slogans and emphasis on factors which have nothing to do with the issue at stake numb his critical capacities. The clear and rational appeal to his thinking are rather the exception than the rule in political propaganda—even in democratic countries. Confronted with the power and size of the parties as demonstrated in their propaganda, the individual voter cannot help feeling small and of little significance.

All this does not mean that advertising and political propaganda overtly stress the individual’s insignificance. Quite the contrary; they flatter the individual by making him appear important, and by pretending that they appeal to his critical judgment, to his sense of discrimination, But these pretenses are essentially a method to dull the individual’s suspicions and to help him fool himself as to the individual character of his decision. I need scarcely point out that the propaganda of which I have been speaking is not wholly irrational, and that there are differences in the weight of rational factors in the propaganda of different parties and candidates respectively.

--…in our effort to escape from aloneness and powerlessness, we are ready to get rid of our individual self either by submission to new forms of authority or by a compulsive conforming to accepted patterns.

--Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable state of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to “positive freedom”; 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 give up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course open to him is to fall back to give up his freedom and to try to overcome his aloneness by eliminating the gap that has arisen between his individual self and the world. The second course never reunites him with the world in the way he was related to it before he emerged as an “individual”, for the fact of his separateness cannot be reversed; it is an escape from an unbearable situation which would make life impossible if it were prolonged. This course of escape, therefore, is characterized by its compulsive character, like every escape from threatening panic; it is also characterized by the more or less complete surrender of individuality and the integrity of the self. Thus it is not a solution which leads to happiness and positive freedom; it is, in principle, a solution which is to be found in all neurotic phenomena. It assuages an unbearable anxiety and makes life possible by avoiding panic; yet it does not solve the underlying problem and is paid for by a kind of life that often consists only of automatic or compulsive activities.

Part 2 to follow soon…