Escape from Freedom

We learn that freedom is always good news, but Erich Fromm wrote an entire book asking the opposite question: what does a person do when freedom arrives and they don't know what to do with it? Think of someone who leaves a salaried job to work for themselves: in the first few days there's the relief of having no boss, but soon comes the vertigo of deciding everything alone.

Fromm wrote these pages in the United States, during the Second World War, trying to understand how an entire people gave up its own political freedom and willingly embraced a regime that crushed it. His answer doesn't stop at politics: too much freedom, with no bond to hold a person up, produces a loneliness so great that some of us would rather trade that loneliness for obedience to something bigger.

Fromm starts at the beginning: a child is born completely dependent, tied by what he calls primary ties, the bonds with mother, family, tribe, none of which were chosen. These ties smother individual freedom, but in exchange they guarantee the certainty of belonging, of having a place in the world without having to prove anything.

It's like a neighborhood where everybody knows each other, and the football team and the father's religion put a person inside a group before they've even thought about it. There's no need to decide who to be, because the answer comes ready-made. As history moves forward, according to Fromm, these ties break one by one, and each cut is a victory for freedom and also the loss of a net that held you up without asking for anything in return.

Fromm uses a simple image: it's like cutting the umbilical cord. A baby attached to its mother, fed without any effort of its own, has to breathe on its own at some point. It's necessary in order to become a person, but it's also frightening, because on one side there is growth and on the other total exposure to the world. Fromm calls this process individuation: the price of becoming a separate individual is precisely this new insecurity.

A medieval person was born knowing their trade, their rank, their church, with almost no choice, but also without the anguish of inventing who to be. The modern world swapped that certainty for choice: today you can change jobs, cities, religions, but every choice charges a price in insecurity that medieval life never charged. It's like leaving a house full of your parents' rules to live alone: the rules were tight, but they also shielded you.