Фото: Агентство Москва.

“Human brain lives in the twentieth century; the hearts of most people are still in the stone age.” “We cannot expect to overcome all the delusions of our hearts with their pernicious influence on our imagination and thinking within the lifetime of a single generation; perhaps it will take a thousand years before humanity outgrows its prehuman history, which has lasted hundreds of thousands of years.” Erich Fromm

Erich Fromm is one of the widely known authors of the 20th century, combining psychoanalysis, social psychology, and sociology. He called his theory humanistic psychoanalysis. He is best known to the general reader for his works “The Art of Loving” and “To Have or To Be”, although this list of his books is far from exhaustive. Fromm was born in 1900 in Prussia, received a sociological and then psychoanalytic education, worked at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, whose staff members became commonly known as representatives of the “Frankfurt School”. In addition to Fromm, it included Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others.

When Hitler came to power, Erich Fromm, like many German intellectuals, moved to America, where he engaged in psychoanalytic practice and teaching. Being a Jew and a person of left-wing views, Fromm could not remain untouched by what was happening in Germany in the 1930s. His first book, “Escape from Freedom”, was dedicated to the psychological reasons for the establishment of the Nazi regime and became one of the first works on the theory of totalitarianism. Its first edition was released in 1941, and since then, this work has undergone numerous reprints.

Erich Fromm. Photo: Wikipedia.

“I first read ‘Escape from Freedom’ in the 90s when after the informational vacuum of the Soviet years, books by foreign psychology classics began to be published one after another. Then around 2012. And the last reading happened this year. At first, I was curious about what Western psychologists wrote about, whose books were so reluctant to be published in the Soviet Union. Then – a desire to understand why authoritarian and totalitarian regimes come to power, and most surprisingly, why, as a rule, they meet support or at least quite calm, indifferent attitudes from the majority of the population. However, in Fromm’s book, it was also mentioned that societies with a long democratic tradition – he wrote about the contemporary United States of the mid-20th century – are not immune to totalitarianism. But personally for me, until the first election of Trump in 2016, this seemed like an exaggerated concern. And this part of the book only caught my attention in recent years. It seems to me that one can find some plausible explanations for bloody wars and mutual extermination in antiquity and the Middle Ages: the expansion of habitats necessary for purely physical survival, prevention of real or imaginary threats from aggressive neighbors. In addition to this, ambitions of rulers, weak restraining cultural and ethical mechanisms, and even more so the absence of any international law, inability and unwillingness to negotiate peacefully. It is much more difficult to understand how in the 20th-century states with a huge cultural background, regimes emerged that not only unleashed the bloodiest war in human history but also without any accessible rational understanding, destroyed millions of their own citizens. And quite often, quite cultured and educated people participated in all this, possibly experiencing economic difficulties, but by no means on the brink of starving to death. And in 1941, the then still relatively young researcher, sociologist, and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm provided very convincing answers to these questions. From his point of view, the suppressed but at the same time constantly present in the background experiences of the individual starting from the beginning of the New Time period, i.e., the time when people began to realize their personal individuality in contrast to complete identification with a class, guild, community, nationality, etc., are feelings of loneliness and powerlessness. They are the reverse side of realizing one’s autonomy in relation to an unpredictable and uncontrollable external world. But they are difficult, and therefore a person tries to cope with them in one way or another.”

Photo: Bundesarchiv.

“He believed that there are constructive strategies for coping with these feelings – such as love for others without losing the sense of identity, realization in work and creativity. But there are also destructive ones, which become particularly dangerous when a large number of people resort to them simultaneously.

To the latter, he included authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automating conformism. Fromm believed that at the societal level, these algorithms come into play thanks to such a phenomenon as the social character, i.e., a set of ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving common to most members of a specific society. Social character, from his point of view, is formed as a result of common experiences and serves for adaptation to the common way of life characteristic of a particular community. But what are the not very constructive strategies for overcoming feelings of loneliness and powerlessness that we encounter as individual individuals living their personal individual lives? Obviously, they are inherent in all people, but are unevenly represented in different cultural and social groups. Authoritarianism The first strategy Erich Fromm defines as authoritarianism. It implies an attempt to dissolve into something that seems to be something greater and stronger than the individual – for example, in the state, leader, idol. In an effort to assume a dominant or submissive role in this dissolving symbiosis. People inclined to this strategy, Fromm defined as individuals possessing a sadomasochistic or authoritarian character. The authoritarian personality seeks to rid itself of the feeling of insignificance through merging with an external object, which is achieved through relationships of domination and/or submission. Sadistic and masochistic traits, in different proportions, are usually combined in one person. A person with an authoritarian character may experience ecstatic excitement if entrusted with power over others, for example, in the role of an overseer, and servitude and respect if suddenly found in a subordinate or oppressed position.”

Photo: Vadim Savitsky / Press Service of the Ministry of Defense of Russia / TASS.

“In Vasily Grossman’s novel, one of the characters, arrested by the NKVD investigator for unclear reasons, tells his cellmates that mass repressions are expedient for the state and advises them: ‘Confess, help your interrogator.’ Erich Fromm adds one interesting detail to the portrait of the authoritarian character. He says that a misunderstanding about this type of personality can be caused by the fact that it may have a tendency to rebellion. However, its rebellion is always directed against the authority it perceives as weak and is combined with a desire to submit to a ‘strong’ authority. Here we can draw a parallel with Russian realities, recalling the figures who were ardent supporters of the state but ended up behind bars due to their criticism of the authorities. Fromm believed that the authoritarian personality type was very prevalent in European countries in the first half of the 20th century, which he associated with the prevailing parenting style at that time. Overall, he believed that the most pronounced personality traits in a child are formed as a result of the specifics of family relationships, and the latter depend on the specifics of socio-political relationships in the existing society at a given moment. Inclination towards Destruction Unlike authoritarianism, the goal of another strategy – destructiveness – is not an active or passive symbiosis but the destruction, elimination of an object perceived as hostile. But its causes are the same – feelings of powerlessness and isolation. To destroy the surrounding world is a preventive attempt not to let this alien, hostile world destroy oneself. If sadism aims at subordination/absorption of the other, then destructiveness aims at its complete destruction. Fromm wrote that sadism, masochism, and destructiveness in socio-political discourse are usually subject to virtuous interpretations: ‘Perhaps there is nothing in the world that has not been used as a rationalization for destructiveness. Love, duty, conscience, patriotism – they have been and are used to disguise self-destruction and that of others.’ However, besides sadomasochism and destructiveness, there are other socio-psychological mechanisms that indirectly but at the same time extremely effectively contribute to the establishment of dictatorships. Conformism On the eve of the 1933 elections, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt conducted a survey that revealed that ‘fanatical supporters of National Socialism, as well as its explicit opponents, were relatively few. The majority of German citizens took a neutral position. Or, in other words, it can be called conformist. ‘Their will for resistance was broken very soon, and since then, they did not pose any particular difficulties for the new regime. Apparently, this willingness to submit to the Nazi regime was psychologically conditioned by a state of internal fatigue and passivity, typical of an individual of our era even in democratic countries,’ writes Fromm. And it is precisely the tendency towards automated conformism that Fromm considered the prevailing feature of the social character of contemporary Americans. Of course, we can extrapolate Erich Fromm’s ideas about the social character to other communities. As for post-Soviet society, in a significant number of people, at least in the socio-political sphere, we can observe traits that Fromm regarded as authoritarian or sadomasochistic: worship and reverence for cruel and bloody dictators and ridicule of those perceived as weak dictators (for example, Khrushchev), distrust and contempt for those who declare themselves opposition to strong power, support for militarism, and a willingness to negotiate with other nations from a position of strength. And at the same time, a premonitory fear of the state, manifested in self-censorship when real censorship has not yet been introduced, fear of any politically colored actions if they are not sanctioned by the current power, and, on the contrary, a readiness to blindly rush and act without thinking about morality and consequences in any actions if there is its direct or indirect indication.”

Photo: Agency Moscow.

“…But let’s return to Western society. I cannot be an expert on what exactly is happening in the minds of Americans, but the fact that slightly more than half – and this is a huge number of people in a country considered a bulwark of modern democracy – voted for a person with openly authoritarian inclinations and a very dubious reputation, raises at least strong concerns. According to Alexander Genis, ’77 million people who voted for Trump were not so much voting for Trump himself as for lowering prices, order on the Mexican border, and against wokeism.’ If this is the case, what does it say? That half of America does not want to see beyond its nose? How will the disdain for what is happening in their own country ripple back to themselves? Why were they not alarmed by Trump’s rhetoric about making Canada the 51st state of the USA and forcibly annexing Greenland? And the attack on democratic institutions in America itself? Reframing a fairly well-known statement, whoever is ready to exchange freedom for satisfying basic needs risks getting neither. Fromm believed that not only habitual motivations, what people are used to perceive as their own desires, rather than imposed on them from the outside, prompting them to act in one way or another are rooted in the social character but also ideologies and culture. This means that not every declared ideology is actually acting. For example, as we see and have repeatedly seen in the history of humanity, although many people can verbally declare adherence to a certain religion, their actions can completely contradict its commandments. Thus, real values, on which people rely in their everyday life choices, can be quite hidden, even from the individual. ‘It often happens that a certain social group at the conscious level accepts certain ideas, but these ideas do not really affect the entire nature of the members of this group due to the specifics of their social character; these ideas remain just a set of conscious principles, but at a critical moment, people find themselves unable to act in accordance with their principles.’ And finally, the conclusion: the right drift that we are currently witnessing in Western democracies makes one think about how much in reality in these societies the majority of people have internalized and assimilated the values of freedom and democracy, or in reality, they are more subject to the influence of much more archaic and primitive attitudes.”