Book Review: Escape From Freedom

Erich Fromm - 1974

Context

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) was a German Jew who fled the Nazis and settled in the US. He was a co-founder of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. He wrote Escape From Freedom in 1941 in response to what he was as the sources of authoritarianism in the human condition and the grave threat to freedom this aspect of humans posed to democracy. 

This review is based on the original 1941 Foreword and a newer 1965 Foreword (9 pages). They lay out his vision of humanity and the source of threats to democracy that are inherent in modern civilization. I focus on the two Forewords because they describe Fromm's desire or goal for the human condition that is basically identical to what I came to believe about what might be possible and have tried to convey here as pragmatic rationalism. In essence, Fromm recognized and articulated the intellectual framework for pragmatic rationalism in 1941, about 70 years before I came to also see the same threat and to some extent, its human origins. 

What Fromm saw clearly that I did not fully understand, only sensed, was the social unease that leads some or many people to need to escape from freedom into the comforting arms of reassuring demagogues and authoritarians or dictators and their reassuring lies, deceit, emotional manipulation and motivated reasoning. This need for psychological comfort and tribe is apparently universal in all societies.

Review

Given the urgency of the situation in 1941, Fromm interrupted his much broader life long investigation of the human condition in modern civilization. In Escape From Freedom, Fromm focuses on the meaning of freedom for modern man. After Escape, he wrote The Sane Society which expanded on the themes he laid out in Escape. In The Heart of Man, Fromm focused on the origins of hate and destructiveness. 

In the 1941 Foreword, Fromm wrote: 

"Pointing out the significance of psychological considerations does not imply, in my opinion, an overestimation of psychology. .... It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated, and thereby, anxious and isolated. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. .... the understanding of the reasons for the flight from freedom is a premise for any action which aims at the victory over the totalitarian forces." 

In the 1965 Foreword, Fromm wrote: 

"Escape From Freedom is an analysis of the phenomenon of man's anxiety engendered by the breakdown of the Medieval World in which, in spite of many dangers, he felt himself secure and safe. .... modern man is still anxious and tempted to surrender his freedoms to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine, well fed and well clothed, yet not a free man but an automaton. .... There can be no doubt that in this last quarter of a century the reasons for man's fear of freedom, for his anxiety and willingness to become an automaton, have not only continued but have greatly increased."

Fromm goes on to point to nuclear weapons, the nascent rise of fast thinking computers and fast acting giant corporations, and overpopulation are all factors that tend to undermine a comfortable Medieval-type sense of self and social place that some (most?) people need. 

He goes on to firmly reject the criticism that despite psychological insight and knowledge, that science cannot be translated into social progress and benefit:

"It becomes ever increasingly clear to many students of man and of the contemporary scene that the crucial difficulty with which we are confronted lies in the fact that the development of man's intellectual capacities has far outstripped the development of his emotions. Man's brain lives in the twentieth century; the heart of most men still live in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired the the maturity to be independent, to be rational, to be objective. They need myths and idols to endure the fact that man is all by himself, that there is no authority which give meaning to life except man himself. .... How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical over-maturity and emotional backwardness?

As far as I can see there is only one answer: the increasing awareness of the most essential facts of our social existence, an awareness sufficient to prevent us from committing irreparable follies, and to raise to some small extent our capacity for objectivity and reason. We cannot hope to overcome most follies of the heart and their detrimental influence on our imagination and thought in one generation .... At this crucial moment, however, a modicum of increased insight -- objectivity-- can make the difference between life and death for the human race. .... Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine."

 Does any of that sound familiar to people who are familiar with Dissident Politics? Most of that sounds very familiar to me. The social goals Fromm articulates, just a small increase in objectivity and reason, are identical to one key goal of pragmatic rationalism. The hope is the same: try to coax humanity away from self-annihilation and toward long-term sell being and survival. The tactic is the same: teach people self-awareness so they can better understand themselves and better defend themselves against the reassuring dark free speech[1] that demagogues and tyrants know is the path to power and wealth.

Dang, I feel vindicated once again. What a great book.

Footnote: 

1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)

A Conservative Culture War Grounded in Arrogance, Ignorance, Disrespect and Lies

Rand Paul - arrogant, ignorant, disrespectful

A Washington Post article discusses the way senator Rand Paul (R-KY) treated Rachel Levine, the physician nominated to become the Biden administration’s assistant secretary of health in her confirmation hearing. 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), however, seemed more interested in talking about children’s genitals.

“Dr. Levine, you have supported [minors] being given hormone blockers, and surgical reconstruction of a child’s genitalia,” Paul said, in a tirade in which he also conflated genital mutilation (a horrifying practice that public health experts view as a human rights violation) with the transition-related surgeries chosen by some transgender individuals to help their bodies conform with their gender identity.

Levine, who most recently worked as Pennsylvania’s top health official, is transgender. If her nomination succeeds, she will become the first publicly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. She would have been within her rights to be enraged by Paul’s ignorance, but she responded on Thursday by repeating a steady message: “Transgender medicine is a complex and nuanced field,” she said twice. It was composed of “robust research,” and standards of care. She would be happy, she said, to come to Paul’s office and discuss the issue in-depth.

She repeatedly thanked him for the opportunity to answer his questions, even the demeaning ones.

She kept her hands folded on the table, while Paul jabbed his finger in the air and dismissively scoffed, “If you’ve ever been around children — 14-year-olds cannot make this decision.” (Levine is a pediatrician who created the Penn State Hershey Medical Center’s adolescent medicine division. Paul is an eye doctor.)

Paul did not seem at all curious about the medical matter at hand, in which he had no expertise. He was instead “alarmed” and “outraged.” He claimed to be worried about the children, but paid no heed to guidance of medical organizations — including the American Academy of Pediatrics — that recommend treating gender-diverse children by affirming their gender identities.

In Paul’s telling, children chose to be transgender because of peer pressure, or pressure from doctors. In his world, those children would be fine if only doctors like Levine would deny them treatment. That bill had inspired similar reactions from Republican lawmakers. 

Paul’s stand against medical treatment for transgender kids occurred on the same day that the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on the Equality Act, a bill that would amend the Civil Rights Act to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. 

“Equality for who?” demanded Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) from the House floor Wednesday night. “Where is the equality in this legislation for the young girls across America who will have to look behind their backs as they change in their school locker rooms, just to make sure there isn’t a confused man trying to catch a peek?” 

Boebert then meandered on to “liberal indoctrination camps — also called colleges and universities — and “radical ideology,” and she warned that the left would “imprison” and “take [the] children” of anyone who disagreed with them. (emphasis added)

Yes, indeed. Children choose to be transgendered because of peer and doctor pressure, just like homosexuals do. It's those darned liberal indoctrination camps. You know, the ones called cities and urban areas. They're infested with enemies of the people and the state, such as democrats, liberals, the LGBQT community, people who oppose the ex-president and other evil miscreants. Those radical liberals want to take the children from good people and turn them into transgendered people.

One can only wonder at the fact that evil people in the liberal indoctrination camps outnumber the patriots in the rest of the country. Could this deranged crackpottery be mostly a matter of some combination of irrational fear, arrogance, ignorance, disrespect and lies? 

Lauren Boebert (R-CO) - arrogant, ignorant, liar

The Dynasty Starts with the Golden Calf

Some kneeled before this monstrosity and prayed, presumably for it to run 

again in 2024, and maybe also to smite the democrats and send them to hell

Images of a man kneeling in prayer before a gold painted statue of the ex-president at the CPAC meeting in Florida yesterday was jarring to say the least. It was another reminder that the fascist GOP is not just fascist. It is also a personality cult that worships a man who tried to overthrow the US government by force on 1/6. The cult leadership seems to be coalescing around the idea of a family dynasty.

Vox comments on the unfolding horror in the fascist GOP:

A recent poll found that Donald Trump Jr. was one of the most popular choices for the 2024 nomination, doing better than Sens. Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley combined. On Fox News Thursday night, former GOP House member and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows openly proclaimed that it’s still Trump’s party — either Donald, Donald Jr.’s, or Ivanka’s. 

In the Bible, the Golden Calf story ends with a furious Moses destroying the idol — dumping its ashes into water and forcing the Israelites to drink it as punishment. In theory, the voters in 2020 could have been the party’s Moses, the loss of the White House and the Senate their bitter ashwater. And yet, here they are, still building idols of a false god.

President Ivanka T. What an awful thought. This country and democracy are in deep, deep trouble.

Conservative activists actually believe this thing is cool and inspiring:

the golden star-tipped scepter is an inspiring touch, horror inspiring  

Americans Remain Largely Dissatisfied With U.S. Gun Laws

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• 42% are satisfied with the nation's gun laws, 56% dissatisfied
• 69% of Republicans/leaners, 22% of Democrats/leaners satisfied with gun laws
• 68% of Democrats/leaners want gun laws to be stricter

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Fifty-six percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with U.S. gun laws and policies, marking the ninth consecutive year of majority-level dissatisfaction since the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. At the same time, 42% of U.S. adults express satisfaction with U.S. gun laws.

Gallup has asked Americans about their satisfaction with specific issues, including the nation's gun laws and policies, each January since 2001, except for 2009-2011. In 2001, 38% of the public was satisfied with U.S. gun laws. Satisfaction rose in subsequent surveys, hovering near 50% from 2002 through 2012, but since then, it has generally held near 40%. The highest dissatisfaction, 62%, was recorded one month after the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

The latest findings are from a Jan. 4-15 Gallup poll that preceded President Joe Biden's Feb. 14 call for "commonsense gun law reforms" on the third anniversary of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. His proposed changes include background checks on all gun sales, bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and more accountability for gun manufacturers.

Biden's desired stricter gun measures are very similar to those that Congress failed to pass after the Newtown mass shooting, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama's vice president. That vote in Congress laid bare Republican lawmakers' unwillingness to support new gun restrictions. Since then, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have generally become increasingly likely to express satisfaction with U.S. gun laws, while Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have become less likely to be satisfied. Two exceptions to this occurred in 2014 and 2016, when Republicans' satisfaction fell amid calls for stricter gun laws.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are now more than three times as likely as Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents to say they are satisfied with the nation's gun laws and policy, 69% vs. 22%. This 47-percentage-point gap in satisfaction is in line with those since 2018. Before that, the average party gap was 22 points.

A follow-up question, asked only of those who said they were dissatisfied with current gun laws, explored what respondents would like to see happen to those laws. Given that dissatisfaction with gun laws is primarily seen among Democrats, it follows that people who are dissatisfied prefer stricter rather than more lenient laws.

As Biden calls for stricter gun laws, 41% of the public is dissatisfied with current gun laws and wants them made stricter; 8% are dissatisfied and want them to be made less strict; and 7% are dissatisfied but want them to remain the same.

While 69% of Republicans say they are satisfied with U.S. gun laws, 68% of Democrats are dissatisfied and want them to be stricter.

Bottom Line

Americans continue to express more dissatisfaction than satisfaction with U.S. gun laws, and partisans remain sharply divided in their views. The public's calls for more gun control have tended to be in reaction to mass shootings, as have lawmakers' attempts to pass stricter gun laws.

After the nation's deadliest mass shooting, in Las Vegas in 2017, the Trump administration banned bump stocks, which make semi-automatic rifles able to fire like machine guns. Trump also indicated that he was open to stricter gun laws after the Parkland, Florida, shooting, but he never took action on that. Likewise, Trump said in 2019 that he would look into changing background checks in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, but ultimately he declined to push for any changes.

The latest proposal from Biden, however, comes when the U.S. has not seen a mass shooting in recent months. Biden has worked to make the nation's gun laws and policies stricter since he was a U.S. senator and helped pass the Brady bill and the now-expired assault weapons ban. However, he faces an uphill battle in trying to get a bipartisan deal now, given the nation's current political divide and the availability of the legislative filibuster.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/329723/americans-remain-largely-dissatisfied-gun-laws.aspx

 

Why Senate Republicans Fear Native American Deb Haaland

Deb Haaland - democrat, New Mexico

An opinion piece in the Washington Post highlights the intractable, ferocious animosity the GOP has toward democrats, liberals and some things that most Americans support, e.g., protecting national parks. This is more evidence of the depth and breadth of the intolerant, unforgiving culture and political war America the hard core right is openly waging against American government and society. We are hopelessly entangled in this animosity for the foreseeable future. The author, Julian Brave NoiseCat, writes:

Alexander Stuart, the third interior secretary, once declared that the United States’ mission was to “civilize or exterminate” native people. The Interior Department has done much to carry out that terrible mission, with the seizure of tribal lands, forced assimilation of Native American children and much more. So it is impossible to understate the significance — particularly to Native Americans — of the fact that President Biden has nominated a Native American woman, New Mexico Rep. Deb Haaland, to head the department that manages much of the land and resources taken from native nations and maintains relationships between those nations and the U.S. government.

“The historic nature of my confirmation is not lost on me,” she said. Indeed, we have had many interior secretaries with close ties to powerful men in the C-suite and on Capitol Hill. But we have never had an interior secretary who tended to traditional gardens, cooked for pueblo feast days and stood with the Oceti Sakowin Nation at Standing Rock in defense of tribal treaty rights.

Perhaps as a consequence, Haaland’s nomination has proved particularly contentious, as Republican senators, many from Western states, used the hearing to attack, sometimes with remarkable animosity, what they misleadingly portrayed as her extreme views on fossil fuels and national parks.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the senior Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, shouted over Haaland, accusing the congresswoman of wanting to legalize drugs to replace tax revenue from oil and gas. (Haaland backed legalizing and taxing cannabis as a congresswoman, but never advocated doing so instead of taxing fossil fuels.) Montana Sen. Steve Daines — who, like Barrasso, has received more than $1 million in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies — demanded Haaland retract a tweet stating that “Republicans don’t believe in science.” (In 2019, Daines said, “To suggest that [climate change] is human-caused is not a sound scientific conclusion.”)

Utah Sen. Mike Lee expressed his dissatisfaction with the designation of Bears Ears as a national monument, asking whether Haaland thought it was “appropriate for stakeholders, people who have some sort of economic interest in the land or some sort of connection to the land ... to be involved in the national monument designation process.” Lee was apparently unaware that the nominee’s Pueblo relatives are among the tribes that consider Bears Ears a sacred place, tracing their connections to the land to time immemorial.

Haaland appeared unperturbed. We Indians, after all, are well-practiced in the art of accommodating and poking fun at our antagonists; we’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. When Daines asked the secretary-designate why she co-sponsored a bill protecting grizzly bears in perpetuity, Haaland responded with forthright charm: “I imagine, at the time, I was caring about the bears.”

Conservatives have portrayed Haaland as a divisive partisan, but in 2019, she introduced the most bills with bipartisan support of all House freshmen. On Tuesday, Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska — a conservative congressman from an oil state — introduced Haaland as a strong nominee and friend who works across the aisle and whose perspective as a native person is needed at Interior. “Anyone who thinks we’re going to call off fossil fuels immediately is smoking pot,” he added — a rebuke to environmentalists, yes, but also to his colleagues in the upper chamber.

What Haaland actually brings — and what the Republican Party seems to consider so dangerous — are experiences and perspectives that have never found representation in the leadership of the executive branch. In fact, Republicans’ depiction of the first Native American ever nominated to the Cabinet as a “radical” threat to a Western “way of life” revealed something about the conservative id: a deep-seated fear that when the dispossessed finally attain a small measure of power, we will turn around and do to them what their governments and ancestors did to us. (emphasis added)

That speaks for itself.

White privilege also gives the radical right 

license to lie and slander

Do Images and Words Matter?

T****'s vision of land management:

a huge pile of coal

Biden's vision of land management:

not a huge pile of coal

The New York Times writes:

Days after President Biden took office, the Bureau of Land Management put a scenic landscape of a winding river at the top of its website, which during the previous administration had featured a photograph of a huge wall of coal.

At the Department of Homeland Security, the phrase “illegal alien” is being replaced with “noncitizen.” The Interior Department now makes sure that mentions of its stakeholders include “Tribal” people (with a capital “T” as preferred by Native Americans, it said). The most unpopular two words in the Trump lexicon — “climate change” — are once again appearing on government websites and in documents; officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have even begun using the hashtag #climatecrisis on Twitter.

And across the government, L.G.B.T.Q. references are popping up everywhere. Visitors to the White House website are now asked whether they want to provide their pronouns when they fill out a contact form: she/her, he/him or they/them.

It is all part of a concerted effort by the Biden administration to rebrand the government after four years of President Donald J. Trump, in part by stripping away the language and imagery that represented his anti-immigration, anti-science and anti-gay rights policies and replacing them with words and pictures that are more inclusive and better match the current president’s sensibilities. 

“Biden is trying to reclaim the vision of America that was there during the Obama administration, a vision that was much more diverse, much more religiously tolerant, much more tolerant of different kinds of gender dispositions and gender presentations,” said Norma Mendoza-Denton, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author of “Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies.”  

Now, officials in Mr. Biden’s administration are using Mr. Trump’s own tactics to adjust reality again, this time by erasing the words his predecessor used and by explicitly returning to ones that had been banished.  

“The president has been clear to all of us — words matter, tone matters and civility matters,” said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary. “And bringing the country together, getting back our seat at the global table means turning the page from the actions but also the divisive and far too often xenophobic language of the last administration.”

One can reasonably think that if a republican is elected as president in 2024, 2028 or later, the pictures of coal and incivility will displace what Biden is doing. This political and social war is not over. It's not close to over. The pile of coal vision could very well win and bring the American experiment to an end as fascists gain the upper hand in their desperate, fear-driven escape from freedom into the comforting arms of a dictator.  

Biden's gesture is good and necessary, but it probably won't change many minds.

As attorney general, Jeff Sessions ordered his department to use the term “illegal alien” 

in all communications when describing someone who did not come to the 

United States through legal means.

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