People without a center

People without a center
A solid identity would be an effective protection against outside interests that could harm us.

How do we develop a sense of self that creates identity, even when we live in a mass society and are oppressed by its constraints? All too often, existential crises and the need to belong to a group get in the way of truly dealing with this question, thus preventing true human development. One thing is clear: the solution does not lie in materialism, because the possession of things can only ever fill the gap of a formed and stable identity in the short term and illusorily. Youth editor Lilly Gebert embarks on a philosophical search for the conditions of personal freedom with Erich Fromm.

by Lilly Gebert

[This article posted on 3/30/2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.manova.news/artikel/menschen-ohne-mitte.]

“Everyone is the other and no one is themselves. The ‘one’ with which the question of the ‘who’ of everyday existence is answered is the ‘no one’ to whom all existence in the ‘inter-being’ has already surrendered.”

― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

Mass or man? While some perceive it as security, others perceive its presence as a threat. How can that be? Why does the knowledge of the existence of the other side threaten the existence of the one side? Why can't both ― the individual and the mass ― exist without each other and yet perish because of each other? Do existential elements exist, fundamental feelings of being human that can only be experienced in isolation? How can a person be so insecure that they feel attacked in their own being, and then only if it contrasts even slightly with that of their environment? When did we stop growing from difference?

People without a center

As early as 1979, in To Have or To Be, Erich Fromm attributed the “identity crisis” of modern societies to the lack of self in its members: “They have their great, constantly changing ego, but none of them has a self, a core, an identity experience (...) Where no genuine self exists, there can be no identity either” (1). Without awareness of and trust in his own self, a person is disconnected from both himself and his environment, according to Fromm. He believes neither in what he is nor in what surrounds him. Where there was once interest, love and solidarity, there now reigns the desire “to have, to possess and to rule the world, and thus to become a slave to one's own possessions”.

The person who is exclusively oriented towards having thus possesses “neither convictions nor genuine goals”. Unlike the person oriented towards being, who lives out of “an inner activity” and whose “humanistic religiosity” “is directed against any kind of reification, calculability and idolization of man”, “the person fixated on having is determined by a peculiar passivity”:

By seeking to realize his self-development, the meaning of his existence, no longer in difference but in conformity with his environment, he misses himself.

He “has become a business, has to function and be utilized”. In the perpetual fight against the looming loss of self, he flees into a narcissistically influenced activism. From now on, his sense of identity is no longer aimed at entering into a lively, productive exchange between himself and his fellow world – the increasing experience of inner emptiness forces him to compensate for his missing self and subjectivity by having objects.

However much he tries to repress it, humans are terrified of being alone. They cannot bear isolation. As social beings, they depend on being related to the world outside themselves. It is not their desire for cooperation, but their compelling need to avoid mental and physical loneliness that drives them into the arms of their fellow human beings (2). He needs at least the feeling of identity and belonging. However, since he is incapable of finding this within himself, he has no choice but to flee from the freedom he perceives as a burden and to base his sense of self on something that lies outside his own responsibility: the sense of 'us'.

In the we, we believe we feel something “that we don't really feel at all ― simply because we go along with what is suggested to us by public opinion or the like”. We stop being ourselves and become an image of what our environment conveys to us as “right” and “accepted”. The discrepancy between our “I” and the world disappears and with it the conscious fear of being alone (3).

“All our evils come from the fact that we cannot be alone.”

― Arthur Schopenhauer
Between heteronomy and self-abandonment

“We do not know, but we can guess how many people, in the realization of their growing inability to bear the burden of life under modern conditions, would willingly submit to a system that would relieve them not only of self-determination but also of responsibility for their own lives.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Considering the increasing inner conflict in and between people, the growing power gap between citizens and the state suggests that ― contrary to what psychoanalysis long believed ― it is not due to the contradictory nature of man to cause difficulties for society, but rather the other way around: society has learned to stabilize itself by not allowing the hidden inner selves of its members to emerge. Their new-found “process of individuation” may have freed them from their traditional fetters and contributed to their independence and rationality; but it has also isolated them, making them fearful and powerless (4).

Erich Fromm saw the conditions for the individual to merge more or less voluntarily into the masses for the first time in Protestantism and the compensatory faith of Martin Luther and John Calvin: After the medieval society, in which every citizen had his fixed role and all suffering and pain was compensated by the church, collapsed, sometimes through its theses, man not only ceased to see the church as a link between himself and God; he also no longer saw himself as a firmly integrated member within a structure of meaning.

As the subsequent existential crisis of the middle class (5) triggered feelings of powerlessness and insignificance in people, it seemed inevitable to the majority of the population, who were overwhelmed by their sudden exposure to God, that from now on they would seek security and salvation in “switching off their isolated selves and becoming instruments in the hands of an overwhelmingly powerful force outside themselves” (6).

In The Fear of Freedom, Fromm described this willingness of the individual “to want to be nothing other than a means of glorifying a God who represents neither justice nor love” (7) not only as a preparation “to accept the role of a servant of an economic machine” (8) – in the “despair of the automaton-like conformist” he also saw the breeding ground for the political goals of fascism ( 9): To the extent that the self-denial and asceticism rooted in Protestantism pushed people to “subordinate his life exclusively to purposes that were not his own” (10), for him, its religious “freedom” was nothing more than another forerunner of that false sense of individuality that was rekindled a few centuries later by capitalism, as well as its intensification, totalitarianism:

"The individual became even more lonely, even more isolated, and became a tool in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an ‘individual’, but a confused and insecure individual. There were things that helped him to get over the openly apparent manifestations of this inner insecurity. Above all, ownership was a support for his self (... ) The less he felt he was someone, the more he needed ownership.” (11)

In short: the inner non-being of modern societies is conditioned by their reversal to the outside. As long as a person is able to merge with the collective or ascribe value to themselves on the basis of things, they do not have to give their own life meaning. But what if it is precisely “the presence of this void” (12) that ensures social cohesion?
The two faces of freedom

The end of monarchical rule, the Enlightenment and its decentralization of knowledge and information: “modern” man is convinced that he has fought for his freedom. In doing so, he has only created new conditions for the same constraints: What used to be open personal obedience to a leader is now due to submission to the organization. What changed was not the fact of dependence, but its form. To this day, man is not in a position to implement and use his freedom to develop his true self. And yet he lives in the belief that he is no longer subject to external authorities.

He is proud of being a responsible citizen. So proud that he fails to recognize the power that anonymous authorities such as public opinion or his “common sense” exert over him.

Quite willing to behave in accordance with their expectations, he fails to realize that it is in fact not an inner conviction but his own fear that prevents him from distinguishing himself from them.

This inability to recognize that the “self” for which he believes he is acting is ultimately the “social self”, which “essentially coincides with the role that the person in question has to play according to what others expect of him, and which in reality is only a subjective camouflage of his objective function in society” (13), is described by Erich Fromm as follows:

"We are elated by the increase of our freedom from powers outside ourselves and are blind to the inner compulsions and fears that threaten to undermine the significance of the victories that freedom has won against its traditional enemies. We are therefore inclined to think that the problem of freedom is exclusively a matter of acquiring more of the freedom that we have already gained in the course of modern history, and that we have nothing to do but defend freedom against all those powers that seek to deny us this kind of freedom.

We forget that while every freedom already won must be defended with the utmost energy, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but also a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and expand traditional freedom, but we also have to achieve a new kind of freedom that enables us to realize our individual selves and have confidence in that self and in life.” (14)

Despite his development of a critical and more responsible self, Fromm argues, humans have never reached the stage at which they would be able to recognize the gap between “freedom from something” and “freedom for something,” let alone overcome it. By never learning to emancipate himself from his primary ties in a healthy way and consequently to calibrate his inner compass based on his own values, he remains susceptible to external influences throughout his life, for example in the form of compulsive conformity or submission to a leader. For Fromm, it was clear:

“The right of freedom of thought only means something if we are also able to have our own thoughts. Freedom from an external authority is only a lasting gain if our internal psychological conditions are such that we are also able to assert our individuality." (15)
The dangers of self-abandonment

“The serious danger for our democracy is not the existence of totalitarian states abroad. It is that in our own personal attitudes and in our own institutions there may prevail conditions which will give the victory to external authority, to discipline, to uniformity, to dependence on the leader in these countries. The battle, then, is here, in ourselves and in our institutions.”

― John Dewey, Freedom and Culture

In the absence of a true sense of freedom, man flees from himself and submits to an external authority, whose definition of “freedom” he then considers his own. It's actually a very simple – albeit sad – game: a person who only works under the pressure of external necessities would quickly become exhausted internally. Because he still feels himself, he would rebel against the imposition of renunciation and oppose his repressor. He could not endure the inner contradiction in the long term and would find ways and means to implement what, in his opinion, would be more in line with his nature.

This is an inherent impossibility for the repressive system: if renunciation and obedience are indispensable structural elements for this system, then in order to maintain the necessity it considers meaningful and its image of having no alternative, it is necessary to create an inner necessity in the person. The person must be induced to devote themselves to “social requirements” and to “behave in accordance with particular economic necessities” out of an inner dynamic. Such a person no longer needs to be forced to work as hard as possible: by replacing his obedience to an external authority with “an internal authority in the form of conscience and duty”, he is henceforth “driven to work by an inner compulsion” that “keeps him more effectively under control than an external authority ever could” (16).

Bruno Bettelheim, like Erich Fromm, examined how the compulsion to work, which encompasses more and more areas of life, and the modern “automation of the individual” not only increases the individual's insecurity and helplessness, but also contributes to his willingness to “submit to new authorities that offer him security and reduce his doubts” (17). Consequently, he saw the “feeling of not really knowing who you are, the feeling of being limited in your autonomy” in modern mass society as being rooted in the fact that

it makes it more difficult for individuals to develop their own standards for their lives and to live by them,
its multitude of possibilities awakens in him the feeling “that it is not so important which way he chooses and that it is therefore not necessary to develop the ability to pursue this path consistently,”
it suggests to him “the illusion of greater freedom” and thus disappointment, failure or failure cause only even greater damage,
its array of possibilities represents not only the agony of choice, but also its impossibility,
it does not convey any guiding principles that help the individual to recognize his own desires and needs and to fulfill them in his own way (18).

According to Bettelheim, a person socialized by mass society in this way will never learn to recognize his problems independently, let alone solve them himself. He is “accustomed to being guided by society in almost everything he does”. The less able he is to recognize that his inner conflicts arise “from the opposition between his own desires and the demands of the environment, the more he expects society to provide him with the solution to the problems it presents to him” (19). For Bettelheim, this is a vicious circle: once someone has become accustomed to letting others make external decisions for them, they will soon extend this to their internal problems as well. And those who are no longer able to react spontaneously and autonomously to the vicissitudes of life are also willing to “uncritically accept what others offer as a solution” (20).

Confronted with their own existential fears, the “individual” has no choice but to hope “that the powerful will do the right thing”.

Unable to orient his own conscience to his own self or his own reason and prevented from participating in decisions about things that are of great importance to him, the feeling of complete dependency not only undermines not only undermines his self-esteem, it also intensifies his powerlessness – the feeling of being “at the mercy of forces that man cannot understand or at least cannot influence in any way” (21). The masses triumph over the individual. Again.
But for how much longer?

That is the question. Luther may have succeeded in silencing his doubts to a certain extent with his unconditional submission to God. However, he apparently never managed to get rid of the roots of his inner conflict: until the end of his life, he repeatedly fell prey to new insecurities, which he then had to fight by submitting to God again (22).

But what kind of faith is it that keeps you in an eternal struggle with yourself and the world? Can freedom also become a burden that weighs so heavily on people that they try to escape from it? Is there an inevitable vicious circle “that leads from freedom into a new dependency? Does freedom from all primary ties make people so lonely and isolated that they inevitably have to flee into a new bondage? Are independence and freedom synonymous with isolation and fear?

Or is there a state of positive freedom in which the individual exists as an independent self and yet is not isolated, but united with the world, with other people and with nature?” (23). I wonder: when will we stop fleeing ‘the burden of freedom’ and move from the negative to the positive, in short, to our own freedom?

Sources and notes:

(1) Fromm, Erich: To Have or To Be. The Psychological Basis of an New Society. Harper & Row, New York 1973, page 147 and following.

(2) Fromm, Erich: The Fear of Freedom. Harper & Row, New York 1947, page 24 and following.

Lilly Gebert, born in 1998, likes to rack her brains. Be it about how to preserve humanity in a system based on inhumanity or how it can be measured at all in times of technocracy and alienation. Knowing how easy it is to shut out the world by picking up a newspaper, she tries to bring clarity to the intellectual darkness of our time on her blog “Treffpunkt im Unendlichen”.