The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

Back at the beginning of the Reformation, wrote Fromm, the individual gained the ability to determine his own path—and at the same time lost his sense of certainty in place and self. Fromm divided newfound freedom into two parts: “freedom to” and “freedom from.” If the former was positive, the latter could cause unbearable anxiety: “The world has become limitless and at the same time threatening. . . . By losing his fixed place in a closed world man loses the answer to the meaning of his life; the result is that doubt has befallen him concerning himself and the aim of life.” Along came Martin Luther and John Calvin with remedies for this anxiety: “By not only accepting his own insignificance but by humiliating himself to the utmost, by giving up every vestige of individual will, by renouncing and denouncing his individual strength, the individual could hope to be acceptable to God.” In other words, the individual could in one swoop regain his certainty in the future—it would now be in God’s hands—and rid himself of his most unbearable burden: the self.