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human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable. Freedom is here used not in its positive sense of “freedom to” but in its negative sense of “freedom from,” namely freedom from instinctual determination of his actions.
standpoint of the Church which represented authority, this is essentially sin. From the standpoint of man, however, this is the beginning of human freedom.
Primary bonds once severed cannot be mended; once paradise is lost, man cannot return to it.
The Renaissance was not a culture of small shopkeepers and petty bourgeois but of wealthy nobles and burghers.
Lutheranism and Calvinism came into existence. The new religions were not the religions of a wealthy upper class but of the urban middle class, the poor in the cities, and the peasants.
the psychology of the leader and that of his followers, are, of course, closely linked with each other.
That the middle class developed intense hostility is not surprising.
The members of the middle class were essentially conservative; they wanted to stabilize society and not uproot it; each
pent-up hostility, not finding any direct expression, increases to a point where it pervades the whole personality, one’s relationship to others and to oneself—but in rationalized and disguised forms.
following of its demands is an affirmation of the whole self. However, the sense of “duty” as we find it pervading the life of modern man from the period of the Reformation up to the present in religious or secular rationalizations, is intensely colored by hostility against the self.
Only the most successful class of society profited from rising capitalism to an extent which gave them real wealth and power.
Those very qualities which were rooted in this character structure—compulsion to work, passion for thrift, the readiness to make one’s life a tool for the purposes of an extra personal power, asceticism, and a compulsive sense of duty—were character traits which became productive forces in capitalistic society and without which modern economic and social development are unthinkable; they were the specific forms into which human energy was shaped and in which it became one of the productive forces within the social process.
In one word, capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing of positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self.
However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness.
Once man was ready to become nothing but the means for the glory of a God who represented neither justice nor love, he was sufficiently prepared to accept the role of a servant to the economic machine—and eventually a “Führer.”
Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself.
Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity The manual laborer sells his physical energy; the businessman, the physician, the clerical employee, sell their “personality” They have to have a “personality” if they are to sell their products or services.
Those factors which tend to weaken the individual self have gained, while those strengthening the individual have relatively lost in weight. The individual’s feeling of powerlessness and aloneness has increased, his “freedom” from all traditional bonds has become more pronounced, his possibilities for individual economic achievement have narrowed down. He feels threatened by gigantic forces and the situation resembles in many ways that of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Today the voter is confronted by mammoth parties which are just as distant and as impressive as the mammoth organizations of industry.
The first mechanism to escape from freedom I am going to deal with is the tendency to give up the independence of one’s own individual self and to fuse one’s self with somebody or something outside of oneself in order to acquire the strength which the individual self is lacking.
Authoritarianism as an attachment issue! Which begs the question, can have a democracy if the voters have unresolved and unrecognized attachment issues?
The masochistic trends are often felt as plainly pathological or irrational. More frequently they are rationalized.
Besides these masochistic trends, the very opposite of them, namely, sadistic tendencies, are regularly to be found in the same kind of characters.
Sadistic tendencies for obvious reasons are usually less conscious and more rationalized than the socially more harmless masochistic trends. Often they are entirely covered up by reaction formations of over-goodness or over-concern for others.
He actually “loves” them because he dominates them.
Observing sado-masochistic practices in little children, he assumed that sado-masochism was a “partial drive” which regularly appears in the development of the sexual instinct. He believed that sado-masochistic tendencies in adults are due to a fixation of a person’s psychosexual development on an early level or to a later regression to it. Later
There, sado-masochism was essentially a sexual phenomenon, but in the newer theory it is essentially a nonsexual phenomenon, the sexual factor in it being only due to the amalgamation of the death-instinct with the sexual instinct.
The direction in which the answer lies has already been suggested in the beginning of this chapter. Both the masochistic and sadistic strivings tend to help the individual to escape his unbearable feeling of aloneness and powerlessness.
Masochism is one way toward this goal. The different forms which the masochistic strivings assume have one aim: to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself; in other words, to get rid of the burden of freedom.
Lost of agency and resposability (achrayut) to return to a lost Eden of childhood
upon a conviction of one’s own utter insignificance and powerlessness. In the latter event a mouse or a leaf can assume threatening features.)
The strivings tend in a direction which only fictitiously is a solution. Actually the result is contradictory to what the person wants to attain;
The masochistic bonds are fundamentally different from the primary bonds. The latter are those that exist before the process of individuation has reached its completion. The individual is still part of “his” natural and social world, he has not yet completely emerged from his surroundings. The primary bonds give him genuine security and the knowledge of where he belongs. The masochistic bonds are escape.
If it is based on subordination and loss of integrity of one partner, it is masochistic dependence, regardless of how the relationship is rationalized.
“anonymous” authority reigns. It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion.
The authoritarian character is never a “revolutionary”; I should like to call him a “rebel.” There are many individuals and political movements that are puzzling to the superficial observer because of what seems to be an inexplicable change from “radicalism” to extreme authoritarianism. Psychologically, these people are the typical “rebels.”
The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness.
“The conservative believes rather in catastrophe, in the powerlessness of man to avoid it, in its necessity, and in the terrible disappointment of the seduced optimist.”62 In Hitler’s writing we shall see more illustrations of the same spirit.
A difference which does not have this connotation is unthinkable to him.
personification of the magic helper is to be observed frequently in what is called “falling in love.”
Sadism aims at incorporation of the object; destructiveness at its removal.
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.
The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.
Older meaning of robot. Also modern fascination with zombies
Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a certain political question. He will give you as “his” opinion a more or less exact account of what he has read, and yet—and this is the essential point—he believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking. If he lives in a small community where political opinions are handed down from father to son, “his own” opinion may be governed far more than he would for a moment believe by the lingering authority of a strict parent.
He was not aware of the fact that his gaiety was not “his,” since he is so accustomed to feel what he is supposed to feel in a particular situation, that it would be the exception rather than the rule which would make him aware of anything being “strange.”
The loss of the self and its substitution by a pseudo self leave the individual in an intense state of insecurity.
It is interesting to observe that in connection with this crude Darwinism the “socialist” Hitler champions the liberal principles of unrestricted competition.
The function of an authoritarian ideology and practice can be compared to the function of neurotic symptoms. Such symptoms result from unbearable psychological conditions and at the same time offer a solution that makes life possible. Yet they are not a solution that leads to happiness or growth of personality. They leave unchanged the conditions that necessitate the neurotic solution. The dynamism of man’s nature is an important factor that tends to seek for more satisfying solutions if there is a possibility of attaining them. The aloneness and powerlessness of the individual, his quest for
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there is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
