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To understand the dynamics of the social process we must understand the dynamics of the psychological processes operating within the individual, just as to understand the individual we must see him in the context of the culture which molds him.
We are entering the second industrial revolution in which not only human physical energy—man’s hands and arms as it were—but also his brain and his nervous reactions are being replaced by machines.
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 lives still in the Stone Age. The majority of men have not yet acquired 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 gives meaning to life except man himself.
How can mankind save itself from destroying itself by this discrepancy between intellectual-technical overmaturity and emotional backwardness?
Progress in social psychology is necessary to counteract the dangers which arise from the progress in physics and medicine.
freedom is not less endangered if attacked in the name of anti-Fascism than in that of outright Fascism.
Is submission always to an overt authority, or is there also submission to internalized authorities, such as duty or conscience, to inner compulsions or to anonymous authorities like public opinion? Is there a hidden satisfaction in submitting, and what is its essence?
Submission to social media where social nlrms are clearly defined and could be clearly expressed
What is it that creates in men an insatiable lust for power? Is it the strength of their vital energy—or is it a fundamental weakness and inability to experience life spontaneously and lovingly?
Both factors, his need to live and the social system, in principle are unalterable by him as an individual, and they are the factors which determine the development of those other traits that show greater plasticity.
Thus the mode of life, as it is determined for the individual by the peculiarity of an economic system, becomes the primary factor in determining his whole character structure, because the imperative need for self-preservation forces him to accept the conditions under which he has to live.
When one has become an individual, one stands alone and faces the world in all its perilous and overpowering aspects. Impulses arise to give up one’s individuality, to overcome the feeling of aloneness and powerlessness by completely submerging oneself in the world outside.
While the process of individuation takes place automatically, the growth of the self is hampered for a number of individual and social reasons. The lag between these two trends results in an unbearable feeling of isolation and powerlessness, and this in its turn leads to psychic mechanisms, which later on are described as mechanisms of escape.
Yet this very helplessness of man is the basis from which human development springs; man’s biological weakness is the condition of human culture.
Because he doesnt have instincts and he has to be taught everything by others
The act of disobedience as an act of freedom is the beginning of reason.
We see that the process of growing human freedom has the same dialectic character that we have noticed in the process of individual growth. On the one hand it is a process of growing strength and integration, mastery of nature, growing power of human reason, and growing solidarity with other human beings. But on the other hand this growing individuation means growing isolation, insecurity, and thereby growing doubt concerning one’s own role in the universe, the meaning of one’s life, and with all that a growing feeling of one’s own powerlessness and insignificance as an individual.
According to Bonaventura, it is God’s intention to offer grace to man, but only those receive it who prepare themselves for it by their merits.
Psychologically, faith has two entirely different meanings. It can be the expression of an inner relatedness to mankind and affirmation of life; or it can be a reaction formation against a fundamental feeling of doubt, rooted in the isolation of the individual and his negative attitude toward life.
Doubt is the starting point of modern philosophy; the need to silence it had a most powerful stimulus on the development of modern philosophy and science.
The modern attempts to silence it, whether they consist in a compulsive striving for success, in the belief that unlimited knowledge of facts can answer the quest for certainty, or in the submission to a leader who assumes the responsibility for “certainty”—all these solutions can only eliminate the awareness of doubt.
Luther’s “faith” was the conviction of being loved upon the condition of surrender, a solution which has much in common with the principle of complete submission of the individual to the state and the “leader.”
the attitudes toward others and toward oneself, far from being contradictory, in principle run parallel. But while hostility against others is often conscious and can be expressed overtly, hostility against oneself is usually (except in pathological cases) unconscious, and finds expression in indirect and rationalized forms.
“Conscience” is a slave driver, put into man by himself. It drives him to act according to wishes and aims which he believes to be his own, while they are actually the internalization of external social demands.
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.
We neglect the role of the anonymous authorities like public opinion and “common sense,” which are so powerful because of our profound readiness to conform to the expectations everybody has about ourselves and our equally profound fear of being different.
We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigor, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self, to have faith in this self and in life.
It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself.
Man became a cog in the vast economic machine—an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none—but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself.
In any society the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are most powerful in that society. This is so partly because these groups have the power to control the educational system, schools, church, press, theater, and thereby to imbue the whole population with their own ideas; furthermore, these powerful groups carry so much prestige that the lower classes are more than ready to accept and imitate their values and to identify themselves psychologically.
Selfishness is rooted in this very lack of fondness for oneself. The person who is not fond of himself, who does not approve of himself, is in constant anxiety concerning his own self. He has not the inner security which can exist only on the basis of genuine fondness and affirmation. He must be concerned about himself, greedy to get everything for himself, since basically he lacks security and satisfaction.
Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self and whose object is the social self.
The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality.
Thus, the self-confidence, the “feeling of self,” is merely an indication of what others think of the person. It is not he who is convinced of his value regardless of popularity and his success on the market. If he is sought after, he is somebody; if he is not popular, he is simply nobody. This dependence of self-esteem on the success of the “personality” is the reason why for modern man popularity has this tremendous importance. On it depends not only whether or not one goes ahead in practical matters, but also whether one can keep up one’s self-esteem or whether one falls into the abyss of
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A man’s clothes or his house were parts of his self just as much as his body. The less he felt he was being somebody the more he needed to have possessions.
Other factors backing up the self were prestige and power.
The sales talk of the old-fashioned businessman was essentially rational. He knew his merchandise, he knew the needs of the customer, and on the basis of this knowledge he tried to sell. To be sure, his sales talk was not entirely objective and he used persuasion as much as he could; yet, in order to be efficient, it had to be a rather rational and sensible kind of talk. A vast sector of modern advertising is different; it does not appeal to reason but to emotion; like any other kind of hypnoid suggestion, it tries to impress its objects emotionally and then make them submit intellectually.
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As a matter of fact, these methods of dulling the capacity for critical thinking are more dangerous to our democracy than many of the open attacks against it, and more immoral—in terms of human integrity—than the indecent literature, publication of which we punish.
“I knew that we counted little in comparison with the universe, I knew that we were nothing; but to be so immeasurably nothing seems in some way both to overwhelm and at the same time to reassure. Those figures, those dimensions beyond the range of human thought, are utterly overpowering. Is there anything whatsoever to which we can cling? Amid that chaos of illusions into which we are cast headlong, there is one thing that stands out as true, and that is—love. All the rest is nothingness, an empty void. We peer down into a huge dark abyss. And we are afraid.”
However, this feeling of individual isolation and powerlessness
is covered over by the daily routine of his activities, by the assurance and approval he finds in his private or social relations, by success in business, by any number of distractions, by “having fun,” “making contacts,” “going places.”
They cannot go on bearing the burden of “freedom from”; they must try to escape from freedom altogether unless they can progress from negative to positive freedom.
There, the attitude of domination—and ownership—is often covered by what seems to be the “natural” concern or feeling of protectiveness for a child. The child is put into a golden cage, it can have everything provided it does not want to leave the cage. The result of this is often a profound fear of love on the part of the child when he grows up, as “love” to him implies being caught and blocked in his own quest for freedom.
to quote a telling description of Dostoevski, in The Brothers Karamazov, he has “no more pressing need than the one to find somebody to whom he can surrender, as quickly as possible, that gift of freedom which he, the unfortunate creature, was born with.”
These considerations refer to an important difference between neurotic and rational activity. In the latter the result corresponds to the motivation of an activity—one acts in order to attain a certain result. In neurotic strivings one acts from a compulsion which has essentially a negative character: to escape an unbearable situation.
But in a psychological sense, the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live.
Thus power can mean one of two things, domination or potency. Far from being identical, these two qualities are mutually exclusive. Impotence, using the term not only with regard to the sexual sphere but to all spheres of human potentialities, results in the sadistic striving for domination; to the extent to which an individual is potent, that is, able to realize his potentialities on the basis of freedom and integrity of his self, he does not need to dominate and is lacking the lust for power.
Power, in the sense of domination, is the perversion of potency, just as sexual sadism is the perversion of sexual love. Sadistic
But what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. Instead of overt authority, “anonymous” authority reigns. It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, “I know you will not like to go out with that boy,” or an advertisement suggests, “Smoke this brand of cigarettes—you will like their coolness,” it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades
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The isolated and powerless individual is blocked in realizing his sensuous, emotional, and intellectual potentialities. He is lacking the inner security and spontaneity that are the conditions of such realization.
This inner blockage is increased by cultural taboos on pleasure and happiness, like those that have run through the religion and mores of the middle class since the period of the Reformation. Nowadays, the external taboo has virtually vanished, but the inner blockage has remained strong in spite of the conscious approval of sensuous pleasure.
drive that is directed toward life and is more or less identical with sexual libido, and a death-instinct whose aim is the very destruction of life.
