Medieval Times

An individual had not yet experienced his individuality, for they were tied to a social role and position within their hierarchy, and there was no I, but a peasant, a clerk, a knight, a farmer, and so on. An average person has not yet faced the existential angst of his own self, and was living off of the beaten path toward fulfillment and salvation. So their life route was completely determined by the norms prescribed by the  local authority, usually in the face of the Church. 

Protestant Reformation 

Later with the protestant reformation and a liberation from Church’s control, an individual was tasked with finding their own personal salvation before God. For the first time, people became aware of their own responsibility for their life before God, and personal anxiety has emerged, especially due to the presence of religious doctrines like Calvinism, which preached the concept of predestination to the people. Hence, although freedom from the external authority has been achieved, it opened the gateway for the internal authority dictated by personal fear of God. Authority obtained its form in the shape of internal forces of faith and morality, which were guided by the self-imposed authority of God, who’ll judge their lives after death. These struggles of protestants, for example, deeply influenced the thought of Kierkegaard, which later resulted in the emergence of existential faith as a response to anxiety during the post reformation period, when God’s authority had started to shake. 

Modern Era

The individual, finally, broke free from the psychological influence of God and religious traditions through maximization of materialistic goods, scientific inquiry, and secularization. As Nietzsche perfectly puts it “God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him”. Another stage of freedom has been achieved, but by the recurring pattern,  now even greater anxiety comes as an individual feels lost in the grand scheme of the universe without any sense of meaning or belonging. Existential crisis has wrapped the people around, so from not knowing how to deal with one’s freedom existentialism has emerged as well as nihilism. Philosophers like Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche were essentially the thinkers who tried to help people with the existential crisis coming from obtaining freedom from external authorities. But now at the peak of Capitalism and global digitalization, new “anonymous” authority is at rise, which takes the forms of public opinion, consumerism culture, modern trends in social media, and advertisement. Subtly anonymous authority influences an individual’s thinking and behaviour. Furthermore, at this time especially, escape mechanisms through which individuals cope with their own freedom, which they have not yet learned to control have stood out more than ever. Three  key mechanisms are:

Authoritarianism is the escape route for those who, out of unbearableness of their freedom, try to submit to authority. Authority can be social expectations and narratives, parents or partners, ideologies, systems, and corporations. Another way this mechanism works is through domination, where an individual tries to dominate others to escape their own insignificance and powerlessness. Both ways strive to eliminate their separation from the world through establishing codependent, symbiotic relationships with it.

Conformism is the most common escape route in which individuals betray their own sense of self to blend in with societal norms and expectations. Individuals pass on themselves all that is projected by the cultural patterns, coming out exactly as everybody else. One no longer feels separated from the world as one merges with the world so much  that one ceases to exist at all. 

Destructivism plays out of the lingering feeling of powerlessness and insignificance in relation to the world, because of which the individual destroys the very object that causes those feelings. Destructivism is also thought of as the response to the repressed life, when life cannot naturally express itself through an individual, and there’s no way of growing as an individual, an individual turns against oneself.  

So as Fromm questions it, are we really trapped in this cycle of reclaiming our freedom just to fall for new dependencies and authorities? Fromm gives a straight answer of “No”, and that all that was discussed is a representation of negative freedom, while positive freedom is achieved not only by liberating oneself from external forces, but also by actualising oneself and actively engaging with the world. Negative freedom is so called “freedom from” the authority, while positive freedom is “freedom to” grow, love, create, and essentially express one’s humanity to the world. One must not escape from the world, but 

actively participate in it.