Escape from Freedom - Erich Fromm
Category: Spiritual & Religious
Narrator: Anthony Haden Salerno
Tags: Spiritual & Religious, Classic, Political
lf a man cannot stand freedom, he will probably turn fascist. This, in the fewest possible words, is the essential argument in this modem classic, Escape from Freedom. The author, Erich Fromm, is a distinguished psychologist, late of Berlin and Heidelberg, now of New York City., He applies the psychoanalytical method to the illness of our civilization which expresses itself in an abject submission to dictatorship. It is true that the rise of democracy set men free and brought to an end the authority of the medieval state and the medieval church. But it brought into existence a society where a man feels isolated from his fellows, where relationships in an industrial age are impersonal, where insecurity replaces a sense of belonging., This sense of isolation may drive an individual to one of various forms of escape. lt may drive a people to seek escape in blind devotion to a leader, in utter submission to an all-powerful state, into a barbarous and sadistic program of aggression against
