Lately, I’ve been reading Erich Fromm’s Escape From Freedom. 

The premise of the book is that modern man faces a serious challenge on account of the fact that he is free. The great problem for modern man, as Fromm sees it, is learning how to live with the burden of freedom. This might come as a surprise to many because we all tend to think of freedom as something positive, something to strive for and experience in all its glorious fullness. 

However, for Fromm, freedom is both a great gift and a great challenge. 

The gift is that you are free, free from the societal expectations and the fixed roles of traditional hierarchies that were prevalent in premodern times. In the modern world, there is no role into which you are born that must define your life, no set path that you are expected to follow simply on account of being born into this family or that family. 

The challenge is figuring out what to do with your life now that you know you are free. This freedom from traditional roles and hierarchies also thrusts all responsibility for your life on you. You must now decide, you must now find your own identity, your own meaning, your own purpose. This is an immense task, and also a very terrifying one, as the individual now realises that everything rests on him. It is in this light that Fromm sees freedom as something burdensome. The task of deciding who you are and what you believe in light of your freedom and so many competing opinions is indeed no easy task and a great burden to bear.

Unfortunately, most people find the burden of freedom too much to bear, and instead of embracing it, they escape from it, so to speak (hence the name of the book). In essence, people trade their freedom in exchange for submission to some ideal or cause or power outside of and higher than themselves. In exchange for freedom, they are provided with a sense of self, purpose, security, identity and meaning by the higher power they’ve chosen to abandon themselves to. Most people reading this will probably immediately realise that this sounds a lot like religion, and of course, this phenomenon is very common among the religious. But it is by no means restricted to the religious. Even among the irreligious, some people look to culture, or peer groups, or social media influencers, or some political ideology to tell them who they are and what to believe and how to live. Just open Twitter and see. 

Fromm would say that these people have found freedom unbearable and have chosen to escape from the burden of freedom by sacrificing their authentic, individual selves. 

Fromm spends much of the book discussing all the ways in which people seek to escape from freedom, and something in the section on authoritarianism jumped out at me this morning. Here’s a long-ish quote:

“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.

The strivings tend in a direction which only fictitiously is solution. Actually, the result is contradictory to what the person wants to attain; the compulsion to get rid of an unbearable feeling was so strong that the person was unable to choose a line of action that could be a solution in any other but a fictitious sense.

The implication of this for masochism is that the individual is driven by an unbearable feeling of aloneness and insignificance. He then attempts to overcome it by getting rid of his self (as a psychological, not as physiological entity); his way to achieve this is to belittle himself, to suffer, to make himself utterly insignificant. But pain and suffering are not what he wants; pain and suffering are the price he pays for an aim which he compulsively tries to attain. The price is dear. He has to pay more and more and, like a peon, he only gets into greater debt without ever getting what he has paid for: inner peace and tranquility.” (emphasis mine)

Here, Fromm is describing the reality of those people who try to escape freedom through masochistic avenues with relation to authority. That is, people whose means of escape is to not only turn to a greater power but to belittle themselves and utterly reduce themselves to insignificant gnats compared to this power. 

Like everybody else, these people are trying to find ways to deal with the burden of loneliness and insignificance that arises on account of freedom. They want to gain inner peace and tranquillity and live full and meaningful lives. But, instead of approaching this task positively as Fromm would suggest, they take an approach that I think most would recognise as dehumanising and degrading. 

If you have ever dealt with a relative or loved one who got involved with a cult, you may have noticed this in action before. Oftentimes, the members of a cult belittle and denigrate themselves and practice rituals that cause them to suffer in unbelievable ways to please the leader. They have abandoned the burden of freedom and sought to find meaning, safety, purpose, tranquillity, and inner peace by subordinating themselves totally to the leader and the cause of the cult.

And yet, note that what these people are searching for is common to all human beings. Everyone wants a sense of meaning and purpose, and everyone would love inner peace and tranquillity. The problem is indeed a universal one. The real issue is not with the problem; it’s with the solution that these people have adopted for the problem.

This is where I find Henrik Karlsson very useful. In his most recent essay, he writes about an approach to problem-solving that he has touched on now and again in his other writings. The idea is quite simple (and also the title of the essay in question): when facing a complicated problem, don’t try to solve it, try to understand it.

Or to flesh it out a bit more: When faced with a difficult problem, don’t try to solve it. Instead, make sure you understand it. If you understand it properly, the solution will be obvious.

Even just on the surface, this runs counter to the way in which I imagine most people approach problem-solving. It certainly runs counter to the way I approach problem-solving. Typically, when faced with a problem, my immediate reaction is to start thinking of possible solutions and generate a couple of different ideas. Then, eventually, I settle on and attempt to execute what seems like the best solution. 

Rarely do I stop to think about the problem itself and try to understand it. Why does this problem exist? What is the nature of the problem exactly? How did the problem arise? To what class does this problem belong?

In essence, I am not considering what Christopher Alexander would call the context of the problem. Here’s an excerpt from Henrik’s essay on Alexander’s approach:

“It was in Notes in 1964 that Alexander introduced his now-famous idea of form-context-fit. These days, I mostly see it referenced in the phrase product-market-fit—meaning you’ve found a product that consumers are hungry to pay for—but it was originally a broader, deeper, and more interesting idea. Alexander proposed form-context-fit as a way to objectively judge if a design is good. Or, to phrase it differently, form-context-fit is a way for us to judge if a specific solution to a problem is good. And what Alexander said was that a design is good if and only if the form (of the solution) fits the context (of the problem).”

In other words, it is not just enough to arrive at a solution to a problem; the solution needs to be a good solution, it needs to fit the context of the problem. That having a solution to a problem is not enough, and you need a good solution, is actually pretty easy to demonstrate. For example, if my best friend has a headache, I can come up with a couple of solutions. I could decide to behead her, and that would be one way to fix the problem, rather permanently. I could also buy her drugs so that she can get high and not feel the pain anymore. I don’t imagine that any headache is strong enough to stand up to the right dose of cocaine or heroin. Notice that both of these solutions do indeed address the problem (the headache is gone), but nobody reading this — I hope — would consider them good solutions to the problem. 

And the reason they are not good solutions is that they do not fit the context of the problem. We want to cure her headache, but we also want to keep her alive and in good health. We do not want her to become a drug addict either. In other words, the problem is: cure her headache. But the context of the problem is something like: cure her headache in a manner that leaves her whole and with the greatest capacity for living out her life wholly post-headache.

You arrive at good solutions to problems by considering the context of the problem. 

Now, to go back to the masochistic people from Fromm’s analysis above. They have a problem indeed, but they are trying to adopt a solution to the problem that is bad because it doesn’t consider the context of the problem. The so-called solution simply ends up engendering more problems.

What is the problem? It is that they have found themselves to be free individuals. Human beings who can do whatever they want, but with a craving for human things like meaning and purpose, safety and security, inner peace and tranquillity. And because they are free, they have to provide themselves with all these things, no small task.

Now, what is the context of the problem? It is that they are human beings. In order to thrive and flourish, human beings need solutions to these problems that acknowledge their humanity at every level and provide for the seemingly paradoxical nature of some of these needs. We need both community and autonomy, meaningful connections and individual freedom, meaning and dignity, a sense of belonging and individuality.

Given the context of the problem, it is clear that any solution that offers you one thing at the expense of another is going to be a bad solution. And this is precisely what we find with the solution of the masochists as it relates to authority. The external authority offers them a sense of meaning and purpose, but at the expense of their individuality, their freedom, and indeed their sense of dignity. The form of the solution does not fit the context of the problem.