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Video Description
Freedom sounds like a gift until it demands we carry its weight. This lecture from Academy of Ideas asks why so many of us quietly hand that weight to someone else. Two forces pull at every person: the inner god, who imagines endless possibilities, and the inner worm, who fears them. Drawing on Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Fromm, it traces how anxiety drives us toward moral masochism, conformity, and even the longing for a strong master. The answer is a choice — the first act of freedom, James said, is simply to choose it.
Full Video Transcript
Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from?
Man is a creature forever pulled between two extremes, between what some have called our inner god and our inner worm.
Our inner god represents our powers of imagination and our symbolic awareness,
which together grant us the ability to project into the future and to envisage almost limitless possibilities.
Our inner god offers us the gift of psychological freedom.
It shows us what we could be and tells us that the creation of our destiny is at least partly in our hands
If we can but move forward into the realm of the possible
But alongside our inner god exists our inner worm
And this is the side of us which fears freedom and keeps us tied like all other animals
To a limited set of behaviors and a limited set of possibilities
Unfortunately for many it is our inner worm not our inner god, which is the ruling factor of our life
We fear psychological freedom more than we desire it, and in this video we are going to investigate why.
Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.
Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.
If psychological freedom entails the ability to envisage constructive ways to change our life, and to then act upon these possibilities,
why should we fear this?
According to Dostoevsky, one of the main reasons for this is due to the intimate connection between freedom and anxiety.
For anxiety follows freedom as its shadow.
Our ability to project into the future, and to imagine how things could be, makes us aware of better ways of living.
we can never be certain if the pursuit of the possible will contribute more to our salvation
or more to our suffering. We may be godlike in our ability to conceive of the possible,
but we lack the omniscient power to know if we are correct in what we see and if we are capable
of achieving what we desire. And so our inner god wants to pursue the possible, but our inner worm
fears what will become of us if we do. This strange mixture of desire and dread that arises
in the face of the possible, creates an inner conflict which, for Kierkegaard, is the essence
of anxiety. For as he put it,
Anxiety, then, makes the individual impotent. Or as Rollo May explained,
To Kierkegaard,
the 20th century psychologist Erich Fromm proposed that we enact behavioral strategies in order to flee from freedom.
He called such strategies mechanisms of escape, and argued that these mechanisms of escape are primarily motivated by masochistic strivings.
In popular culture, masochism is typically associated with sexuality,
but Sigmund Freud isolated a more prevalent form of masochism, which he termed moral masochism,
in which the psychoanalyst Anita Weinreb defined as
On the surface, moral masochism appears puzzling.
For how can a longing for submission, for humiliation and suffering,
and for the belittlement of oneself be felt as a worthy objective to strive for?
But Fromm thought the riddle of moral masochism can be solved when viewed as an attempt to escape from the anxieties of freedom
by submitting to a powerful other. Whether the masochist submits to an external god, a church, a nation, the state, a leader, an
ideology, a company, a significant other, a drug, or an inner compulsion, the objective,
according to Fromm, is always the same. The masochist cannot bear the anxieties of choice, of
possibility and freedom, and so happily, he hands over the reins of his soul to a master.
Or as Fromm wrote,
These questions are answered by the relationship to the power which he has attached himself.
The meaning of his life and the identity of his self are determined by the greater whole into which the self has submerged.
Moral masochism is ruinous to psychological health.
The extreme dependency the masochist develops for a powerful other leads to infantilization and the enthusiastic acceptance of chains.
The rejection of freedom does not leave a man unpunished, wrote the Russian dissident Viktor Gorsky.
it turns him into a slave of necessity.
Yet a masochistic flight from freedom also has wider social and political effects.
For it is easy to find numerous examples of societies
whose citizens feared freedom to such a degree
that the only means of escape they saw was to submit to a powerful other
in the form of an authoritarian regime.
People grasp at political authoritarianism
in the desperate need to be relieved of anxiety, wrote Rollo May.
In her book, The Quest of Our Lives,
The author Ida Wiley notes a telling comment from a young German slightly before the horrors of World War II
We Germans are so happy. We are free from freedom
The negative social effects of moral masochism are not only seen in mass submission to an authoritarian regime
For a more covert mechanism of masochistic escape exists and this involves submission to the tyranny of the majority
Or what Fromm labeled as obedience to common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion
The strategy behind this mechanism of escape involves identifying ourselves so thoroughly
with whatever society deems self-evident, normal, and expected
that we are saved from having to formulate and commit ourselves to our own principles, values, beliefs, and ways of life.
We repress our awareness of possibilities and accept only that which is socially given.
This mechanism of escape may protect us from the anxieties of freedom,
but the more we obey the tyranny of the majority, the more we lose ourself,
and the more society becomes inhabited by automatons who ostracize all who dare to deviate from the status quo.
As Rollo May wrote,
There is no political freedom that is not indissolubly bound up to the interpersonal freedom of the individuals who make up that nation.
No liberty of a nation of conformists. No free nation made up of robots.
Given that moral masochism makes us weak and servile and promotes the enslavement of a society, we must ask,
what can we do to develop the strength to bear the anxiety that freedom elicits and to move forward into life instead of remaining stagnant?
How can we reignite the God within?
Remembering that psychological freedom is the awareness of possibilities plus the courage to move forward into the possible,
Kierkegaard suggested that one way to become free is to recognize that when it comes to the decision of whether to pursue the possible
It is always better to take the risk and to venture into the unknown
Freedom lies in being bold wrote the poet Robert Frost or as Kierkegaard echoed
By not venturing it is so dreadfully easy to lose that which it would be difficult to lose in even the most venturesome venture
For if I have ventured amiss very well, then life helps me by its punishment
But if I have not ventured at all, who then helps me?
In choosing a life of venturing, in embracing the possible even though this means inviting uncertainty into our life,
we will not be tempted to resort to moral masochism.
Rather, in venturing, we continually expand the confines of our comfort zone,
we learn how to remain resilient in the face of failure,
and we cultivate courage, self-reliance, independence, and hence self-respect.
And so one question remains.
The first act of freedom is to choose it, wrote the psychologist William James,
and the second is to take the actions that are necessary to be free and realize that life is short
and the greatest suffering comes not to those who are bold, but to those who remain cowardly.
The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore
Unlike the mediocre
Intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible
It is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors
To meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown
Source: Academy of Ideas