JK recently showed me a copy of the course catalog for Lake Washington Technical College, one of the places that we have been kicking around the idea of taking car repair classes at. The weirdest thing about it though is an introductory statement it has from the president of the school, Dr. Mike Metke. It is part of a larger passage which I think is supposed to be inspirational for people who have decided to take initiative in their life, but taken out of context, I find this one passage kind of disturbing:
Psychologist Erich Fromm said that being free and being responsible for making all your own decisions is much more stressful than following orders and living in a controlled society. When I worked in law enforcement, I met people who preferred prison life over dealing with life outside the walls. Living under miserable circumstances, whether it be in a totalitarian state or an abusive relationship, is less frightening than having to change and deal with the unknown.
In one sense, I totally “get” what he is talking about and agree with him. Being out there and doing you thing and not knowing what’s going to happen next is really stressful. But at the same time, it’s almost like he is dismissing the bad elements of not living like that. I know he is just trying to be inspirational or something, but it just sort of comes off as weird, I think. And it also makes me suspicious (like a lot of things, I know). I mean, he seems to be saying something that is sort of true, above and congratulates you on making the leap forward into the “unknown.” But really, this is a technical college, which is designed to put you on a specific career track and land you in a job so that you don’t have to face the unknown.
So it seems to be a bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand which underlies a greater truth which I suspect this man may not even be consciously aware of.
PS. Does anybody know more about Fromm or his theories in relation to the quote above? If so, could you drop me some basic introductory info along with links to more reading (please don’t just link to me Wikipedia either, cause I already looked!)
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6 Comments
Sounds like he might be referring to the “socially patterned defect.” You are a social construct, a product of your environment. You have been programmed. If you are defective, you don’t see yourself as defective because “defective” is subjective. If you live in the United States, you live in a “free” country. But are you really free? Can you do whatever you want wherever you want? No. Does that bother you? Some prisons are bigger than others. They’re still prisons. It’s the “pathology of normalcy,” I guess.
http://www.erich-fromm.de/data/pdf/1944a-e.pdf
the majority take vast solace in being told what to do and when to do it. my ex is a nurse and i pointed out to her that, though she works hard at her job, she would be incapable of functioning without millions of dollars of hospital and equipment to support her and billions of dollars of government health care money to support the hospital. then i really pissed her off by telling her that all my tools are in my head and that all my contracting equipment from my construction business are in the garage.
controlling the means of production.
entrepreneurs control the means of production. employees become compartmentalised in the production framework and can, in some ways, go to sleep.
not everyone can be at the helm of the ship, jaw squared to the wind……..most have to subjegate themselves to being a cog in the vast wheel of the economy. school does it`s level best to hammer entrepreurialism out of people`s heads because we need vastly more robots to do the tiny jobs that add up to production. and when school doesn`t work then there is always………………………drugs.
Yeah, that passage is weird. I mean, this idea of free and responsible is relative anyway. I think the stressful part of being “free” is that we are accountable and responsible for the consequences of our actions (something that the Bush administration deliberately ignores) - that IS stressful. However, those with extreme social constraints - such as prisoners - seem to suffer from a double whammy. They experience the continuous anguish of virtually their whole identity stripped away, having a banal routine AND prisoners frequently suffer from existential crisis - a problem that often taps into fear of the unknown but is also a symptom of extreme types of social constraints and incarceration.
I think that the majority of folks consciously and unconsciously allow constraints - some type of formal or informal imprisonment. I may be reaching, but isn’t that what states and nations are to some degree? They’re highly organized, bureaucratized, legislated, insular (some far more than others) communities that are socially sanctioned. Isn’t that why the whole Bush wire tapping deal was so scandalous - because it touched the issue of the US as a police state? I’m rambling now. I need to think about this some more.
Well, I had to flip through my old psych textbooks to see if there was anything relevant, and this was the ONLY thing mentioned on Fromm that I could find, yet it may shed some light…
“Erich Fromm attributed his interest in the study of irrational and abnormal behavior to his observation of the frenzy of fanaticism that swept over his native Germany during World War I.”
Another way to look at how people behave is to realize that we set up habits and routines for ourselves as a form of structure and comfort. That’s part of the reason it is difficult to change; we’ve grown used to uncosciously doing the same thing over and over again.
Reading up on Fromm via wikipedia, it jogs my memory on his views being really helpful to the start of the humanistic psychology movement. Now I’m quoting from the same book “A History of Modern Psychology” the basic beliefs of humanism are: “1. an emphasis on conscious experience, 2. a belief in the wholeness of human nature and conduct, 3. a focus on free will, spontaneity, and the creative power of the individual, and 4. the study of everything that is relevant to the human condition.” This went against early beliefs of people being like machines or programmed for certain behaviors, etc.
For a long time psychologists only focused on the abnormal so they did not have a really good sense of what is a normal, healthy person. That’s a very new movement in psychology, extremely anecdoctal at times, but more research is being done.
Unfortunately, our educational system was modeled on the factory, machine model of humans and while there have been some reforms over the years, schools are still programmed to turn out good employees, not entrepreneurs although some lip service is paid to it. There is more of a push for critical thinking skills, but with Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation there is more of a back to basic, teach to the test mentality happening.
Erich Fromm was considered one of the Leftist Psychologists of the 50’s and 60’s. He was influenced quite a bit by Wilhelm Reich (whose books Function of the Orgasm and theory of Character Armor as well as The Mass Psychology of Fascism were highly influential, though not much referenced on account of Reich going “crazy” in his latter days). Fromm’s book Escape from Freedom is as good a place to start with him as any. In some ways, I’d say both he and Reich were slight precursors to R.D. Laing.
Escape from Freedom - I will check that out. Sounds like it fits into what this guy was referencing. The “funny” part of this is that it seems like this guy was quoting Fromm almost entirely out of context, at least based on what people have said here…