Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 4
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 6)

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Alternatively, I can belong to a left sect or a right wing cult. When a factional fight descend upon an organization people in both sides forget about warm feelings toward friends who now stand with the other side. Thus, my loyalty to the herd overrides my feelings for individuals in the group. I am afraid to break with the group and experience my loneliness and anxiety. So I must hate my ex-friends — who now stand with the other side — to keep my sense of belonging to the group; I adapt the arguments of the leaders to maintain the approval from the group. I must believe at all cost that I arrive at the arguments of the leaders through my own thinking; any doubts that I am a dupe will bring back the original high anxiety and loneliness that drove me to join a sect or a cult to begin with. Or alternatively I can belong to a nation or a white supremacist group that hate other nations and races. I will get my fix of belonging and approval when I unleash all my destructive energy against my “enemies” via a war or a racist attack; this way I can experience the euphoria in connecting to the blood of “my” people and “my” soil.

Any deep analysis of group psychology cannot help noticing the lack of self in the drive to please and get approval. This need for constant approval is proportional to the depravation of positive warm relationships with are based on genuine independence. To receive emotional approval from their group, people are permitted, psychologically speaking, to express only feelings and thoughts which are acceptable within the group. When you try to break from your group and do not get approval any longer, you could become a mass; deep anxiety can overtake you and the horror of inferiority and impotence can become intolerable. So one must get back in line with one’s group or find a new one.

Fromm poses the contradictions of human beings who are caught between the need to belong to the herd like an animal and the human need to develop freely our human reasoning and emotions, freed from the hard wires programming of the animal:

“Man by origin is a herd animal. His actions are determined by an instinctive impulse to follow the leader and to have close contact with the other animals around him. Inasmuch as we are sheep, there is no greater threat to our existence than to lose this contact with the herd and to be isolated. Right and wrong, true and false are determined by the herd. But we are not only sheep. We are also human; we are endowed with awareness of ourselves, endowed with reason which by its very nature is independent of the herd. Our actions can be determined by the by the results of our thinking regardless of whether or not the truth is shared by others.

“. . . The ambiguity of thinking, the dichotomy between reason and a rationalizing intellect, is the expression of a basic dichotomy in man, the coextensive need for bondage and freedom, the unfolding and full emergence of reason is dependent on the attainment of full freedom and independence. Until this is accomplished man will tend to accept the truth that which the majority of his group want be true; his judgment is determined by need for contact with the herd and by fear of being isolated from it.”[9]

As long as class society promotes oppression, exploitation, and relationships between humans that are not based on genuine freedom to be and grow, each member of society will use rationalizations to cover up the profound need for irrational emotional bondage — that is, a bondage associated with the security of the herd. As long as this is the case we have not broken from the basic psychology that keep us bonded as animals; we do not have free human relationships. The “truth” of our group is not objectively arrived, but it is driven by the basic emotional need to belong. We must resolve this fundamental contradiction. Our yearning for unity, to oneness can be traced to the animal oneness with nature and the security of the herd. But as humans we are and we are not part of nature; thus we must seek higher unity with nature and our humanity. Failure to do this does not stop the need for unity and oneness, but it gives it a sick social form:

“By the combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal development of the capacity for reason, we human beings have lost our original oneness with nature. In order not to feel utterly isolated — which would, in fact, condemn us to insanity — we need to find a new unity: with our fellow beings and with nature. This human need for unity with others is experienced in many ways: in the symbiotic tie to mother, an idol, one’s tribe, one’s nation, one’s class, one’s religion, one’s fraternity, one’s professional organization. Often, of course, these ties overlap, and often they assume an ecstatic form, as among members of certain religious sects or of a lynch mob, or in the outbursts of national hysteria in the case of war. . .The desire to experience union with others manifests itself in the lowest kind of behavior, i.e., in acts of sadism and destruction, as well in the highest: solidarity on the basis of an ideal or conviction. It is also the main cause of the need to adapt: human beings are more afraid of being outcasts than even of dying.”[10]

Most people in our society are not happy. They are aware of it to a lesser or greater degree even if they cannot fully admit it to themselves. To be independent and experience happiness we must overcome huge anxiety. Most of us are full of anxiety and stress just from the daily efforts to stay alive — to survive economically and pay the bills. Those who are fortunate to earn enough money to have a middle class lifestyle spend their life in stress and anxiety to keep the facade of success going. They must accommodate a lifestyle in accordance with their economic and social status.

The busy middle class person does not have time to experience the deep sense of self and deep sense of connections to nature and other humans. Such a person does not have a conscious self which is separated from the social conditionings and expectations of his/her social group. Any attempts to deeply examine who I am is likely to generate the deepest anxiety, which is always waiting to bust below the conscious surface of busyness and routines. Deep self exploration can question my activities, the need to be approved by friends and colleagues from work, and the need for constant consumption of things and food in order to feel sane. Yet most people would rather stay unhappy than question the irrational adherence to their social group. The mountain of anxiety we must overcome, and the hard transformation we must undergo is insurmountable for most people.

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[9] Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pages 58-59.

[10] Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be, pages 92, 93.