Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 4
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 9)
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The Insecure Child and the Idolization of Wars, God and Commodities
As long as we are emotionally children, we need the tribe, the family or the clan to protect us and keep the deepest anxieties under control. We adopt many ideological thoughts and feelings to get the precious approval of our group. Crippled adults who are emotionally dependent provide a critical ingredient for the proper functioning of this class society. When we remain emotionally children, we can be utilized by the people in power for their darkest needs. If people can feel and think independently, our society will go into turmoil. Bourgeois society cannot allow this to happen. It must generate crippled humans who cannot have thoughts and feelings of their own, and thus can be easily manipulated. Fromm describes the basic process of how it happens:
“The growing person is forced to give up most of his or her autonomous, genuine desires and interests, and his or her own will, and to adopt a will and desires and feelings that are not autonomous but super-imposed by the social pattern of thought and feelings. Society, and the family as its psychosocial agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person’s will without his being aware of it? Yet, by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated.”[15]
As long as we remain emotionally immature, the state and other social agents of the dominating class can manipulate our deep desires to overcome the unbearable suffering from the constant anxiety of separateness. Thus, the sucking of millions into patriotism, nationalism and the willingness to kill and die in wars can be traced to the insecure individual who remains emotionally a child. If we were mature adults we could not be able to tolerate for a minute the constant wars, oppression, greed, evil competitions, destruction of the environment, and the suffering that the people in power inflict on the majority in this globe. We tolerate the above because most of us remain self-center children inside depressed adults whose mature feelings are numbed. The child follows his/her big father to a war to receive the approval and warmth of the tribe; the manipulated child is unaware that the war is essentially orchestrated for the profits of the ruling classes. The idolization of different gods can also be traced to the same insecure child.
There are many other idols that are unmistakable alienating idols. The idolization of money and the power that comes from money is the most obvious example. It is one thing to want money to buy the necessary things to survive and have a decent life. Yet many people worship money as much as god. It is particularly the case for the upper middle class and members of the bourgeoisie who spend their all life accumulating money in the name of success. Any serious psycho-analysis of these people will reveal that they are anxious children who use money and success to avoid their deep unfulfilled need for love and human connection. Money and success normally go together with a huge inflated ego; such ego is only a bubble that protects the frightened child and the immature adult.
The modern person’s main idols are the mass produced commodities, which the alienated person worships through consumerism. Marx already expanded on this to a great extent in his well known analysis about the fetishism of the commodity. The alienated persons, in particular those from the middle class, buys a great deal of commodities that they do not need at all — they are used just to lull the emptiness and the great anxiety of the infantile adult. The greater the external stress and internal unhappiness, the greater becomes the fetishism of commodities; that is, the more the insecure person needs to idolize gods in the form of commodities through frenzied consumerism. This is why, indeed, the explosion of stress and depressions in late 20th century was accompanied by a big jump in consumerism. In fact, we can say that the boom in religious beliefs and spiritual practices developed because the worshipping of commodities failed to adequately soothe the anxieties of the immature adults. Consumerism works to an extend, but not when the lonely adult increasingly works long alienated hours without support. Thus the rise of religions and the worshipping of the traditional gods in western society reflect an overflow from the inadequacy of consumerism, that is, the worshipping of commodities. When the unhappiness is too strong to be soothed by consumerism, the insecure and immature adult returns to the traditional idolization that has worked for centuries.
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[15] Eric Fromm, To Have or to Be, page 66.