The reformation and the renaissance affected different classes differently (in some granting greater positive freedom and in most the illusion of greater negative freedom with real increases in negative emotions such as fear, anxiety and aloneness). Additionally, the Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines of salvation by faith alone and predestination added to the anxiety of all and the poisoning of relations between classes and groups. “The individualistic relationship to God was the psychological preparation for the individualistic character of man’s secular activities.” The ways that people chose to cope with these new anxieties and fears (in particular developing an obsessional craving to work) set the psychological stage for the further advancement of capitalism in the world. Going froward the author wishes “to show that the structure of modern society affects man in two ways simultaneously: he becomes more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and he becomes more isolated, alone, and afraid. The understanding of the whole problem of freedom depends on the very ability to see both sides of the process and not to lose track of one side while following the other…. Besides the affirmation of the individual which capitalism brought about, it also led to a self-negation and asceticism which is the direct continuation of the Protestant spirit.” Why would the people accept such a deal in which they take a deceptive external freedom while accepting an inward self-negation? The simple and incomplete answer is that, “In any society the spirit of the whole culture is determined by the spirit of those groups that are the most powerful in that society….these powerful groups carry so much prestige that the lower classes are more than ready to accept and imitate their values and to identify themselves psychologically.”
A more precise question is: how is it that the protestant ideals of asceticism, self-negation, and unselfishness support and brought about the modern selfish and egotistical flavour of today’s individualism? To understand we need to look at the nature of selfishness and of love. The author vehemently disagrees with a common assumption in many religious, enlightenment and modern philosophers who claim that “Selfishness is identical with self-love. To love others is a virtue, to love oneself is a sin. Furthermore, love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive.” These assumptions are based on the notion that love is self-sacrificial; Jesus’ sacrifices for humanity are often citied as the best example of love. This common notion of self-sacrificial love is a dead end that will keep you immature, hobbled, and dominated. Love is not caused by an object of love; rather love is “a lingering quality in a person which is only actualized by a certain ‘object.’… [it is] an active striving and inner relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object.” Note that in a loving person, love is latent until brought out by a love object. The author is against the romantic notion that there is only one person (or a limited number of people) that one can love. One may, due to time constraints, express love to one person more than others however, “the kind of love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love but a sado-masochistic attachment.” If you can love one person you can love all – again love if present is a quality that can be expressed toward an object and one of those objects should be the Self. A corollary is that if one can only love others (and not oneself) then one cannot really love – in that case one’s expressions of love are not really love. Selfishness has nothing to do with self-love. “Selfishness is one kind of greediness. Like all greediness, it contains an insatiability, as a consequence of which there is never any real satisfaction. Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.” A selfish person is always concerned with themselves but never satisfied, they are anxious, fearful, and envious of all that is around them. Such people do not really like themselves and may abhor themselves. “narcissism—like selfishness—is an overcompensation for the basic lack of self-love.” Now we can see how it is that the protestant spirit of self-negation supports the selfishness of the modern era. “The ‘self’ in the interests of which modern man acts is the social self, a self which is essentially constituted by the role the individual is supposed to play and which in reality is merely the subjective disguise for the objective social function of man in society. Modern selfishness is the greed that is rooted in the frustration of the real self…. While modern man seems to be characterized by utmost assertion of the self, actually his self has been weakened and reduced to a segment of the total self – intellect and willpower – to the exclusion of all other parts of the total personality.” Thus, the self-negation of the protestant ethic is destroying the modern self to the point that the only self we praise is intellect and willpower ability. These two aspects of the self have built the complexity of the modern world. This is a complexity that is too much for any one person and the result is that the social self often only seeks its place in the great machine that is modern society. For example, in the business world, emotions should not have a determining influence on business decisions but emotions in the form of affective labour are demanded in the services sector but they are not required to be genuine. In other words, emotions must be completely under the control of the intellect and willpower for the instrumental reason of the great social machine. This spirit of instrumentality is that of the market where “personal relations between men have this character of alienation; instead of relations between human beings, they assume the character of relations between things.” When an individual and their labour becomes a commodity in the market we are essentially selling ourselves; we are a commodity in the labour market. In medieval times people had an assurance that God valued them as individuals and in their station in life. An individual who has become a commodity on the market gains the freedom to sell oneself or one’s product but suffers under the anxiety of the same loss of value that any unsellable commodity has: valuelessness.
There are five factors that modern humanity with a weakened self often pursues to alleviate or cover up the bewilderment and insecurity that comes with the freedom of the modern world. 1) property, such as land or material wealth, 2) prestige, such as renown or credentials, 3) power, authority, and influence, 4) family, and 5) group pride such as national or class pride. In contrast to these support factors, when the motivation is love or productive work one looks to exercise real economic and political freedom of expression; one seeks opportunities for individual initiative and rational enlightenment.
Next the author wants to explain the intricacies of the psychological mechanisms of escape: in our efforts to escape aloneness and powerlessness we so easily rid ourselves of our complete self through submission or compulsive conformance. There are thousands of escape mechanisms but the author focuses on three whose expression can politically influence the society (watching movies is an escape that allows one to live vicariously and avoid aloneness but entertainment of this sort does not easily affect politics or policy. The three politically significant escape mechanisms are: Authoritarianism, Destructiveness, and Automaton Conformity.
The Authoritarian Character is trying to find security, belonging, and power along a spectrum of intensity in one or two paths: by subsuming and attaching themselves to another’s authority (masochism) or by subsuming someone else’s strength, confidence, or power under themselves (sadism). Here character means the dominant drives that motivate behavior. In both cases pain and suffering are not the end in themselves; they are the means to forgetting oneself. “Symbiosis, … means the union of one individual self with another self (or any other power outside of its own self) in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and to make them completely dependent on each other…. People are not sadistic or masochistic but there is a constant oscillation between the active and the passive sides of the symbiotic complex”. Authoritarian character admires authority and wants to submit to it as well as have someone submit to them. The authority may be a person, a duty, or a conscience. Everything is judged in terms of power: that with power is respected; that without power is contemptable. All notions and things that limit freedom (such as fate, natural law, destiny, the will of the Lord, duty, tradition, the concept of original sin, acting for something greater than oneself) are all loved by the authoritarian character. Equality or equity are non-sense; there is the natural order; no experience of solidarity; courage is to accept one’s fate.