The dominant character of Nazis in their quest to hide or get rid of feelings of anxiety, insignificance, and aloneness is the authoritarian character. this sado-masochistic character seeks to form symbiosis with another. At once wanting to dominate and wanting to be dominated. The second mechanism of escape the author deals with he calls destructiveness. Destructiveness is different from authoritarian because it does not seek symbiosis. Destructiveness seeks to get rid of unwanted feelings of anxiety and powerlessness by destroying its object. The destructive character feels it would be better to destroy the world than to be crushed by it. “Sadism tends to strengthen the atomized individual by the domination over others; destructiveness by the absence of any threat from the outside.” The author claims to see an incredible amount of destruction happening regularly and most of it is irrational. Rational destruction (such as is needed for life to flourish) is a necessary part of life. The irrational destruction is hostility that is “a constantly lingering tendency within a person which so speak waits for an opportunity to be expressed.” It has no real reason but always finds justification even on the most hypocritical or flimsiest of reasons or evidence. Often if a destructive character cannot find something to destroy with sufficient intensity, they turn in on themselves. Suicide is almost always the last act of the destructive character. Before suicide is attempted the destructive character experiences a thwarting of life. “the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed….[or] the blockage of spontaneity of the growth and expression of man’s sensuous, emotional, and intellectual capacities….Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” In the author’s experience the lower middle class is the most destructive. The working class and the poor have more or less accepted their lot and do not dream as much of that unlived life the lower middle-class dream but cannot achieve. Having means does not inoculate you from the destructive character but it does lessen the probabilities. The destructive characters of the lower middle class were the first adopters of Protestantism because the new doctrines helped express there lingering destructive ambitions. “Then, as later the middle class expressed its hostility mainly disguised as moral indignation, which rationalized an intense envy against those who had the means to enjoy life.” Nazism used the lower middle-class in the form of the SA or Brownshirts and directed its destructiveness at its enemies; first the Jews, who were viewed as economically better off and therefore an outlet for envy, and then foreigners who were view as a threat due to their history.
The third mechanism for escape from freedom the author calls automaton conformity. It is the most dominant one in capitalist countries. “This particular mechanism is the solution that the majority of normal individuals find in modern society…. The individual ceases to be himself; he adopts entirely the kind of personality offered to him by cultural patterns; and he therefore becomes exactly as all others are and as they expect him to be. The discrepancy between ‘I’ and the world disappears and with it the conscious fear of aloneness and powerlessness…. The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton, identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.” The author admits that most people have an adverse reaction to being labeled an automaton. Most think we live in a free market capitalism system which means it is the freest most individualistic system that has ever existed. The cute answer is: of course that is what one would want automatons to think. The author argues that the capitalist culture we live in is one of the most conformist cultures in history. The author claims that our “feelings and thoughts can be induced from the outside and yet be subjectively experienced as one’s own”. First some obvious examples of feelings and thoughts induced from the outside that are felt subjectively: 1) fashion: if you have a fashion sense you change your clothes and styles to fit the outside influence; 2) empathy in fiction: have you ever identified and felt empathy for a character in a movie or book; 3) advertising: have you ever impulse bought something having come up with your “own” reasons for doing so. Some less obvious examples: adopting an authority’s position as one’s own: 1) are paintings in a museum good? Why? 2) Is that wine good? Why? 3) A weather forecaster can legitimately say they have come to an independent scientific opinion on a weather forecast. Most people look at a weather app and hold that as their opinion. It is very hard to find an opinion that is not already circulating in the media, or in a religion, or in an ideology. The author challenges you to think of a thought or opinion you have that has not already been broadly circulated. Compare the source of your thoughts to those of a hermit to help see their origin.
More insidiously, the author claims that the suppression of critical thinking starts earliest and is most complete in the automaton conformity character. To understand, the author asks us to not consider the truth value of an idea or opinion. Both experts and manufactured public opinion can be true or false. What he is interested in is how an individual came to hold “their” opinions and beliefs. When beliefs are from the outside they are easily changeable with the right suggestion from the right authority; be it the boss, the leader, public opinion etc. when they come from internal critical thinking one is much less likely to change one’s opinion when confronted by an authority or the threat of loss of life and limb. People who do risk life and limb for their beliefs may be brain washed or they may legitimately hold their beliefs seriously – the internal motivations of other’s actions we do not have access to. However, the absence of beliefs which one is willing to die for is indicative of the automaton conformity character.
More detrimental for the self is the fact that conformity also means the automaton conformist characters also accept the expectations of others from the outside. Many people get married or stay married because they are expected to; many people stay at their unfulfilling jobs because they are expected to and many claim that it is their own wish to do so. They have many rationalizations. “This substitution of pseudo acts for original acts of thinking, feeling, and willing, leads eventually to the replacement of the original self by a pseudo self. the original self is the self which is the originator of mental activities. The pseudo self is only an agent who actually represents the role a person is supposed to play but who does so under the name of the self…. The loss of the self and its substitution by a pseudo self leaves the individual in an intense state of insecurity. He is obsessed by doubt since, being essentially a reflex of other people’s expectations of him, he has in a measure lost his identity.” But we can feel better by being acknowledged and recognized in our pseudo self. Today’s identity politics, which multiplies the number of identities that are recognized, is a societal evolution of this need to find identity in conformity.
The social process that brought about the rise of Nazism is twofold: the psychology is molded by socio-economic factors, which themselves are accentuated by psychology. Like the reformation appealed most to the lower middle-class Nazism did too. The lower middle class are struggling. They are somewhat educated and can imagine a better life that they cannot have. (the working class tend to be at peace with their lot in life – the upper middle and higher classes can live the life they want). The author describes the social character of the lower middle class “throughout its history: [having] love of the strong, hatred of the weak, their pettiness, hostility, thriftiness with feelings as well as with money, and essentially their asceticism. Their outlook on life was narrow, they suspected and hated the stranger, and they were curious and envious of their acquaintances, rationalizing their envy as moral indignation; their whole life was based on the principle of scarcity—economic as well as psychologically.” Compared to pre-world war I, the interwar period was unstable and marked by decreasing influence of the lower middle class. The lower middle class suffered the most relative and likely absolute deprivation as a result of hyper-inflation and the great depression. Psychologically, “There was nobody to look down upon any more, a privilege that had always been one of the strongest assets in the life of small shopkeepers and their like.” The failure of the monarchy caused anxiety; Versailles created more resentment to the foreigner; the old ways could not guarantee continued livelihood; the youth sensing this rebelled more against their parents; the republic was weak. Nazism returned national pride by continuing the prewar German imperialism more aggressively and with it the promise of more prosperity, pride, significance, and a sense of belonging.