Erich Fromm’s book “On Disobedience,” is made up of four essays. In the first, “Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem,” (1963) Fromm wants to rehabilitate disobedience. “Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is [likely] that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.” He is concerned with the possibility of nuclear annihilation due to someone being obedient to an authority. Yet it is due to disobedience that humanity has grown and developed. It was disobedience against the powers that be at every stage of human history that has moved us to greater achievements in all fields of human endeavour. However, Fromm identifies an imbalance in our development. Our technical, scientific, cultural, development may be very high, but we are lagging in emotional development – in fact Fromm claims most people are emotionally still in the stone age; that is, we are emotionally functioning in a way that would be beneficial in primitive small groups trying to survive in a physically dangerous world rather than what is necessary to thrive in a massive technologically and culturally sophisticated society. An indicative symptom of this is that everywhere the powers that be encourage obedience and punish disobedience.
It is important to note that not all disobedience is good, and all obedience is bad. Further, an act of disobedience may also be an act of obedience at the same time when two or more principles are in irreconcilable conflict. In this last case the conflict is usually between the demands of an external authority and the demands of that internal still small voice of conscience. If one’s voice of conscience is really one’s own, then submitting to it is an act of affirmation of one’s self; all other submissions that go against one’s true conscience are violations of one’s self. Fromm makes a distinction between one’s true conscience which he calls the humanistic conscience which “is based on the fact that as human beings we have an intuitive knowledge of what is human and inhuman, what is conductive of life and what is destructive of life. This conscience serves our functioning as human beings. It is the voice which calls us back to ourselves, to our humanity.” In contrast to this is the more popular authoritarian conscience which is roughly equal to Freud’s super-ego, “the internalized voice of an authority whom we are eager to please and afraid of displeasing.” This authority is always outside one’s self and although the individual believes they are acting out of their own conscience, the voice they hear is was put there by an external power. “Obedience to outside thoughts and power, tends to debilitate ‘humanistic conscience,’ the ability to be and to judge oneself.”
On the issue of obedience and justified submission to an authority, Fromm makes a distinction between a rational authority (where the interests of the authority face the same direction as those of the person in submission – such as between teacher and a student) and an irrational authority (where interests are not aligned such as between slave owner and slave). We find it easier to obey and difficult to disobey for three reasons: 1) we feel safer standing in a group than alone, 2) maturity requires the willingness to stand alone and this courage requires practice and freedom, and 3) all powers in history have identified obedience with virtue and disobedience with “sin”.
In his second essay “Prophets and Priests,” (1967) Fromm starts by asking us to consider that today we have better access to all the wisdom of the history of the world and yet this wisdom seem less effective than it have ever been. His simple answer is that there are too few prophets and too many priests. “Those who announce ideas…and at the same time live them we may call prophets….they say the truth [and] they felt the responsibility to tell it; they did not threaten, but showed the alternatives with which man was confronted….It is the function of the prophet to show reality, to show alternatives and to protest; it is his function to call loudly, to awake man from his customary half-slumber. It is the historical situation which makes prophets, not the wish of some men to be prophets.” A prophet’s ideas will resonate and create a following; adherents who benefit from the idea and priests promote and administer the idea to the people who are attached to the idea. There are priests everywhere in science, in politics, in every branch of human knowledge and endeavour. “Often they are very learned; it is their business to administer the idea of the original thinker, to impart it, to interpret it, to make it into a museum object and thus to guard it….political priests…have administered the idea of freedom, to protect the economic interests of their social class.” Socialism is an example of this. “While this idea aimed at the liberation and independence of man, the priests declared in one way or another that man was not capable of being free, or at least that he would not be for a long time. Until then they were obliged to take over, and to decide how the idea was to be formulated, and who was a faithful believer and who was not.” The priests on both sides of the cold war have discredited socialism in this way.
Fromm praises Bertrand Russell as a prophet “a man of belief….his activities for peace his love of life seems to me [Fromm] the mainspring of his whole person. He warns the world of impending doom precisely as the prophets did, because he loves life and all its forms and manifestations. He again like the prophets, is not a determinist who claims that the historical future is already determined; he is an ‘alternativist’ who sees that what is determined are certain limited and ascertainable alternatives.”
The third essay “Let Man Prevail,” (1960) is the first part of a socialist manifesto and program. He begins by asking: “Can we not build an industrial society in which the individual retains his role as an active, responsible member who controls circumstances, rather than being controlled by them?” The major problems that he sees in the Western and Eastern worlds (but mostly the Western) are 1) that even in the richest countries there are still poor people (poor in all categories such as life expectancy, opportunity etc.) indicating a structural inequality problem that give more dignity to some and less to others. 2) Fromm points out several contradictions: “We are wealthier, but have less freedom. We consume more, but are emptier. We have more atomic weapons, but we are more defenseless. We have more education, but we have less critical judgement and convictions. We have more religion, but we become more materialistic.” Indicating that as we solve the economic problems, we have neglected the human problem – this is a type of alienation where the proposed solution is not directed at the problem but at distracting from the problem. 3) Bureaucratic management and the rise of a managerial class have influenced all of society in a negative way “The giant corporation which control the economic, and to a large degree the political, destiny of the country constitute the very opposite of the democratic process; they represent power without control by those submitted to it.” All large bureaucracies including those of government administer people as things. People then need to think of themselves as things to survive in a bureaucracy or under their management. This has the effect of changing people into automatons if they want to prosper in a bureaucratic system. The social process that results from the introduction of large bureaucracies is one that diminishes our ability to mature and when it becomes generational makes large swaths of the population very fearful to step out of line and mature. How we organize ourselves creates a type of character that is helpful for surviving in the world – today the biggest threat to the maturity, freedom, and spontaneity of our society is its bureaucratization. “[W]e are quickly approaching a society governed by bureaucrats who administer a mass-man, well fed, well taken care of, dehumanized and depressed…. We talk of freedom and democracy, yet an increasing number of people are afraid of the responsibility of freedom, and prefer the slavery of the well-fed robot; they have no faith in democracy and are happy to leave it to the political experts to make decisions.”
In the final essay, “Humanist Socialism,” (1960) Fromm gives a political program to the SP-SDF (Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation) a new political party in the US that had formed in 1957 from the union of the two socialist parties. The basic principles of Humanistic Socialism starts: “The supreme value in all social and economic arrangements is man; the goal of society is to offer the conditions for the full development of man’s potentialities, his reason, his love, his creativity; all social arrangements must be conducive to overcoming the alienation and crippledness of man, and to enable him to achieve real freedom and individuality. The aim of socialism is an association in which the full development of each is the condition for the full development of all.”
“The Supreme principle of socialism is that man takes precedence over things, life over property, and hence work over capital; that power follows creation, and not possession”.