His explicitness notwithstanding, he is very representative culturally and should be recognized as such. The recurrent themes running through the literature on alienation—and
80 For the most detailed presentation of these doctrines, see Fromm’s The Sane Society.
through today’s social commentary generally—are the themes which Fromm brings into naked focus: that reason is “unnatural,” that a non-contradictory, objective reality “restricts” one’s individuality, that the necessity of choice is an awesome burden, that it is “tragic” not to be able to eat one’s cake and have it, too, that self-responsibility is frightening, that the achievement of personal identity is a social problem—that “love” is the omnipotent solution—and that the political implementation of this solution is socialism.
The transparent absurdity or the unintelligibility of most discussions of alienation might tempt one to believe that the issue is entirely illusory. But this would be an error. Although the explanations offered for it are spurious, the problem of alienation is real. A great many men do recognize the painful emotional state which writers on alienation describe. A great many men do lack a sense of personal identity. A great many men do feel themselves to be strangers and afraid in a world they never made.
But why? What is the problem of alienation? What is personal identity? Why should so many men experience the task of achieving it as a dreaded burden? And what is the significance of the attacks on capitalism in connection with this issue?
These are the questions we must now proceed to answer.
The problem of alienation and the problem of personal identity are inseparable. The man who lacks a firm sense of personal identity feels alienated; the man who feels alienated lacks a firm sense of personal identity.
Pain is an organism’s alarm-signal, warning of danger; the particular species of pain which is the feeling of alienation announces to a man that he is existing in a psychological state improper to him—that his relationship to reality is wrong.
No animal faces such questions as: What should I make of myself? What manner of life is proper to my nature? Such questions are possible only to a rational being, i.e., a being whose characteristic method of cognitive functioning (of apprehending reality) is conceptual, who is not only conscious but also self-conscious, and whose power of abstraction enables him to project many alternative courses of action. Further, such questions are possible only to a being whose cognitive faculty is exercised volitionally (thinking is not automatic)—a being who is self-directing and self-regulating in thought and in action, and whose existence, therefore, entails a constant process of choice.
As a living entity, man is born with specific needs and capacities; these constitute his species identity, so to speak—
i.e., they constitute his human nature. How he exercises his capacities to satisfy his needs—i.e., how he deals with the facts of reality, how he chooses to function, in thought and in action—constitutes his personal or individual identity. His sense of himself—his implicit concept or image of the kind of person he is (including his self-esteem or lack of it)—is the cumulative product of the choices he makes. This is the meaning of Ayn Rand’s statement that “man is a being of self-made soul.”
A man’s “I,” his ego, his deepest self, is his faculty of awareness, his capacity to think. To choose to think, to identify the facts of reality—to assume the responsibility of judging what is true or false, right or wrong—is man’s basic form of self-assertiveness. It is his acceptance of his own nature as a rational being, his acceptance of the responsibility of intellectual independence, his commitment to the efficacy of bis own mind.
The essence of selflessness is the suspension of one’s consciousness. When and to the extent that a man chooses to evade the effort and responsibility of thinking, of seeking knowledge, of passing judgment, his action is one of self-abdication. To relinquish thought, is to relinquish one’s ego— and to pronounce oneself unfit for existence, incompetent to deal with the facts of reality.
To the extent that a man chooses to think, his premises and values are acquired first-hand and they are not a mystery to him; he experiences himself as the active cause of his character, behavior, and goals. To the extent that a man attempts to live without thinking, he experiences himself as passive, his person and actions are the accidental products of forces he does not understand, of his range-of-the-moment feelings and random environmental influences. When a man defaults on the responsibility of thought, he is left at the mercy of his involuntary, subconscious reactions—and these will be at the mercy of the outside forces impinging upon him, at the mercy of whoever and whatever is around him. By his default, such a person turns himself into the social determinists* view of man: into an empty mold waiting to be filled, into a will-less robot waiting to be taken over by any environment and any conditioners.
A strong sense of personal identity is the product of two things: a policy of independent thinking—and, as a consequence, the possession of an integrated set of values. Since it is his values that determine a man’s emotions and goals, and give direction and meaning to his life, a man experiences his values as an extension of himself, as an integral part of his identity, as crucial to that which makes him himself.
“Values,” in this context, refers to fundamental and abstract values, not to concrete value-judgments. For example, a man holding rationality as his abstract value may choose a friend who appears to embody this value; if, subsequently, he decides that he was mistaken in his judgment, that his friend is not rational and that their relationship should be ended, this does not alter his personal identity; but if, instead, he decides that he no longer values rationality, his personal identity is altered.
If a man holds contradictory values, these necessarily do violence to his sense of personal identity. They result in a splintered sense of self, a self broken into unintegratable fragments. To avoid this painful experience of a splintered identity, a man whose values are contradictory will commonly seek to escape knowledge of his contradictions by means of evasion, repression, rationalization, eta Thus, to escape a problem created by a failure of thought, he suspends thinking. To escape a threat to his sense of personal identity, he suspends his ego—he suspends his self qua thinking, judging entity.
Thus, he displaces his sense of self downward, so to speak, from his reason, which is the active, initiating element in man, to his emotions, which are the passive, reactive element Moved by feelings whose source he does not understand, and by contradictions whose existence he does not acknowledge, he suffers a progressive sense of self-estrangement, of self-alienation. A man’s emotions are the product of his premises and values, of the thinking he has done or has failed to do. But the man who is run by his emotions, attempting to make them a substitute for rational judgment, experiences them as alien forces. The paradox of his position is this: his emotions become his only source of personal identity, but his experience of identity becomes: a being ruled by demons.
It is important to observe that the experience of self-alienation and the feeling of being alienated from reality, from the world around one, proceed from the same cause: one’s default on the responsibility of thinking. The suspension of proper cognitive contact with reality and the suspension of one’s ego, are a single act. A flight from reality is a flight from self.
One of the consequences is a feeling of alienation from other men, the sense that one is not part of the human race—that one is, in effect, a freak. In betraying one’s status as a human being, one makes oneself a metaphysical outcast This is not altered by the knowledge that many other human beings have committed the same betrayal. One feels alone and cut off—cut off by the unreality of one’s own existence, by one’s desolate inner sense of spiritual impoverishment.
The same failure of rationality and independence by which men rob themselves of personal identity leads them, most commonly, to the self-destructive policy of seeking a substitute for identity—or, more precisely, seeking a second-hand identity—through mindless conformity to the values of others. This is the psychological phenomenon which I have designated as social metaphysics. In my article “Rogues Gallery,”81 dealing with different types of social metaphysicians, I commented on the type most relevant to the present context, the “Conventional” social metaphysician:
This is the person who accepts the world and its prevailing values ready-made; his is not to reason why. What is true? What others say is true. What is right? What others believe is right. How should one live? As others live. . . . [This is] the person whose sense of identity and personal worth is explicitly a function of his ability to satisfy the values, terms and expectations of those omniscient and omnipresent “others.” … In a culture such as the present one, with its disintegrating values, its intellectual chaos, its moral bankruptcy— where the familiar guideposts and rules are vanishing, where the authoritative mirrors reflecting “reality” are splintering into a thousand unintelligible subcults, where “adjustment” is becoming harder and harder—the Conventional social metaphysician is the first to run to a psychiatrist, crying that he has lost his identity, because he no longer knows unequivocally what he is supposed to do and be.