🐙📚 A little excursion into critical theory: Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School, and the appeal of authoritarianism Ever heard of Erich Fromm? Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers who set out to understand why modern capitalist societies produced not only technological progress and material wealth, but also alienation, conformity, and authoritarian politics. The Frankfurt School brought Marxist social criticism into conversation with psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Its thinkers wanted to understand not merely how societies reproduce inequality, but why people sometimes accept, defend, and even enthusiastically participate in systems that subordinate them. Fromm had a particularly uncomfortable question: Why do people sometimes flee from the very freedom that was supposed to liberate them? In "Escape from Freedom", published in 1941, also known as "The Fear of Freedom" he explored how the collapse of traditional structures, social isolation, and feelings of powerlessness could make authoritarianism attractive. And goodness, does that question still have teeth. Look around. People are struggling with economic insecurity, unaffordable housing, precarious work, social isolation, and the feeling that the world is changing faster than they can make sense of it. They are told they are free to choose, while many of the choices that actually shape their lives remain beyond their control. And then somebody arrives with a wonderfully simple explanation. Your problems are caused by immigrants. By feminists. By queer people. By intellectuals. By some imagined enemy supposedly conspiring to destroy everything you love. The solution? A strong leader. A return to an idealised past. Fewer inconvenient rights for the people you've been taught to resent. More obedience, more hierarchy, more certainty. Fromm helps us understand why this can be appealing. Authoritarian movements offer more than political programmes. They offer belonging, identity, and relief from the burden of uncertainty. They promise to replace the difficult work of autonomy with the reassuring simplicity of obedience. And there's a particularly nasty little trick involved: you can be made to feel powerful by participating in somebody else's domination. You may have little control over your working conditions, your rent, or your future. But you can be encouraged to feel superior to someone more vulnerable. You can identify with the powerful rather than question the system that keeps you powerless. This is one reason authoritarian politics can flourish alongside economic inequality. Instead of asking who holds power and who benefits, people are encouraged to fight over who deserves dignity. But Fromm's argument cuts deeper than a diagnosis of the far right. A society can formally guarantee freedom while making people too exhausted, isolated, frightened, or economically dependent to exercise it meaningfully. Democracy requires more than the right to cast a ballot. It requires the material security, education, social connections, and confidence that allow people to think and act independently. And this is where the lesson becomes uncomfortable for the political centre, too. If democratic institutions leave people feeling powerless while treating their insecurity as a public-relations problem, they create space for movements that promise to restore agency through exclusion and control. Understanding that does not excuse fascism. It means taking seriously the conditions in which authoritarianism recruits its supporters. We cannot build a freer society merely by telling people to appreciate their freedom. We have to make freedom something they can actually experience. Less fear. Less dependence on arbitrary power. More solidarity. More democratic control over the conditions of our lives. Because the alternative to authoritarian belonging cannot simply be loneliness with a constitution attached. Fromm's question remains worth asking: Are we creating people who can live freely, or a society in which surrendering freedom increasingly feels like the only way to feel safe? 🐙 Leslie's marginalia: If a politician promises to make you great again by taking somebody else's freedom away, perhaps ask why your greatness requires a victim. [https://ko-fi.com/post/Fromm-the-Frankfurt-School-and-the-appeal-o-B1H02912BJ]