The marvelous “Philosophize This!” podcast introduced me to Erich Fromm a while back, and I’ve been reading his stuff now and again. I picked up “The Revolution of Hope - Toward a Humanized Technology,” and for some reason, one passage resonated with me today.
I’ve been contemplating the gliding ease with which large swathes of Americans (but not only Americans) seem to be sliding into fascism. I’ve been reading about fascism in Germany in the 1920s, and if you saw my notes from the Selling Hitler book, observing lots of interesting and terrifying parallels between both the approaches of the fascists selling the idea and reactions of people buying into it then and now.
What is it about our collective humanity that allows us to have learned zero lessons in a hundred years of development, having gone through the worst conflict in human history, having witnessed, recorded, examined, analyzed, taught, and lived through such an intensely condensed period of mass murder on a scale that blows the mind?
I think Fromm’s observation on a certain aspect of the nature of humanity answers those questions. Here it is (bold highlight is mine, italics are Fromm’s):
Man is not bound to be sheep. In fact, inasmuch as he is not an animal, man has an interest in being related to and conscious of reality, to touch the earth with his feet, as in the Greek legend of Antaeus; man is stronger the more fully he is in touch with reality. As long as he is only sheep and his reality is essentially nothing but the fiction built up by his society for more convenient manipulation of men and things, he is weak as a man. Any change in the societal pattern threatens him with intense insecurity and even madness because his whole relationship with reality is mediated by the fictitious reality which is presented to him as real. The more he can grasp reality on his own and not only as a datum with which society provides him, then more security fields because the less completely dependent he is on consensus and hence the less threatened by societal change.
(I don’t know if Fromm was the first to bring “sheep” into it - we know that’s devolved into “sheeple” in recent years. The irony is that whose using the term are the ones deceived by the conspiracy theories, Fox News / OAN propaganda, etc.)
That bolded passage above describes the mechanism that, in my opinion, is responsible for the ease with which a population can get further and further into a fictitious reality while simultaneously making it harder and harder for themselves to break out of it.
All it takes is the initial ruse, a lie with a little truth to it - a favorite of the fascist propagandist in 1920s Germany and in 2010-20s United States - and the fictitious reality is made manifest.
Add global, funded, competent 24 hour communications across multiple media to build it up, grow the audience, add another lie, and then another, and soon enough you have a whole society that sees only what you show them, and “[a]ny change in the societal pattern threatens [them] with intense insecurity and even madness because [their] whole relationship with reality is mediated by the fictitious reality which is presented to [them] as real.”
All you have to do is produce a “pattern” so they feel threatened. QAnon? BLM-scapegoating? CRT strawman? “Stolen” elections with Jewish space lasers? “Bamboo fibers” in paper ballots?
Insanity, apparent to anyone outside this fictitious reality built up by Republican / New American Fascist propaganda, but not so much for the weak and the scared, hiding behind fake enemies and appealing to fake strongmen.
Remember Cypher from The Matrix? (If you haven’t seen the movie, skip this paragraph to avoid the spoiler, go watch the movie now.)
He’s the avatar for this deluded movement.
A violent liar, he betrays everything for the sake of fictional reality, he’s worse than the merely “unawake”, for he is weak, afraid, and willing to kill, to sacrifice everyone for the sake of his own comfort, a sheep in wolf’s clothing.